Re:Dual XEON vs. Dual Athlon - Misinformed!
on
2.2 GHz Xeon
·
· Score: 1
It IS true that AMD's chips have a slightly faster ALU / FPU, but that's because they have a shorter execution pipe. Once Intel starts pushing the clock speed of the P4 core up to something reasonable, the loss in instructions per clock cycle will not matter since the clock speed will be doubled.
So you agree then that the present 2.2GHz core is really far too slow to compete with a 1.6 GHz Palomino. If so, we agree. I'd be happy if Intel gave us 3 GHz soon. That would be enough to beat any Athlon. But unless that happens soon, AMD will remain the speed king.
Problem with this is, morons will always be comparing an AMD CPU that runs at a much lower clockspeed with a higher clockspeed Intel chip and deduct that AMD CPUs are better. NOT TRUE! They're completely different architectures, the P4 is pretty much a 786 as far as I'm concerned.
What we morons compare are results on reasonable benchmarks, and I'm sorry to say, but here, the newest Athlons wipe the floor with the newest Xeons. Sure the P4 has a new and unconventional architecture; too bad for Intel and their mindless apologists that it sucks!
As for AMDs "MP" line... DON'T BUY them! If you seriously need an SMP server / workstation and your budget only allows an x86 processor, you'll want to go with Intel. Why, you ask? Simple, they're reliable to 9 decimal places. This is especially noticable with the way ALL of Intel's cores handle heat distribution.
Sounds like someone didn't sell off his Intel shares when they were high! Sucks for you! As for me, I'll install a good heatsink and fan and avoid anything with a P4 core like the plague. I don't need my chip to cut its execution frequency in half right when I ask it to do something interesting! (PS: now admit it, you pulled those P4 reliability figures out of your ass.)
No matter how hard you try, you can't get an Intel P4 to malfunction due to operating heat and although you can stop a P3, you'd be hard pressed to permanently damage the core.
Yeah, I bet your fan falls off your CPU all the time. Good thing you have a P4, the chip designed for the mentally retarded. The rest of us know how to operate a screwdriver and can attach some good cooling gear to a Palomino.
There's also the issue of complex ALU / FPU operations... The P4 core can actually use SSE2 at run-time even if the code is written using plain ol' x86. And a lot of MMX instruction calls can simply be replaced with a coresponding SSE2 instruction call with NO other changes to the code.
That's great. So why does it suck so badly in just about all applications?
Another thing that makes it better is the MUCH higher memory bandwidth. DDR is just plain sad compared to the througput you can get using SSE2 and RAMBUS in concert. You can actually exceede the rated bandwidth limit for RAMBUS using both of them together (I've done it).
So why does the P4 with DDR (VIA's mobo) do so much better than the P4 with Rambus? Because Rambus has such horrible latency. Very few situations saturate the full memory bandwith of DDR, but crappy latency slows down ALL applications.
And finally, all Intel cores are capable of being updated / modified at boot time using microcode... This means if Intel locates a CPU bug / bottleneck / other issue, they can essentially correct it everytime you reboot. This has its limitations, but it's a far cry from AMD's solution (they have none!).
From what I hear, AMDs were designed correctly. Why would they need this? And if Intel can really use microcode to fix bottlenecks in the P4, you should write them and tell them to do it, because if they don't, they'll continue eating AMD's dust.
spork
Dual Xeon 1.7 Vs Dual Athlon 1.2 link
on
2.2 GHz Xeon
·
· Score: 1
If you're not convinced that the newest Athlon MP will wipe the floor with the 2.2 GHz Xeon, check out the humiliation that a dual 1.7 MHz Xeon system suffers at the hands of a lowly 1.2 GHz dual Athlon.
I know there will be some of you who'll say "Mah mama told me to not buy no AMD." But for the rest of us, this will be a no-brainer. For the difference in chip prices you will be able to pay for most of the 4 GB of DDR that AMD mobos will support. Or maybe yo' mama told you to send your money to Rambus...
Despite the high-end sounding name, this chip is nothing more than a crappy old Pentium 4 with some extra cache. When benchmarked against a 1.6 GHz desktop Palomino, you'll see that it not all that much faster.
If you want a multiprocessing server in Q1 2002, the chips to buy are AMD. By then 3 or 4 mobos that support dual processors will be online. Load up on DDR and you'll be able to host anything.
another theory would be that this is an international grand master training to defeat computer programs. these moves are in no opening library. if i was a grand master and had refined
these new strategies against machines, i would want to try them vs 'real' opponents as well.
Wow, now there's an interesting idea! Hmm... lemme see... are there any very good players about to have a big match against a computer?
But that would fit too well. If I were Kramnik I too would get a big kick out of starting and perpetuating the rumor that the ghost of Bobby Fischer has returned.
I think you're quite right. The following observation struck me:
2. "UNIX has been dying since the mid 1980s. Who would want to start writing a system that will be dead on arrival?"
It seems to me that we expect software to modernize much faster than it actually does. I think it's quite likely NT will be around (and big) in 20 years, while much better software architectures will be hanging on the fringes.
As of today, the newest Microsoft home user OS released still has DOS inside. And how old is that?
Maybe the problem is that no one tries to send a life raft to the poor people trapped in an old OS. Everybody says: Come swim to my new, fancy one, or fuck off. The result is that the old OS lives on.
If Trumpet don't need money fast and have a few years to get the bugs out, they just might build the life raft many Windows users are hoping for. The Windows API isn't changing THAT fast; if you catch up to it as it was 6 years ago, you're doing great! (Very few people dare write programs that break in Win95. I expect it will be 10 years before a significant number of Windows binaries won't run on XP.) I'm not saying compatability will be easy; just that they have plenty of time to do it.
Of couse, I don't expect them to succeed. Trumpet are greedy bastards, they'll run out of money soon, and their closed-source code will just vanish. Whatever. I'm much more interested in WINE anyway, who don't need to write new device drivers (the real eternal uphill battle) and don't need to worry about running out of corporate money. Sure, it seems they're moving forward at a snail's pace, but if in 3 years WINE runs everything that you can run on Win95, it will still be the #1 reason why people will be comfortable switching to Linux.
I have to admit, the evidence that Fischer is really out there is much better than I expected it to be before I read the articles. Still, it is very hard to have any idea of who your opponent is in internet chess.
Maybe it's an American Fischer fan who learned all the "Fisher-related facts." The only evidence against that is just the quality of play.
Still--can we rule out it was a very powerful experimental chess computer or a very talented and reclusive chess star? Maybe Kramnik or Kasparov has an odd sense of humor and was making all the moves while his American buddy was doing all the typing.
Unless it's one of the current greats incognito, this story is interesting even if the opponent really isn't Fischer. It sounds like there's someone out there with an incredible chess talent!
Isn't it funny how much of the internet news no longer feels any compulsion to cite the actual studies when they present "scientific results"? Or how they don't really care about the limitations of the study itself, and its possible wider implications?
Well, let them be stupid; anyone can post stuff to the internet. But I do hope the Slashdot staff show better judgement in the future before linking to "scientific results" presented in this shoddy a manner.
A Pentium-Equivalent Rating for these?
on
Itanium Update
·
· Score: 1
I would laugh if Intel eventually decided to sell these impressive-looking chips for desktop systems and had to do a big campaign about how clock speed is not terribly relevant to how the chip performs, in hopes of silencing Athlon owners saying "Ha ha, a whole Gigaherz!? How much did you pay?"
Re:When will we see some improvements from the Alp
on
Itanium Update
·
· Score: 3, Funny
The way I understand it, Intel bought Alpha not to praise it, but to bury it.
Read the story. Among other things, a two-year Mars mission including one year of zero-g (6 months there and 6 months back... that back part is also important) would be enough to cause permanent tooth loss.
WTF? Did everyone forget that there have already been MANY people who've spent more time than this in space? Sure, they're all Russian (AFAIK), so maybe their teeth are stronger because they weren't brought up on American junk food. Please, just because you have a slow news day doesn't give you license to have a dumb news day.
Very few people will want to watch their rental movies on their computer monitor, but if this is a popular service we'll see many cards with TV-out. This is good news.
Now what's needed it some way to send simple commands to your computer through your TV remote (like browsing and playing files). Once we have this, the computer-as-entertainment-hub idea will be unstoppable.
I'd love to "rent" the few Simpsons episodes I still haven't seen, and if all of MST3K became available... slobber... why I'd do just about anything. I'd even install a Windows partition and get a passport account.
I'm sick of seeing these obviously flawed "listening tests" that everyone is writing about. If you want to be taken seriously, here's what you do.
Encode MP3s, RC2-OGGs, and whatever else you like, at all the bitrates you are interested in. I recommend doing this for many different types of music you like.
IMPORTANT STEP 1:
Once they're on your computer, decompress them back into a.WAV file. Make sure you keep track of which.wav came from which compressed file. If you tested both MP3 and OGG at 3 different bitrates each, you will have 6.WAV files for each song, plus the original.WAV (don't delete it). Then cut out relevant passages from each of the songs, maybe a minute each, with a wav editor.
IMPORTANT STEP 2:
Once you have these wav files on your hard drive, tell your roommate to burn them on a CD, in an order that he will write down but not reveal to you. Then put the CD into your stereo and get a good paid of headphones. Crank it up, and take notes on which versions of the passages sound the best and why. See how successful you are in identifying the original wav file when you don't know which it is. See if there is any pattern to your responses.
Until you do a double-blind test like this (come on, it's not difficult) you really shouldn't be shooting your mouth off about which format sounds better.
Because 6.0 sucks so badly
on
Netscape 6.1
·
· Score: 1
They couldn't stomach telling people to "upgrade" to 6.0. That's why. 6.1 works great, no crashes yet!
I don't care how much ferrous contamination you have in your pendulum. If the effect had anything to do with magnetism it wouldn't be observed behind a steel wall. Remember?
Also, no one is claiming this is more powerful than magnetism. It won't lift a train or anything. As for your "star wars" devices, why can't you just use ordinary electromagnets? The repulsorlift could have a coil, etc.
Interesting! How about recruiting zombies to act as gnutella hubs? The problem with your plan is that after the attack is detected, it will be very easy to see who actually uploaded to you (unless there's some way of masking that...).
You're right. They paid $4B for Netscape, whose revenue now is probably comparable to Be's, and they get a lot more cool (and proprietary!) technology from Be... for 1/500th of the price.
It's hard to know what AOL is really after, but here's one guess: An AOL-branded "internet access" computer. They'd give it away for free if you sign up for a year or two of AOL. I can see this campaign working, too. And the timing of this announcement is interesting. If AOL really do intend to do something like this, they realized in their recent talks with Microsoft that MS would never cooperate with them on a project like this.
You may be pissed but you're thinking straight. I am compelled by your objections, which deepens the mystery. Is there a betting pool somewhere? (Oh wait I know, it's called the stock market!)
Slashdot Mirror
So you agree then that the present 2.2GHz core is really far too slow to compete with a 1.6 GHz Palomino. If so, we agree. I'd be happy if Intel gave us 3 GHz soon. That would be enough to beat any Athlon. But unless that happens soon, AMD will remain the speed king.
Problem with this is, morons will always be comparing an AMD CPU that runs at a much lower clockspeed with a higher clockspeed Intel chip and deduct that AMD CPUs are better. NOT TRUE! They're completely different architectures, the P4 is pretty much a 786 as far as I'm concerned.
What we morons compare are results on reasonable benchmarks, and I'm sorry to say, but here, the newest Athlons wipe the floor with the newest Xeons. Sure the P4 has a new and unconventional architecture; too bad for Intel and their mindless apologists that it sucks!
As for AMDs "MP" line... DON'T BUY them! If you seriously need an SMP server / workstation and your budget only allows an x86 processor, you'll want to go with Intel. Why, you ask? Simple, they're reliable to 9 decimal places. This is especially noticable with the way ALL of Intel's cores handle heat distribution.
Sounds like someone didn't sell off his Intel shares when they were high! Sucks for you! As for me, I'll install a good heatsink and fan and avoid anything with a P4 core like the plague. I don't need my chip to cut its execution frequency in half right when I ask it to do something interesting! (PS: now admit it, you pulled those P4 reliability figures out of your ass.)
No matter how hard you try, you can't get an Intel P4 to malfunction due to operating heat and although you can stop a P3, you'd be hard pressed to permanently damage the core.
Yeah, I bet your fan falls off your CPU all the time. Good thing you have a P4, the chip designed for the mentally retarded. The rest of us know how to operate a screwdriver and can attach some good cooling gear to a Palomino.
There's also the issue of complex ALU / FPU operations... The P4 core can actually use SSE2 at run-time even if the code is written using plain ol' x86. And a lot of MMX instruction calls can simply be replaced with a coresponding SSE2 instruction call with NO other changes to the code.
That's great. So why does it suck so badly in just about all applications?
Another thing that makes it better is the MUCH higher memory bandwidth. DDR is just plain sad compared to the througput you can get using SSE2 and RAMBUS in concert. You can actually exceede the rated bandwidth limit for RAMBUS using both of them together (I've done it).
So why does the P4 with DDR (VIA's mobo) do so much better than the P4 with Rambus? Because Rambus has such horrible latency. Very few situations saturate the full memory bandwith of DDR, but crappy latency slows down ALL applications.
And finally, all Intel cores are capable of being updated / modified at boot time using microcode... This means if Intel locates a CPU bug / bottleneck / other issue, they can essentially correct it everytime you reboot. This has its limitations, but it's a far cry from AMD's solution (they have none!).
From what I hear, AMDs were designed correctly. Why would they need this? And if Intel can really use microcode to fix bottlenecks in the P4, you should write them and tell them to do it, because if they don't, they'll continue eating AMD's dust.
spork
I know there will be some of you who'll say "Mah mama told me to not buy no AMD." But for the rest of us, this will be a no-brainer. For the difference in chip prices you will be able to pay for most of the 4 GB of DDR that AMD mobos will support. Or maybe yo' mama told you to send your money to Rambus...
If you want a multiprocessing server in Q1 2002, the chips to buy are AMD. By then 3 or 4 mobos that support dual processors will be online. Load up on DDR and you'll be able to host anything.
Wow, now there's an interesting idea! Hmm... lemme see... are there any very good players about to have a big match against a computer?
But that would fit too well. If I were Kramnik I too would get a big kick out of starting and perpetuating the rumor that the ghost of Bobby Fischer has returned.
Let's just see how he opens against Fritz!
2. "UNIX has been dying since the mid 1980s. Who would want to start writing a system that will be dead on arrival?"
It seems to me that we expect software to modernize much faster than it actually does. I think it's quite likely NT will be around (and big) in 20 years, while much better software architectures will be hanging on the fringes.
As of today, the newest Microsoft home user OS released still has DOS inside. And how old is that?
Maybe the problem is that no one tries to send a life raft to the poor people trapped in an old OS. Everybody says: Come swim to my new, fancy one, or fuck off. The result is that the old OS lives on.
If Trumpet don't need money fast and have a few years to get the bugs out, they just might build the life raft many Windows users are hoping for. The Windows API isn't changing THAT fast; if you catch up to it as it was 6 years ago, you're doing great! (Very few people dare write programs that break in Win95. I expect it will be 10 years before a significant number of Windows binaries won't run on XP.) I'm not saying compatability will be easy; just that they have plenty of time to do it.
Of couse, I don't expect them to succeed. Trumpet are greedy bastards, they'll run out of money soon, and their closed-source code will just vanish. Whatever. I'm much more interested in WINE anyway, who don't need to write new device drivers (the real eternal uphill battle) and don't need to worry about running out of corporate money. Sure, it seems they're moving forward at a snail's pace, but if in 3 years WINE runs everything that you can run on Win95, it will still be the #1 reason why people will be comfortable switching to Linux.
Maybe it's an American Fischer fan who learned all the "Fisher-related facts." The only evidence against that is just the quality of play.
Still--can we rule out it was a very powerful experimental chess computer or a very talented and reclusive chess star? Maybe Kramnik or Kasparov has an odd sense of humor and was making all the moves while his American buddy was doing all the typing.
Unless it's one of the current greats incognito, this story is interesting even if the opponent really isn't Fischer. It sounds like there's someone out there with an incredible chess talent!
Well, let them be stupid; anyone can post stuff to the internet. But I do hope the Slashdot staff show better judgement in the future before linking to "scientific results" presented in this shoddy a manner.
I would laugh if Intel eventually decided to sell these impressive-looking chips for desktop systems and had to do a big campaign about how clock speed is not terribly relevant to how the chip performs, in hopes of silencing Athlon owners saying "Ha ha, a whole Gigaherz!? How much did you pay?"
The way I understand it, Intel bought Alpha not to praise it, but to bury it.
WTF? Did everyone forget that there have already been MANY people who've spent more time than this in space? Sure, they're all Russian (AFAIK), so maybe their teeth are stronger because they weren't brought up on American junk food. Please, just because you have a slow news day doesn't give you license to have a dumb news day.
Now what's needed it some way to send simple commands to your computer through your TV remote (like browsing and playing files). Once we have this, the computer-as-entertainment-hub idea will be unstoppable.
I'd love to "rent" the few Simpsons episodes I still haven't seen, and if all of MST3K became available... slobber... why I'd do just about anything. I'd even install a Windows partition and get a passport account.
Encode MP3s, RC2-OGGs, and whatever else you like, at all the bitrates you are interested in. I recommend doing this for many different types of music you like.
IMPORTANT STEP 1:
Once they're on your computer, decompress them back into a .WAV file. Make sure you keep track of which .wav came from which compressed file. If you tested both MP3 and OGG at 3 different bitrates each, you will have 6 .WAV files for each song, plus the original .WAV (don't delete it). Then cut out relevant passages from each of the songs, maybe a minute each, with a wav editor.
IMPORTANT STEP 2:
Once you have these wav files on your hard drive, tell your roommate to burn them on a CD, in an order that he will write down but not reveal to you. Then put the CD into your stereo and get a good paid of headphones. Crank it up, and take notes on which versions of the passages sound the best and why. See how successful you are in identifying the original wav file when you don't know which it is. See if there is any pattern to your responses.
Until you do a double-blind test like this (come on, it's not difficult) you really shouldn't be shooting your mouth off about which format sounds better.
They couldn't stomach telling people to "upgrade" to 6.0. That's why. 6.1 works great, no crashes yet!
Also, you get Java installed. That's why it's so big.
Also, no one is claiming this is more powerful than magnetism. It won't lift a train or anything. As for your "star wars" devices, why can't you just use ordinary electromagnets? The repulsorlift could have a coil, etc.
Or more probably, students there don't read the assigned articles and just make shit up.
Anybody who believes this data could be explained by a magnetic effect has to be on crack. Like magnetism would pass through a steel wall... sheesh!
Interesting! How about recruiting zombies to act as gnutella hubs? The problem with your plan is that after the attack is detected, it will be very easy to see who actually uploaded to you (unless there's some way of masking that...).
It's hard to know what AOL is really after, but here's one guess: An AOL-branded "internet access" computer. They'd give it away for free if you sign up for a year or two of AOL. I can see this campaign working, too. And the timing of this announcement is interesting. If AOL really do intend to do something like this, they realized in their recent talks with Microsoft that MS would never cooperate with them on a project like this.
You may be pissed but you're thinking straight. I am compelled by your objections, which deepens the mystery. Is there a betting pool somewhere? (Oh wait I know, it's called the stock market!)
I place bets on these guys as the mystery buyer... everyone knows they need a new OS and Be would be an excellent OS for the nextgen doomsday devices!
Not to say that I think this article was mere FUD. I think the guy is right. Good thing for him he doesn't work at MSNBC.
Check the nightlies. I thought the BeOS build was already available for download.
When somebody asks for my phone number in a bar, I'll say: you'll find it at digit 20684081 in pi. If they call, I'll know it's serious!