The response against Russia has been so weak that I am completely shocked that today Putin gave the order to pull back from the Ukrainian border.
... which only goes to show you don't understand the first thing about international politics and diplomacy and probably shouldn't be so eager to comment on it.
The article in the 2nd link (1st link only says "abstract" in the link) is a joke. Well, the people who wrote it are serious, but it's a joke. They honestly cited The Onion as a source for one of their points without mentioning that The Onion is a satirical site. Do they even know that? They offer no alternative. They only say that the whole drone strike idea isn't working.
Ert, ert, shill alert! You just redlined my shillmeter there. What you're doing is a common misdirection tactic that is almost exclusive used by shills: if a source illustrates an otherwise well-founded argument with a light-hearted aside, an opposing shill will never fail to rip the light-hearted aside out of context, claim it's the only source of data the argument is built on, and thereby dismiss the whole article, including all of its othersources. Shame until the 7th generation upon the moderators who modded this turd up.
The real point is to kill bad guys. (...) Killing some of them may convince some people who haven't joined that joining them may be a really bad idea. There's value in that.
It's not so difficult. You know how in every war, there are heroes, who risk their life for the good cause? Usually they die; if not, they get decorated, and if their country happens to win the war, their heroism in the name of all that's good and free is sung for years to come. Well guess what? These terrorists are exactly the same people. They think that they're the good guys, that and their cause is so important for the wellbeing of the world that it's worth dying for, or killing some innocents. It's not all that different from the concept of "collateral damage" - killing innocents for a greater cause. In the case of Al-Qaeda, they think that America is out to dominate the world (which is not all that far from the truth), to exterminate their religion (incorrect except if you listen to the real whackjobs, who unfortunately are gaining political power), and an imminent threat to what they call their "lifestyle". Sounds familiar? It should; "... is a threat our lifestyle" is a rallying cry for populists all over the world, in particular the aforementioned whackjobs. Al-Qaeda is at war for a just cause (in their eyes), and they know war is risky. And that is why you'll never defeat them by lobbing missiles into social events that include their leaders; you'll only make them stronger by convincing more people that fighting back against the perceived "western threat" is worth dying for. See also bluefoxlucid's story a few posts up.
In general, "bad guys" who are truly evil and do bad things out of pure malice are pretty much a fable propagated for the purpose of spreading hate against certain groups. "Bad guys" usually do what they do because either they think they're the good guys and the end justifies the means (which is why this philosophy is so problematic), or in the case of stupid sociopaths, because they think they can profit from it (I say "stupid sociopaths" because most of the smart ones are terrified of the label "bad guy" and greasy enough to avoid it at all cost.)
Yeah, and Linus Pauling, one of the most influential chemists in history, was a noted megavitamin crank. Not that I'm trying to elevate Lerner to that level, just saying that being a crank in one field doesn't necessarily preclude doing good science in another. I know plenty of good scientists that have the weirdest ideas about some things that are not their core specialty. It seems to be a pattern.
The idea of DPF is fundamentally sound, and Lerner's company LPP has a few papers in serious peer-reviewed journals in relevant fields, so I'd tend to give them the benefit of doubt. How much benefit is a different question, though.
Oh yeah, and I'm not implying TFA is necessarily serious research (though it does seem legit at first glance). I'm just attacking your criterion for judging a project worthy of funding.
Bravo! You might just as well be saying that you'd be willing to give your money to a scammer like Andrea Rossi, but not to serious real-life scientific research. If everything were to think like that, there would be no public funding for fundamental research, and no progress (because applied research alone won't get you very far in the grand scheme of things).
Aaah, the axiom of anarcho-capitalism. Disproven innumerable times by history, game theory and present reality, yet if you close your eyes, stick your fingers firmly in your ears and keep on repeating it like a mantra, nothing will seem to be wrong... until you wake op in an Orwellian dystopia.
Hur hur indeed. Hey moron, they measured the ice with a satellite with a very precise radar, calculated the volume of ice that was lost, and converted that to a mm value by dividing by the water-covered surface area of the earth. Suppose the volume calculation has an error of 10% (it's probably much smaller than that), then you would have 0.43mm +/- 0.04mm. Keep your imaginary error ranges in you ass next time.
...because everyone knows a blog that is heavily funded by the Heartland Institute must be better than direct satellite measurements.
And no, this is not an ad hominem; I'm not necessarily saying WUWT must necessarily be terrible purely because they have undeclared conflicts of interest, I'm just attacking your ridiculous qualifier better. How can you possibly argue that the quality of data on a blog with undeclared conflicts of interest is better data than direct satellite measurements? Your "better" just seems to mean "confirms my preconceptions".
Though let's not kid ourselves, WUWT is terrible. Every time I visit it, I find huge embarrassing mistakes any BA in science could spot.
"Overrated" or "offtopic" seems to be far too mild for such asinine posts. Sometimes I think there really should be a "stupid" mod. It would be abused to hell, of course.
To be fair, the "won't need to be guarded" only applies to the current relatively low-level waste. In comparison, the "200-500 years" waste you're talking about would be insanely hot (by which I mean radioactive, though it will also produce substantial heat), so would need to be kept in a facility where it can be monitored (as opposed to burying it in a stable geological formation). So the utilities need to put some of their profits aside for bankrolling this kind of storage for several generations (200 years is still a very long time), which would increase the cost of the electricity. And political instability (which area hasn't seen a war, revolution or political collapse in the last few hundred years?) could conceivably compromise the security of the storage.
Before you accuse me of bias, the volumes of waster we're talking about are far, far lower than what we're seeing now, and in this light, I think the concerns in my previous paragraph can be mitigated by rational decision making and enough money. I even speculate (unbiased reliable estimates are hard to find) this increase in cost will be an acceptable price to pay for an otherwise relatively clean power source. I just wanted to point out that it's not all flowers and sunshine; there's a difficult debate to be had, and if you want it to be dirt cheap, you get what you pay for.
If you ask me, there are various degrees of likelihood:
- smaller polar caps and rising sea levels: damn sure - we're seeing it now already and temperature at the poles correlates relatively well with global averages. The impact of this will be pretty terrible and this is already enough motivation to do something about global warming.
- retreating glaciers: almost certain for an overwhelming majority of glaciers in the world - we're seeing it now already, often to a spectacular extent. What I don't understand is why you're classifying this as a disaster; that part is a bit reminiscent of a strawman argument. I don't think these glaciers are doing humanity that much good. They're usually not cited as a problem as such cited, but as a spectacular indicator that the greater problem of global warming is real.
- desertification: it doesn't take cutting edge climate models to show that rising global temperatures will expand the Hadley cell. This will inevitably cause the deserts to migrate away from the equator. It is also often said it will lead to a net enlargement of the subtropical deserts, though it is a bit harder to say by how much. What also needs to be factored in is that parts of Greenland that weren't suitable for agriculture before already have become so; worldwide (I'm thinking Canada and Siberia), this effect may offset the likely expansion of the desert. So in the end, I expect only limited net loss or gain of arable zones worldwide. We are losing some of the landmass in those zones to the oceans, but expressed as a percentage, that may not be too much. However, the precautionary principle applies; not doing anything is taking a hard-to-justify risk.
- Shifting climate zones/biomes: regardless of net gains or losses, arable land is almost certain to shift a lot (shifts in habitats is something we're seeing now already). So in terms of human food supply, the haves will become have-nots and the have-nots will become haves. These kinds of shifts have historically been associated with political instability, wars and mass migrations, so are best avoided. Not to even mention the shifts in habitable land...
- intensified hurricanes: very likely. In simple terms, what we call the tropics will become larger (bigger Hadley cell) and warmer (correlation with global temperatures, just like the poles), and warm ocean water is the driving force of hurricanes.
- all the other things (tornadoes, wildfires): subject to debate. Hence the very cautious language in my previous post. But honestly, when facing a near-certainty of rising sea levels and shifting climate zones, I really don't feel we need any other arguments to do something about the problem. In that sense, you have a point that haggling over these smaller things may play into the hand of the deniers, who love to carry over these uncertainties into areas that are pretty certain ("see, if they're not certain about that, how can they be certain about anything?") Putting the "UD" in FUD (the F part is saying that reducing CO2 emissions will have a huge impact on our lifestyle and will ruin our economy, which, given a sufficiently sensible plan, is poppycork).
In case it wasn't clear, wildfires are predominantly caused by accumulation of a sufficiently large amount of sufficiently dry combustible material. Once it's there, it will inevitably catch fire one day or another, arson or not. And climate change has the potential to modulate that "sufficiently dry" attribute. It is equally true that humanity is actively modulating the "sufficiently large amount" attribute (for example by suppressing small undergrowth fires and by not cutting the undergrowth that would otherwise be removed by these fires), which doesn't make things any better. But arson has relatively little to do with it.
In all fairness, yes, there are clearly fossil fuels shills at work on/., but the post you replied to does not seem to be one of them. There are many places in the world where certain forestry-related policies are under heavy controversy because they are now generally accepted to increase the incidence and severity of wildfires. While in my opinion, there is enough independent evidence to cautiously suggest that global warming (which itself is not in dispute in scientific circles) is more likely to make bush fires worse than better (dry areas getting dryer and all that), forestry practices such as underbrush cutting have a rightful place in any discussion about wildfires. I know the shills have worn our patience very thin, but let's try to have a fair and balanced discussion, even if there are forces at work that don't want us to.
No way; the Core2 was essentially a thoroughly reworked Pentium III. Moore's law has stalled terribly when it comes to single-thread performance; what we did get is more cores. Even more so when looking clock-for-clock; in that department, both Intel and AMD only had incremental increases of 5~20% since the Athlon 64, with the big exception of the Nehalem architecture, which was the only truly big jump in single-core per-clock performance of the x86-64 era.
Yeah, I guess I'm a bit biased in that we're constantly running stuff that keeps as many threads busy as we want, and we do indeed see that this dramatically decreases Intel's advantage. I do see your point that this is not a typical use case.
CMT is inherently less efficient than SMT. It's also a simpler design that's easier for a smaller company to implement.
{citation needed} on both accounts.
There are piles upon piles of benchmarks out there demonstrating this. Intel's architecture excels in instruction throughput, transistor budget, and power efficiency.
Look at the price of AMD's microprocessors on any online retailer's website. Intel's i7-3930k still sells for around $600 and its successor is around $630. AMD's flagship FX-9590 fell from $1000... to $600... to $300 in a matter of weeks as it just can't keep up where it counts.
For the "less efficient" part, I would accept "less efficient for single-threaded applications" or "less efficient for consumer applications", but inherently less efficient is strong wording and I'm not convinced it is true. Just as you haven't given me any evidence that CMT is simpler and easier to implement. AMD has shown in the past it can match Intel in design sophistication (as opposed to fabbing, where it was usually behind, except for the short period of time it had SOI and Intel didn't). It was my understanding that its choice to not do SMT is due to philosophical differences, not design complexity.
In the ARM market, AMD is nothing special. They don't have their own fabs, they don't have particularly much experience with ultra-low power designs.
I would, however, consider it within the realm of the possible that AMD were to release a processor that uses the ARM instruction set but is meant to compete in the laptop (not tablet) market and/or the (currently) niche market of Linux servers using ARM. I'd imagine the thing architecturally having a lot in common with their x86-64 offering (except of course things such as instruction decoder), with power draw and speed both far above the tablet market, but with a performance/W that is very attractive for the laptop/server market (maybe even low enough power for set top boxes or high enough performance for consoles - perhaps even a crossover of both). It could make the ARM server niche grow quite a lot, given that its popularity is limited by poor single-thread performance, which the hypothetical AMD part would cure.
Of course, this is all wild speculation, and AMD has been disappointing on its promises of late, but they must be up to something...
Core2 Duo 6x faster than Athlon 64 X2? What are you smoking? Yes, it was somewhat faster, and AMD was a bit more sluggish adjusting its prices than it should have been, but the Core 2 Duo's big success was largely due to its much lower power draw in laptops, and more importantly, the market's "Intel inside" bias. The Core2 later got significant competition from the Phenom xx50 and newer, but that was only half a year before the Core i7 came out. Only then, you could really say the Intel CPUs ran circles around their AMD counterparts, at least in desktop and mobile applications.
This written on an Athlon 64 X2 "Toledo". It runs XFCE 4.8 on a 64-bit Linux kernel 3.5 pretty snappily (my experience is not too much worse than on my Ivy Brigde) and keeps up admirably with the (modest) workload I'm throwing at it. It's a day-and-night difference with the 1-year-newer P4 Cedar Mill I threw out because it was nearly unworkable in the exact same function, even though it was paired with faster memory. I'm thinking the early EM64T implementations were not up to snuff, which wasn't such a big deal at the time because no-one was using it much.
I guess I'm giving everyone a blast from the past with this post:)
Not everyone runs workloads that are poorly vectorized and parallelized, you insensitive clod.
Hyperthreading (Intel's implementation of SMT) is what gives Intel's i7 series microprocessors a huge advantage
The P4 had hyperthreading too. If that really would be such a huge advantage, one would think it would have been a bit more competitive than it was...
Disabling one of the CMT frontends...
...assuming the workload is not keeping all the frontends busy most of the time.
...only reduces competition for resources that are shared, which on AMD FX series microprocessors includes some of the cache and floating point hardware.
Not with AVX-intensive workloads; there, a single thread can keep the whole shared FPU busy with AVX instructions.
CMT is inherently less efficient than SMT. It's also a simpler design that's easier for a smaller company to implement.
Wow, just wow. I can understand they want to start using newer instructions, but not with a release that amounts to a service pack! They should either have done this with windows 8, or waited till windows 9. What the hell were they thinking?
Finally someone who got it right. GP is wrong about the Joule heating; ultra-pure water with near-zero conductivity heats just fine in the microwave, as do oil and dry carbohydrates, and insects do die if they don't manage to go sit at a node in the standing wave, only they seem to actively seek these nodes by moving to where it feels least hot. That said, it seems plausible that there is some joule heating in actual food, and it could even help explain some weird heating patterns; it's just not the most important contribution overall.
TFA at the very least used unfortunate wording suggesting rotational resonance, which would also be wrong. This is a pervasive urban legend even amongst people who should know better, and can even be found in some entry-level textbooks (see the scan in TFA). The misconseption is based on the fact that molecular rotations for gases are indeed located in the microwave spectrum. However, molecules don't really rotate freely in the condensed phase (and the peaks for water vapor are at 22.2 and 183GHz anyway so the frequency of the microwave oven would be far off). Dielectric heating is the only correct explanation. That said, it does seems plausible that the dielectric heating of liquid water is more efficient than that of ice because of the more persisten hydrogen bonds, so TFA probably got that part right.
In summary, both GP and TFA got their basic mechanism wrong but contain some good arguments nevertheless.
Slashdot Mirror
The response against Russia has been so weak that I am completely shocked that today Putin gave the order to pull back from the Ukrainian border.
... which only goes to show you don't understand the first thing about international politics and diplomacy and probably shouldn't be so eager to comment on it.
The article in the 2nd link (1st link only says "abstract" in the link) is a joke. Well, the people who wrote it are serious, but it's a joke. They honestly cited The Onion as a source for one of their points without mentioning that The Onion is a satirical site. Do they even know that? They offer no alternative. They only say that the whole drone strike idea isn't working.
Ert, ert, shill alert! You just redlined my shillmeter there. What you're doing is a common misdirection tactic that is almost exclusive used by shills: if a source illustrates an otherwise well-founded argument with a light-hearted aside, an opposing shill will never fail to rip the light-hearted aside out of context, claim it's the only source of data the argument is built on, and thereby dismiss the whole article, including all of its other sources. Shame until the 7th generation upon the moderators who modded this turd up.
The real point is to kill bad guys. (...) Killing some of them may convince some people who haven't joined that joining them may be a really bad idea. There's value in that.
Oh please grow up. The real world is not about "good guys" and "bad guys". In fact, bad guys don't actually exist, and killing those who you think are bad only makes them stronger.
It's not so difficult. You know how in every war, there are heroes, who risk their life for the good cause? Usually they die; if not, they get decorated, and if their country happens to win the war, their heroism in the name of all that's good and free is sung for years to come. Well guess what? These terrorists are exactly the same people. They think that they're the good guys, that and their cause is so important for the wellbeing of the world that it's worth dying for, or killing some innocents. It's not all that different from the concept of "collateral damage" - killing innocents for a greater cause. In the case of Al-Qaeda, they think that America is out to dominate the world (which is not all that far from the truth), to exterminate their religion (incorrect except if you listen to the real whackjobs, who unfortunately are gaining political power), and an imminent threat to what they call their "lifestyle". Sounds familiar? It should; "... is a threat our lifestyle" is a rallying cry for populists all over the world, in particular the aforementioned whackjobs. Al-Qaeda is at war for a just cause (in their eyes), and they know war is risky. And that is why you'll never defeat them by lobbing missiles into social events that include their leaders; you'll only make them stronger by convincing more people that fighting back against the perceived "western threat" is worth dying for. See also bluefoxlucid's story a few posts up.
In general, "bad guys" who are truly evil and do bad things out of pure malice are pretty much a fable propagated for the purpose of spreading hate against certain groups. "Bad guys" usually do what they do because either they think they're the good guys and the end justifies the means (which is why this philosophy is so problematic), or in the case of stupid sociopaths, because they think they can profit from it (I say "stupid sociopaths" because most of the smart ones are terrified of the label "bad guy" and greasy enough to avoid it at all cost.)
Yeah, and Linus Pauling, one of the most influential chemists in history, was a noted megavitamin crank. Not that I'm trying to elevate Lerner to that level, just saying that being a crank in one field doesn't necessarily preclude doing good science in another. I know plenty of good scientists that have the weirdest ideas about some things that are not their core specialty. It seems to be a pattern.
The idea of DPF is fundamentally sound, and Lerner's company LPP has a few papers in serious peer-reviewed journals in relevant fields, so I'd tend to give them the benefit of doubt. How much benefit is a different question, though.
s/everything/everyone/
Oh yeah, and I'm not implying TFA is necessarily serious research (though it does seem legit at first glance). I'm just attacking your criterion for judging a project worthy of funding.
Bravo! You might just as well be saying that you'd be willing to give your money to a scammer like Andrea Rossi, but not to serious real-life scientific research. If everything were to think like that, there would be no public funding for fundamental research, and no progress (because applied research alone won't get you very far in the grand scheme of things).
Aaah, the axiom of anarcho-capitalism. Disproven innumerable times by history, game theory and present reality, yet if you close your eyes, stick your fingers firmly in your ears and keep on repeating it like a mantra, nothing will seem to be wrong... until you wake op in an Orwellian dystopia.
Hur hur indeed. Hey moron, they measured the ice with a satellite with a very precise radar, calculated the volume of ice that was lost, and converted that to a mm value by dividing by the water-covered surface area of the earth. Suppose the volume calculation has an error of 10% (it's probably much smaller than that), then you would have 0.43mm +/- 0.04mm. Keep your imaginary error ranges in you ass next time.
Here: chew on some better data
...because everyone knows a blog that is heavily funded by the Heartland Institute must be better than direct satellite measurements.
And no, this is not an ad hominem; I'm not necessarily saying WUWT must necessarily be terrible purely because they have undeclared conflicts of interest, I'm just attacking your ridiculous qualifier better. How can you possibly argue that the quality of data on a blog with undeclared conflicts of interest is better data than direct satellite measurements? Your "better" just seems to mean "confirms my preconceptions".
Though let's not kid ourselves, WUWT is terrible. Every time I visit it, I find huge embarrassing mistakes any BA in science could spot.
"Overrated" or "offtopic" seems to be far too mild for such asinine posts. Sometimes I think there really should be a "stupid" mod. It would be abused to hell, of course.
To be fair, the "won't need to be guarded" only applies to the current relatively low-level waste. In comparison, the "200-500 years" waste you're talking about would be insanely hot (by which I mean radioactive, though it will also produce substantial heat), so would need to be kept in a facility where it can be monitored (as opposed to burying it in a stable geological formation). So the utilities need to put some of their profits aside for bankrolling this kind of storage for several generations (200 years is still a very long time), which would increase the cost of the electricity. And political instability (which area hasn't seen a war, revolution or political collapse in the last few hundred years?) could conceivably compromise the security of the storage.
Before you accuse me of bias, the volumes of waster we're talking about are far, far lower than what we're seeing now, and in this light, I think the concerns in my previous paragraph can be mitigated by rational decision making and enough money. I even speculate (unbiased reliable estimates are hard to find) this increase in cost will be an acceptable price to pay for an otherwise relatively clean power source. I just wanted to point out that it's not all flowers and sunshine; there's a difficult debate to be had, and if you want it to be dirt cheap, you get what you pay for.
Yeah, the problem with breeders is more fear of proliferation (rational or not) than technical feasibility.
(In fact, in order to explode a few American heads - I'm a republican socialist!)
Heh lol as a European who has long been living in the USA, that comment made my day.
If you ask me, there are various degrees of likelihood:
- smaller polar caps and rising sea levels: damn sure - we're seeing it now already and temperature at the poles correlates relatively well with global averages. The impact of this will be pretty terrible and this is already enough motivation to do something about global warming.
- retreating glaciers: almost certain for an overwhelming majority of glaciers in the world - we're seeing it now already, often to a spectacular extent. What I don't understand is why you're classifying this as a disaster; that part is a bit reminiscent of a strawman argument. I don't think these glaciers are doing humanity that much good. They're usually not cited as a problem as such cited, but as a spectacular indicator that the greater problem of global warming is real.
- desertification: it doesn't take cutting edge climate models to show that rising global temperatures will expand the Hadley cell. This will inevitably cause the deserts to migrate away from the equator. It is also often said it will lead to a net enlargement of the subtropical deserts, though it is a bit harder to say by how much. What also needs to be factored in is that parts of Greenland that weren't suitable for agriculture before already have become so; worldwide (I'm thinking Canada and Siberia), this effect may offset the likely expansion of the desert. So in the end, I expect only limited net loss or gain of arable zones worldwide. We are losing some of the landmass in those zones to the oceans, but expressed as a percentage, that may not be too much. However, the precautionary principle applies; not doing anything is taking a hard-to-justify risk.
- Shifting climate zones/biomes: regardless of net gains or losses, arable land is almost certain to shift a lot (shifts in habitats is something we're seeing now already). So in terms of human food supply, the haves will become have-nots and the have-nots will become haves. These kinds of shifts have historically been associated with political instability, wars and mass migrations, so are best avoided. Not to even mention the shifts in habitable land...
- intensified hurricanes: very likely. In simple terms, what we call the tropics will become larger (bigger Hadley cell) and warmer (correlation with global temperatures, just like the poles), and warm ocean water is the driving force of hurricanes.
- all the other things (tornadoes, wildfires): subject to debate. Hence the very cautious language in my previous post. But honestly, when facing a near-certainty of rising sea levels and shifting climate zones, I really don't feel we need any other arguments to do something about the problem. In that sense, you have a point that haggling over these smaller things may play into the hand of the deniers, who love to carry over these uncertainties into areas that are pretty certain ("see, if they're not certain about that, how can they be certain about anything?") Putting the "UD" in FUD (the F part is saying that reducing CO2 emissions will have a huge impact on our lifestyle and will ruin our economy, which, given a sufficiently sensible plan, is poppycork).
In case it wasn't clear, wildfires are predominantly caused by accumulation of a sufficiently large amount of sufficiently dry combustible material. Once it's there, it will inevitably catch fire one day or another, arson or not. And climate change has the potential to modulate that "sufficiently dry" attribute. It is equally true that humanity is actively modulating the "sufficiently large amount" attribute (for example by suppressing small undergrowth fires and by not cutting the undergrowth that would otherwise be removed by these fires), which doesn't make things any better. But arson has relatively little to do with it.
Yep, because without arson, there would be no wildfires. Oh wait, no, there would.
Or are you going to tell us that plants that are evolutionary adapted to fire or even need it to procreate were really created by God who knew there would always be humans around to start the necessary fires since the earth was created 10000 years ago?
In all fairness, yes, there are clearly fossil fuels shills at work on /., but the post you replied to does not seem to be one of them. There are many places in the world where certain forestry-related policies are under heavy controversy because they are now generally accepted to increase the incidence and severity of wildfires. While in my opinion, there is enough independent evidence to cautiously suggest that global warming (which itself is not in dispute in scientific circles) is more likely to make bush fires worse than better (dry areas getting dryer and all that), forestry practices such as underbrush cutting have a rightful place in any discussion about wildfires. I know the shills have worn our patience very thin, but let's try to have a fair and balanced discussion, even if there are forces at work that don't want us to.
No way; the Core2 was essentially a thoroughly reworked Pentium III. Moore's law has stalled terribly when it comes to single-thread performance; what we did get is more cores. Even more so when looking clock-for-clock; in that department, both Intel and AMD only had incremental increases of 5~20% since the Athlon 64, with the big exception of the Nehalem architecture, which was the only truly big jump in single-core per-clock performance of the x86-64 era.
CMT is inherently less efficient than SMT. It's also a simpler design that's easier for a smaller company to implement.
{citation needed} on both accounts.
There are piles upon piles of benchmarks out there demonstrating this. Intel's architecture excels in instruction throughput, transistor budget, and power efficiency.
Look at the price of AMD's microprocessors on any online retailer's website. Intel's i7-3930k still sells for around $600 and its successor is around $630. AMD's flagship FX-9590 fell from $1000... to $600... to $300 in a matter of weeks as it just can't keep up where it counts.
For the "less efficient" part, I would accept "less efficient for single-threaded applications" or "less efficient for consumer applications", but inherently less efficient is strong wording and I'm not convinced it is true. Just as you haven't given me any evidence that CMT is simpler and easier to implement. AMD has shown in the past it can match Intel in design sophistication (as opposed to fabbing, where it was usually behind, except for the short period of time it had SOI and Intel didn't). It was my understanding that its choice to not do SMT is due to philosophical differences, not design complexity.
In the ARM market, AMD is nothing special. They don't have their own fabs, they don't have particularly much experience with ultra-low power designs.
I would, however, consider it within the realm of the possible that AMD were to release a processor that uses the ARM instruction set but is meant to compete in the laptop (not tablet) market and/or the (currently) niche market of Linux servers using ARM. I'd imagine the thing architecturally having a lot in common with their x86-64 offering (except of course things such as instruction decoder), with power draw and speed both far above the tablet market, but with a performance/W that is very attractive for the laptop/server market (maybe even low enough power for set top boxes or high enough performance for consoles - perhaps even a crossover of both). It could make the ARM server niche grow quite a lot, given that its popularity is limited by poor single-thread performance, which the hypothetical AMD part would cure.
Of course, this is all wild speculation, and AMD has been disappointing on its promises of late, but they must be up to something...
Core2 Duo 6x faster than Athlon 64 X2? What are you smoking? Yes, it was somewhat faster, and AMD was a bit more sluggish adjusting its prices than it should have been, but the Core 2 Duo's big success was largely due to its much lower power draw in laptops, and more importantly, the market's "Intel inside" bias. The Core2 later got significant competition from the Phenom xx50 and newer, but that was only half a year before the Core i7 came out. Only then, you could really say the Intel CPUs ran circles around their AMD counterparts, at least in desktop and mobile applications.
This written on an Athlon 64 X2 "Toledo". It runs XFCE 4.8 on a 64-bit Linux kernel 3.5 pretty snappily (my experience is not too much worse than on my Ivy Brigde) and keeps up admirably with the (modest) workload I'm throwing at it. It's a day-and-night difference with the 1-year-newer P4 Cedar Mill I threw out because it was nearly unworkable in the exact same function, even though it was paired with faster memory. I'm thinking the early EM64T implementations were not up to snuff, which wasn't such a big deal at the time because no-one was using it much.
I guess I'm giving everyone a blast from the past with this post :)
Hyperthreading (Intel's implementation of SMT) is what gives Intel's i7 series microprocessors a huge advantage
The P4 had hyperthreading too. If that really would be such a huge advantage, one would think it would have been a bit more competitive than it was...
Disabling one of the CMT frontends...
...assuming the workload is not keeping all the frontends busy most of the time.
...only reduces competition for resources that are shared, which on AMD FX series microprocessors includes some of the cache and floating point hardware.
Not with AVX-intensive workloads; there, a single thread can keep the whole shared FPU busy with AVX instructions.
CMT is inherently less efficient than SMT. It's also a simpler design that's easier for a smaller company to implement.
{citation needed} on both accounts.
Wow, just wow. I can understand they want to start using newer instructions, but not with a release that amounts to a service pack! They should either have done this with windows 8, or waited till windows 9. What the hell were they thinking?
Finally someone who got it right. GP is wrong about the Joule heating; ultra-pure water with near-zero conductivity heats just fine in the microwave, as do oil and dry carbohydrates, and insects do die if they don't manage to go sit at a node in the standing wave, only they seem to actively seek these nodes by moving to where it feels least hot. That said, it seems plausible that there is some joule heating in actual food, and it could even help explain some weird heating patterns; it's just not the most important contribution overall.
TFA at the very least used unfortunate wording suggesting rotational resonance, which would also be wrong. This is a pervasive urban legend even amongst people who should know better, and can even be found in some entry-level textbooks (see the scan in TFA). The misconseption is based on the fact that molecular rotations for gases are indeed located in the microwave spectrum. However, molecules don't really rotate freely in the condensed phase (and the peaks for water vapor are at 22.2 and 183GHz anyway so the frequency of the microwave oven would be far off). Dielectric heating is the only correct explanation. That said, it does seems plausible that the dielectric heating of liquid water is more efficient than that of ice because of the more persisten hydrogen bonds, so TFA probably got that part right.
In summary, both GP and TFA got their basic mechanism wrong but contain some good arguments nevertheless.