or by best I mean, technologically superior, better performance, better functionality.
A lot of todays products get proliferation because of market share, backwards compatibility, advertising, money/muscle power.
Im sure a lot of/.ers would argue that if AMD had a little more money for advertising and for getting large clients like Dell then the Athlon would be selling far far more than the Pentium 4.
It is not always the best functionality at the price the consumer can afford, it has to do with many other factors such as availability and branding etc.
of course its always easier to dismiss such comments as "dick-waving arguments" instead of actually realizing what is going on.
You can find other compilers for Itanium, check out this. Im sure other universities have research into Itanium compilers that might also surpas intel's compiler.
Who would you like to be your trustworthy source? Someone from Intel? Someone from Alpha? Someone from AMD? Good luck getting a trustworth estimate of processor performance from anyone.
As far as spreading marketing fud, I haven't seen any marketing on the Itanium, so I really wouldn't know what to spread.
As far as Itanium being better than Alpha, nobody knows what alpha could have done, and Itanium is a processor of the future, a technology that is being hammered out. You have to give Intel credit for trying to build something as advanced and ambitious as the Itanium.
Re:What I've always wondered ...
on
Intel's Big Chip
·
· Score: 1
I think Intel bit off more than it can chew.
First of all its looking for server market, where your chips can take longer to develop and to release. For servers the issues are different.
Intel tried to use massively parallel technology, to enable the servers to do many things at once. This technology has the potential to do great things, but the cost of developing it correctly, supporting it, and gaining market share is huge. However, if Intel could somehow establish the Itanium as a major player in the server world it would gain loads of market share and of course the necessary money.
I claim that Itanium (especially in the new form) can be better than the alpha chip.
I also claim that alpha is dead already. They will not produce more alpha chips, (of course you can still use your old one) but nothing new will come of alpha seeing as how Intel has aquired the main alpha architects and rights to alpha technology. Compaq has claimed that Itanium is the way of the future (and presumably better).
If your looking for justification as to why I think Itanium is better, its because of the advanced concepts present in Itanium. Don't get me wrong, nobody could make processors quite as well as alpha, they had some of the best technologies and implementations. Itanium, however, has massive parallelism advantages, it has massive registers which avoids having to frequently access memory. It has rotating 64 bit registers for stack emulation. It natively supports speculation, predication, and can optimally execute 3 instructions per clock cycle (I'm actually not postiive on 3, the ideal execution may be higher but in real programs with less than ideal compilers actual instructions per cycle wouldn't be near the ideal.)
Sorry to dissapoint, but at the University of Illinois there has been similar technology implemented for at least 4 years (while I was here) but probably longer.
The technology not only detects exact matches, but it compares memory allocations on two programs so that massive search and replacing, whitespace, and subroutine order does not matter in match detection. The professors frequently threaten students with the cheat detecting program, however in large classes (~60+) it would be quite unreasonable to compare each student to every other student, so they must use some scheme to pick who gets compared. Most recent submissions or random detections are possibilities.
Windows XP betas have been available as cracked warez for months now. Office XP, too. MS's vaunted "copy protection" lasted all of about 2 hours.
I don't think that people who frequent warez sites pay for much of any software. We can safely eliminate them from the general calculation. Im talking about your average, multiple pc per household, they won't be able to casually pirate anymore (at least without dl your aforementioned warez).
keep in mind that the purchase price of your typicall consumer's pc usually has a nice ~$100 addition to the price tag in order to cover the win os already installed on the system. Windows doesn't come with nearly as much good software and if you ignore piracy, that cost builds way up. Also, lots of linux/unix programs are freeware or shareware which drastically reduces cost.
ihmo windows pc's are much more expensive.
Now when XP becomes standard with their draconian registering procedure and computer tracking code. People will pay even more, because there won't be the casual pirating of windows that occurs now.
Itanium uses a different language, EPIC, which stands for Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing. Each instruction has a specification on how it is to be run on a distributed system.
When someone created a "red-alert" type game in our assembly class. Real-time war, lots of units on the screen, 100 or so. The new p3 - 900mhz processors in the lab handled it no problem, however it might have crashed or run really slowly on an old 486. But anyway your right, and the argument still stands. Gaming is about the only thing that might require speed.
Why do you think there is so much discussion about which processors are best.
The only thing you can do, is try and look at a variety of benchmarks, that put the chips on equal playing ground.
Make sure benchmarks or apps have optimized code for the processor they are running on, and make sure the setup is the same for both processors.
Much of the code that runs on the P4 isn't optimized for it, the optimized stuff runs much faster. Apple's G4 can perform really well on certain benchmarks but they never show the ones that suffer.
Anyway it is a difficult process to say the least. Thats why Tom writes entire articles comparing chips for a living.
We saw the same thing with the celery FSB clock speed.
Intel is always extremely conserned with it's lowend processors competing with its top of the line. Check out the Tom's Hardware review about 2 months ago when they got their hands on a high power Tulatin. Those marketing fools just figured they could kill 2 birds with 1 stone by lowering power (which hurts performance) and calling it "mobile" or "low power".
is called namebrand. Big money has been payed so that people will recognize the name "pentium". So who can blame them for sticking with it.
beats the Athlon4 the old athlon wasn't called the athlon3 (I know it was the third evolution of that chip, so what). Which is blatantly trying to have the same name as the P4.
I work for a driver development group for Intel, and because of this I work on many OS's and many different configurations. We have hard-drive disk swappers on almost every machine and they work great.
Basically you put the drive into a small case, and you pull this case in or out, replacing it with another case with another hard drive in it. This makes booting up on another hard drive extremely simple. Partitioning drives "can" work, but with win2k, windows ME, winXP, it gets too complicated, especially if your constantly breaking stuff when trying to debug a problem that causes a system crash, different hard drives simplifies the process a lot.
As a note of warning to any novice users out there. Make sure you get one with a lock, and make sure you always power down completely before swapping drives.
remember the nintendo glove? that thing was cool, but it was a coarse physical movement input mechanism, or how about that big pad you used for track and field, that was awesome.
Personally I am very much in favor of this appeal. It is what makes the american system of justice great. Anyway, ordering napster to block 100% of the files is ridiculous. How could they possibly do it. Thats like asking an ftp client to block all versions of a song, regardless of format (.wav, mp3, etc)
When is the government going to learn that the public will figure out how to share data, despite company's best attempts otherwise. The restrictions these companies want is quite disturbing, 1984 disturbing. Did you see the earlier article about publishers wanting to restrict the liberties of Libraries!
----- I'd rather let 1000 guilty men go free then chase after them.
Why does it seem like every other article contradicts current beliefs?
Im always hearing, this makes the universe twice as old as previously thought, or this will push back the estimated date of intelligent life by a million years, or this blows away current estimates for the end of Moore's Law.
I guess reading/. is giving me a healthy skepticism of science and the common belief in general.
We American's like our superiority over other countries. Im sure we would like to have nuclear materials that aren't accounted for, so that we could still have the most big bombs while promoting the destruction of nuclear weapons. Maybe someone suggested that when coding up our custom "nuke-tracker" that it "accidentally" lose track of some of our weapons. That way we could claim that we have less of the stuff than we really did!
Of course this all backfires when you forget about these "features" and send the software over to Russia. Not to mention that they are kind enough to point out the "feature" and bring it to attention. Makes you wonder.
Even though everyone bashed the new sci-fi miniseries of dune, I have a couple points that I liked. Although the battle scenes were horrible, I thought that the portrayal of the Baron, paul's mother, and paul's sister (liam??) were particularly good. I really liked paul's sister when she assassinates the Baron. Some of the special effects were low, but the scenery was really good, especially indoors. I could see the effects of low budget everywhere and am really eager to see what would happen with an expanded budget.
Bring on the sequel, if you don't want the sequel to come out, then don't watch it. It's not like we are holding a gom jabbar up to your neck.
You can make really really small black holes, but they don't take much energy to create, so when they collapse you don't get that much back. Creating really large black holes is much more unlikely.
Hawking radiation doesn't "escape" a black hole, its particles that are generated right at the event horizon, and one anitparticle is absorbed by the black hole, and one regular particle is shot out into space. So it didn't really come "out" of the black hole.
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A lot of todays products get proliferation because of market share, backwards compatibility, advertising, money/muscle power.
Im sure a lot of /.ers would argue that if AMD had a little more money for advertising and for getting large clients like Dell then the Athlon would be selling far far more than the Pentium 4.
It is not always the best functionality at the price the consumer can afford, it has to do with many other factors such as availability and branding etc.
of course its always easier to dismiss such comments as "dick-waving arguments" instead of actually realizing what is going on.
If it were the other way around a lot of us would probably be running BeOs on an Alpha chip right now.
1) Executives of @Home payed out multiple millions for shitty little websites that did nothing
2) @Home made several mistakes by trying to expand when they had no money (see 1) and being unable to provide any sort of reliable service
3) Many other companies saw what @Home had, and since they had no way to protect their market, everyone else simply split up their market share.
Why would AT&T support what they could provide themselves, and without all the rookie mistakes that @Home made.
You can find other compilers for Itanium, check out this. Im sure other universities have research into Itanium compilers that might also surpas intel's compiler.
Who would you like to be your trustworthy source? Someone from Intel? Someone from Alpha? Someone from AMD? Good luck getting a trustworth estimate of processor performance from anyone.
As far as spreading marketing fud, I haven't seen any marketing on the Itanium, so I really wouldn't know what to spread.
As far as Itanium being better than Alpha, nobody knows what alpha could have done, and Itanium is a processor of the future, a technology that is being hammered out. You have to give Intel credit for trying to build something as advanced and ambitious as the Itanium.
First of all its looking for server market, where your chips can take longer to develop and to release. For servers the issues are different.
Intel tried to use massively parallel technology, to enable the servers to do many things at once. This technology has the potential to do great things, but the cost of developing it correctly, supporting it, and gaining market share is huge. However, if Intel could somehow establish the Itanium as a major player in the server world it would gain loads of market share and of course the necessary money.
I also claim that alpha is dead already. They will not produce more alpha chips, (of course you can still use your old one) but nothing new will come of alpha seeing as how Intel has aquired the main alpha architects and rights to alpha technology. Compaq has claimed that Itanium is the way of the future (and presumably better).
If your looking for justification as to why I think Itanium is better, its because of the advanced concepts present in Itanium. Don't get me wrong, nobody could make processors quite as well as alpha, they had some of the best technologies and implementations. Itanium, however, has massive parallelism advantages, it has massive registers which avoids having to frequently access memory. It has rotating 64 bit registers for stack emulation. It natively supports speculation, predication, and can optimally execute 3 instructions per clock cycle (I'm actually not postiive on 3, the ideal execution may be higher but in real programs with less than ideal compilers actual instructions per cycle wouldn't be near the ideal.)
The technology not only detects exact matches, but it compares memory allocations on two programs so that massive search and replacing, whitespace, and subroutine order does not matter in match detection. The professors frequently threaten students with the cheat detecting program, however in large classes (~60+) it would be quite unreasonable to compare each student to every other student, so they must use some scheme to pick who gets compared. Most recent submissions or random detections are possibilities.
I really don't see why this is a big deal.
howabout a hypercube, or mesh, or 2-way switches with shuffle interconnects between them
I don't think that people who frequent warez sites pay for much of any software. We can safely eliminate them from the general calculation. Im talking about your average, multiple pc per household, they won't be able to casually pirate anymore (at least without dl your aforementioned warez).
ihmo windows pc's are much more expensive.
Now when XP becomes standard with their draconian registering procedure and computer tracking code. People will pay even more, because there won't be the casual pirating of windows that occurs now.
Don't feed the trolls!
When someone created a "red-alert" type game in our assembly class. Real-time war, lots of units on the screen, 100 or so. The new p3 - 900mhz processors in the lab handled it no problem, however it might have crashed or run really slowly on an old 486. But anyway your right, and the argument still stands. Gaming is about the only thing that might require speed.
The only thing you can do, is try and look at a variety of benchmarks, that put the chips on equal playing ground.
Make sure benchmarks or apps have optimized code for the processor they are running on, and make sure the setup is the same for both processors.
Much of the code that runs on the P4 isn't optimized for it, the optimized stuff runs much faster. Apple's G4 can perform really well on certain benchmarks but they never show the ones that suffer.
Anyway it is a difficult process to say the least. Thats why Tom writes entire articles comparing chips for a living.
We saw the same thing with the celery FSB clock speed.
Intel is always extremely conserned with it's lowend processors competing with its top of the line. Check out the Tom's Hardware review about 2 months ago when they got their hands on a high power Tulatin. Those marketing fools just figured they could kill 2 birds with 1 stone by lowering power (which hurts performance) and calling it "mobile" or "low power".
I do.
beats the Athlon4 the old athlon wasn't called the athlon3 (I know it was the third evolution of that chip, so what). Which is blatantly trying to have the same name as the P4.
Basically you put the drive into a small case, and you pull this case in or out, replacing it with another case with another hard drive in it. This makes booting up on another hard drive extremely simple. Partitioning drives "can" work, but with win2k, windows ME, winXP, it gets too complicated, especially if your constantly breaking stuff when trying to debug a problem that causes a system crash, different hard drives simplifies the process a lot.
As a note of warning to any novice users out there. Make sure you get one with a lock, and make sure you always power down completely before swapping drives.
remember the nintendo glove? that thing was cool, but it was a coarse physical movement input mechanism, or how about that big pad you used for track and field, that was awesome.
When is the government going to learn that the public will figure out how to share data, despite company's best attempts otherwise. The restrictions these companies want is quite disturbing, 1984 disturbing. Did you see the earlier article about publishers wanting to restrict the liberties of Libraries!
-----
I'd rather let 1000 guilty men go free then chase after them.
Im always hearing, this makes the universe twice as old as previously thought, or this will push back the estimated date of intelligent life by a million years, or this blows away current estimates for the end of Moore's Law.
I guess reading /. is giving me a healthy skepticism of science and the common belief in general.
We American's like our superiority over other countries. Im sure we would like to have nuclear materials that aren't accounted for, so that we could still have the most big bombs while promoting the destruction of nuclear weapons. Maybe someone suggested that when coding up our custom "nuke-tracker" that it "accidentally" lose track of some of our weapons. That way we could claim that we have less of the stuff than we really did!
Of course this all backfires when you forget about these "features" and send the software over to Russia. Not to mention that they are kind enough to point out the "feature" and bring it to attention. Makes you wonder.
Bring on the sequel, if you don't want the sequel to come out, then don't watch it. It's not like we are holding a gom jabbar up to your neck.
You can make really really small black holes, but they don't take much energy to create, so when they collapse you don't get that much back. Creating really large black holes is much more unlikely.
Hawking radiation doesn't "escape" a black hole, its particles that are generated right at the event horizon, and one anitparticle is absorbed by the black hole, and one regular particle is shot out into space. So it didn't really come "out" of the black hole.