True, but Amazon has dozens of warehouses, in many states, and they are very big.
At some point, it may be cheaper to double the size of the warehouses and increase the number of robots by a factor of 10, if it cuts your "labor cost" by 90%.
It may not work in retail, due to needing to be customer facing, but in a warehouse, it just needs to be fast enough to ship stuff each day. And it can work 24/7 without shift changes or breaks.
It also doesn't steal, doesn't break stuff (or should break less than $10/hr employees do)
All true... And the first Mac in 1984 had a 7 MHz CPU and 128K of memory and a 400k floppy drive and came with a little 9" monochrome screen... all for $2,500!
So those darn computers will never be useful.:)
Imagine what the version of that robot will look like and be able to do in 10 years.
What about the 3 million working fast food? If they keep demanding $15/hr, at some point robots start to make sense. They might cost half a million or whatever, but they work 24/7/365.
"Starbucksâ(TM) 95,000 baristas have a competitor. It doesnâ(TM)t need sleep. Itâ(TM)s precise in a way that a human could never be. It requires no training. It canâ(TM)t quit. It has memorized every one of its customersâ(TM) orders. Thereâ(TM)s never a line for its perfectly turned-out drinks."
Yea, that will take awhile to happen as well, and you might say "but it won't make my double mocha whatever just the way I like it and I'd never trust anyone else but my guy to do it right", but millions of people don't care and just want a decent cup of coffee.
Imagine if the price could come down by a dollar a cup and taste the same? Imagine if there was no pressure from $15/hr demands from workers who turn over faster than the moon rises?
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A whole lot more than 3 million jobs can be replaced by robots.
Yes, it might take 25-50 years to see it happen, just like it has taken that amount of time to see the first home computers go from "weird hobbyist things" to common every day things. But it will happen.
Look back to the Apple 1 in 1976 and ask yourself if anyone from that time would think that we'd all be carrying around a computer in our pocket with a wireless connection to the information of the world and enough storage to put any big business computer of that era to shame, and everyone would laugh at you.
That is where robots are today. Laugh all you want, but in 25-50 years, they may be as common as a smartphone is today, and just as cheap.
You panting, drooling idiots who think this will be reality soon are deluding yourselves.
Ok, you're ranting, but I actually understand your points...
I don't think this will happen in 5 years, but I do think I'll see it in the next 25 years.
If Google isn't taking 100% liability for their self driving cars, then these will never be viable in industry. Because you end up needing a driver as a backup -- but the driver will lose concentration and be a terrible backup. So any time the computer fails, the human will be too damned late to help. Not unless your software can predict it's failure minutes out instead of seconds.
Google isn't the only company working on this, everyone from Ford to BMW is working on it.
Computers aren't perfect, but they don't have to be perfect, they only have to be better than us.
Imagine for a minute that self-driving cars kill 1 person for every 20,000 drivers on the road, each year. Does that sound bad? Good?
Let me put this another way. Humans driving cars, in the US, in 2010, killed 1 person for every 6,363 drivers on the road. There were 33,000 deaths on US roads in 2010 and 210 million licensed drivers.
If self-driving cars kill 1 person per 20,000 drivers, then the total deaths would have been 10,500 instead of 33,000. Likewise, thousands if not million of injuries would have been avoided as well.
This is bad? You don't think that at some point the insurance companies aren't going to demand self-driving cars when they discover how much money they can save? Sure, they don't get it now, but I'll bet there are accountants within those companies today who see the future. They'll get there.
This is flying cars and fusion power. Until it's 100% there, it's 100% crap.
No, it really isn't. Flying cars is an energy problem, fusion is a physics problem. People simply don't understand the energy it takes to lift a 4,000 lb object 100 feet off the ground. As for fusion, a lot of very smart people have been working on that one awhile, we may or may not see it happen in our lifetime, it just depends on finding the "solution".
As for self-driving cars, these exist today, they have driven millions of miles, almost completely accident free. They will only get better, not worse.
Because the legal framework which needs to surround it is completely non-existent.
The legal framework for licensed drivers and auto insurance didn't exist 115 years ago either. We have plenty of lawyers to make sure it gets put into place.
Google isn't on the cusp of putting millions of truckers out of business. Not by a long shot.
They aren't, right up until they do...
I don't think it will happen in 5 years, but I do think it will happen and I think most of us will live to see it.
People watching Charles Lindbergh fly across the Atlantic would have laughed had you tried to describe a Boeing 747 to them. Only 42 years separates his flight across the Atlantic with the introduction of the 747.
Do you think we'll all be driving manual cars in 42 years?
While I recognize that automated production is the way of the future, I'm not quite sure how to get there. If there were some clear path, I'd be advocating it.
The best I can come up with at the moment is to point out how we're going to be in tough straits when 3 million people find themselves without a job in the next 5 years (and 2 1/2 million after that when short-haul driving is mostly automated, automated drone delivery of packages and mail and such.)
I can picture a future 50 years from now, but like you, getting there appears to be painful.
What do you do with all those people when they no longer are employable? Find them something else to do? Perhaps... but if we make everything with robots, at some point, humans aren't... really needed...
Do you have any ideas on how we can be part of that transition?
No, because so many people are stuck in old mindsets and don't want to change. People are quite stubborn, myself included sometimes.:)
I'm as capitalist as they come, but even I see a problem with such a system when you no longer need workers to make stuff. Who is going to buy your stuff? The whole concept of money may end up strained when more and more people unemployable.
Perhaps Denmark's Basic Income system will work, those who own and control the robot factories will get some things the rest of us don't, but in return, we'll all be fed and have a place to live and plenty of entertainment to watch and no jobs to worry about.
I do have to say, there will have to be one thing that I really, really don't like, but I see no way around it. If you want a basic income for not working, then you have to accept population control. If 100 million don't have to work, they may end up making a lot more humans. Naturally, unchecked, that could be a problem.
My gut says "that is terrible", but then my gut has been wrong about lots of stuff, so perhaps my "gut" is a lousy indicator of things.
I agree with you, but not completely. For contrast, the Darpa grand challenge led to Google's self-driving car, which is poised to put 3 million truck drivers out of work.
You didn't reply to me, but I'll give it a shot...
Go back 115 years ago and look at how many jobs Horses had in the year 1900. They did everything from move people to haul stuff to ride into war. All those jobs sucked for horses.
Imagine the horses looked at cars and thought, "well, those cars might replace some of our jobs, but as we move into the city, there will be lots of people, so there will be plenty of new things for us to do.
As a human looking back past the year 2000, you know this is absurd, there are few jobs today that a horse can do that pays for its care and feed.
Horses didn't become unemployed because they became fat and lazy, they became unemployable. The horse population peaked around 100 years ago and it has been nothing but downhill since.
It won't happen next year, or even 5 years from now... but at some point... all those drivers, from taxis to trucks, will become unemployable through no fault of their own. They simply will not be able to compete with the cost of a robot.
Yep, the idea that we'll continue to employ hundreds of thousands of people in warehouses for hundreds of companies in 10 to 20 years is just silly.
Clearly they'll get replaced in one form or another. Oh sure, you'll need a few people to run the machines and a few people to build or repair them, but you won't need hundreds of thousands of them.
And of course the people losing their $10/hr jobs at Amazon aren't the people who will build or repair these robots.
Yep, once the hardware is in place, I imagine the software will do nothing but get better over time.
Companies like Amazon have all the incentive in the world to make it work, and they aren't alone. There are thousands of other companies that also need to make this all cheaper and more reliable.
It costs $25,000 (down from the $30K number I remembered), it doesn't require special programming, you just show it what to do.
Scroll down that page, look at what it can do, including putting items in boxes.
Now it might not be ready for what Amazon needs, but given the size of Amazon's workforce, their budget, and the possible savings from having a million such robots and not needing to "surge hire" for the holidays, clearly this is a goal that Amazon will continue to peruse.
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A tenth of the speed of a human is not a problem when the hourly cost is 1/100th the price of a human.
Amazon's contest demonstrated anything, it's that it could be quite a long time before robots are capable of identifying and sorting through objects at speeds even remotely approaching human (and thus taking over those jobs).
This is from the summary, and it is wrong.
It implies that it will be awhile before the robots are as fast as humans and thus replacing their jobs.
This is not it at all. The robot doesn't have to be faster than humans, just cheaper. If the robot can only handle 12 items in 20 min, but it costs 50 cents an hour to run, then you can simply order up more robots.
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I was watching a show on The Discovery Channel recently that was profiling new robots, and one of them is a new learning robot that you teach to do things by just showing it. It isn't fast, it takes maybe 5 minutes to fold a shirt for example, but you can teach it to fold a shirt by just showing it, the same way you'd show another human. Make some adjustments and corrections as it tries to do it and then it has "learned" how to do it. That robot costs just $30,000 to purchase and is expected to last for years. It can also be taught how to do other things.
It doesn't have to be fast if the job is one that you can scale up and just buy more robots, that robot will work 24/7/365, it never calls in sick, it never asks for a raise, and it doesn't complain about working conditions.
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Amazon ships stuff from warehouses, it can simply order up 500,000 such robots if needed.
So a 2x speedup in 6.5 years (unless you take into account the nearly 1.5x overclocking of my i7-920). Sure, lower dissipation is worth something, but sorry if my socks aren't blown off by a speed doubling every 6.5 years.
I understand your point... I was simply saying where the development went... Rather than speed, less power consumption was the goal...
Do you not think that a doubling of speed while halving power consumption is impressive? I do in any case... what it also tells me is that for the same power, they could have quadrupled performance (give or take), if that had been their goal, but it clearly wasn't.
And you're right, software hasn't done a great job of adapting to many cores, which is a shame.
Fair enough... I infered from your post that you wanted more performance, that you wanted to know how to get a 25%+ speed jump.
i7-5960X would do it...
Not cheap, but have you considered such an 8 core, 16 thread system with 64GB of RAM, then using 32GB as a RAM disk and doing your work there rather than off a SSD?
You might find your 5-10 min becomes sub-5 min...
Keep in mind that your jump from an Athlon 64x2 to an Ivy Bridge was about a 10 year leap in technology. Even the Core2Duo was faster nearly 10 years ago than the 64x2. It will be hard to do that again without either spending megabucks, or waiting another 10 years.
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As a side note, if I'm not mistaken, you're doing this on an amateur basis, which is fine of course... If this was professional work, it screams for a multi-CPU Xeon system. It also seems like it would be idea for a GPU application as well, given the professional cards that nVidia puts out, that might be even faster.
Reform of the FBI, NSA, etc is unlikely, they just "keep doing it". These guys are supposed to be the watchers, but who is watching the watchers? And even if someone was what can they do about it?
What could they do about it?
That depends... Who do the Joint Chiefs of Staff really serve? The President? Someone else?
Do the military's generals serve our elected leaders?
If so, I hate to say it, but that is the only recourse. You aren't going to stop the NSA/CIA/FBI using... themselves... It would take the military getting involved...
The CIA might be powerful, but so is the 101st Airborne...
I would expect that it would be, given the 486 being limited to a 33 MHz bus speed compared to the Pentium 133's 66 MHz bus.
Like I said, the jump from a 486DX2-66 to a Pentium 75 was rather ho hum, at the time those two chips were mainstream. The 486 was still selling strong in 1994 when the Pentium 75 came out. By the end of 1995 when the Pentium 133 was released, the 486 was no longer mainstream, being really slow for Windows 95 at that point. Keep in mind that the Pentium 75 had a 50 MHz bus, compared to the Pentium 133 having a 66 MHz bus. In those case, with almost no on-die cache (they were very small), bus speed meant a lot. A 486DX-50 often could outperform a 486DX2-66, depending on the task at hand.
Also, there was no 486DX4-133. Intel stopped at 100 MHz but called it the DX4 anyway. AMD did make a 133 MHz version, but called it "Am5x86-P75"
If you are comparing an Intel 486DX4-100 chip to a Pentium 133, well then yes, the Pentium is probably double the speed.
Even the AMD 133 chip was not really any faster than a Pentium 75, the 33 MHz bus speed was too much of a limiter to see the gains the high clock speed would indicate. Once the Pentium got to 100 MHz and a 66 MHz bus, the 486 line was more or less finished for mainstream computing.
I remember those days well, I owned a computer networking and support business back then, I spent many a weekend ripping out 486 computers that we had installed in 1993 and 1994 with Pentium 133 and 166 machines in 1995 and 1996 due to the 486's inability to run Windows 95 at acceptable speeds (at least for our business users). A P75 would do it, but the difference in performance between a P75 and a P133 were noticeable to the average person.
Keep in mind that Intel has focused much of its efforts the past 6 years on power reduction, not speed.
The speed can come later, at the moment they don't need it due to lack of competition.
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Consider, 2009, i7-920 running at 2.66 GHz was a 130W CPU.
Today, these new CPUs are running at 3.3 GHz with a turbo to 3.7 GHz, with a FAR superior iGPU, along with better IPC, while pulling half the power, 65W.
To get similar performance out of the i7-920 chip you'd need to run it at 4 GHz, perhaps a bit more, to counter the IPC improvements.
How much power would that chip consume, assuming it would overclock to 4 GHz? 200W? More?
So we've tripled the power per watt that can be provided in 6 years.
That is an amazing improvement. The only trick is that we need multi-threaded applications to see that translate into more performance.
've got a machine over two years old now - I do some pretty heavy number-crunching with GIS map programs and always tell the counter guy I want the nearest thing he's got to a machine that finishes infinite loops. After conceding that the next model up from the i7-3930K was $500 more for another 15% of horsepower, I picked that one.
It is very rare that 2 years will provide a huge jump in performance.
The exceptions are when major new developments come out.
The Core2Duo was one such development, it was so much faster than Netburst, it was obvious and major.
I remember the old Athlon Thunderbird chips, those were good and a nice upgrade over a middle range Pentium II.
Other times, CPU speed tends to just sit around. The jump from a 486DX/2-66 to a Pentium 75 was very ho-hum back in the day, at least until Windows 95 showed up, then it became more clear. On Windows 3.1? Meh.
Go back further, In 1991 I had a 386DX-25, wonderful machine that was fast for its day, until 2 years later in 1993 I spent a decent chunk of money and got a 486DX2-66, that was a noticable upgrade.
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Go back further, I remember when the 80286-12 chips came out, compared to the older XT that we had at the time, lord that was a rocketship. Anyone else remember the "turbo button"?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps a better way to phrase my original point would be this:
"How many horses in 1915 were being used in commercial activities and how many are being used for those same activities in 2015"
Even ranchers no longer use horses as much, I know ranchers in Texas who have switched to helicopters, they are faster and better than horses.
http://smithhelicopters.com/pr...
http://channel.nationalgeograp...
http://fireaviation.com/2014/1...
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http://www.livinghistoryfarm.o...
1945 was when horses were finally supplanted by tractors, and of course it has only continued from there.
Interesting...
I did some Google searching and couldn't find anything very useful, so I'll take your word for it...
Curious, do you know how many of those are working horses vs personal pets or other recreational animals?
Right, but then if rates become flat, why have a battery to do power shifting?
As people stop buying them when the rates even out, you're back to the same problem.
The reason for buying them goes away, if there is no savings, then people will stop using them.
True, but Amazon has dozens of warehouses, in many states, and they are very big.
At some point, it may be cheaper to double the size of the warehouses and increase the number of robots by a factor of 10, if it cuts your "labor cost" by 90%.
It may not work in retail, due to needing to be customer facing, but in a warehouse, it just needs to be fast enough to ship stuff each day. And it can work 24/7 without shift changes or breaks.
It also doesn't steal, doesn't break stuff (or should break less than $10/hr employees do)
All true... And the first Mac in 1984 had a 7 MHz CPU and 128K of memory and a 400k floppy drive and came with a little 9" monochrome screen... all for $2,500!
So those darn computers will never be useful. :)
Imagine what the version of that robot will look like and be able to do in 10 years.
Wow, you really are dedicated to major jumps.
Fair enough, more power to you and all. :)
The 486/75 to K6-2 500 is a HUGE jump, I personally couldn't have waited that long. :)
Are those wild horses or horses in captivity?
I was referring only to those who are housed and fed by us, not those in the wild.
3 million may not make or break things...
What about the 3 million working fast food? If they keep demanding $15/hr, at some point robots start to make sense. They might cost half a million or whatever, but they work 24/7/365.
What about all the coffee shops?
http://qz.com/134661/briggo-co...
"Starbucksâ(TM) 95,000 baristas have a competitor. It doesnâ(TM)t need sleep. Itâ(TM)s precise in a way that a human could never be. It requires no training. It canâ(TM)t quit. It has memorized every one of its customersâ(TM) orders. Thereâ(TM)s never a line for its perfectly turned-out drinks."
Yea, that will take awhile to happen as well, and you might say "but it won't make my double mocha whatever just the way I like it and I'd never trust anyone else but my guy to do it right", but millions of people don't care and just want a decent cup of coffee.
Imagine if the price could come down by a dollar a cup and taste the same? Imagine if there was no pressure from $15/hr demands from workers who turn over faster than the moon rises?
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A whole lot more than 3 million jobs can be replaced by robots.
Yes, it might take 25-50 years to see it happen, just like it has taken that amount of time to see the first home computers go from "weird hobbyist things" to common every day things. But it will happen.
Look back to the Apple 1 in 1976 and ask yourself if anyone from that time would think that we'd all be carrying around a computer in our pocket with a wireless connection to the information of the world and enough storage to put any big business computer of that era to shame, and everyone would laugh at you.
That is where robots are today. Laugh all you want, but in 25-50 years, they may be as common as a smartphone is today, and just as cheap.
Regarding "max power pull", you're right of course, when idle they all use less.
I will say, take a look at the "idle power" of AMD's chips and the "idle power" of the new Intel chips.
One of the reasons I upgraded from Sandy Bridge to Haswell was not speed (part of it, but not all of it), but power consumption.
You panting, drooling idiots who think this will be reality soon are deluding yourselves.
Ok, you're ranting, but I actually understand your points...
I don't think this will happen in 5 years, but I do think I'll see it in the next 25 years.
If Google isn't taking 100% liability for their self driving cars, then these will never be viable in industry. Because you end up needing a driver as a backup -- but the driver will lose concentration and be a terrible backup. So any time the computer fails, the human will be too damned late to help. Not unless your software can predict it's failure minutes out instead of seconds.
Google isn't the only company working on this, everyone from Ford to BMW is working on it.
Computers aren't perfect, but they don't have to be perfect, they only have to be better than us.
Imagine for a minute that self-driving cars kill 1 person for every 20,000 drivers on the road, each year. Does that sound bad? Good?
Let me put this another way. Humans driving cars, in the US, in 2010, killed 1 person for every 6,363 drivers on the road. There were 33,000 deaths on US roads in 2010 and 210 million licensed drivers.
If self-driving cars kill 1 person per 20,000 drivers, then the total deaths would have been 10,500 instead of 33,000. Likewise, thousands if not million of injuries would have been avoided as well.
This is bad? You don't think that at some point the insurance companies aren't going to demand self-driving cars when they discover how much money they can save? Sure, they don't get it now, but I'll bet there are accountants within those companies today who see the future. They'll get there.
This is flying cars and fusion power. Until it's 100% there, it's 100% crap.
No, it really isn't. Flying cars is an energy problem, fusion is a physics problem. People simply don't understand the energy it takes to lift a 4,000 lb object 100 feet off the ground. As for fusion, a lot of very smart people have been working on that one awhile, we may or may not see it happen in our lifetime, it just depends on finding the "solution".
As for self-driving cars, these exist today, they have driven millions of miles, almost completely accident free. They will only get better, not worse.
Because the legal framework which needs to surround it is completely non-existent.
The legal framework for licensed drivers and auto insurance didn't exist 115 years ago either. We have plenty of lawyers to make sure it gets put into place.
Google isn't on the cusp of putting millions of truckers out of business. Not by a long shot.
They aren't, right up until they do...
I don't think it will happen in 5 years, but I do think it will happen and I think most of us will live to see it.
People watching Charles Lindbergh fly across the Atlantic would have laughed had you tried to describe a Boeing 747 to them. Only 42 years separates his flight across the Atlantic with the introduction of the 747.
Do you think we'll all be driving manual cars in 42 years?
While I recognize that automated production is the way of the future, I'm not quite sure how to get there. If there were some clear path, I'd be advocating it.
The best I can come up with at the moment is to point out how we're going to be in tough straits when 3 million people find themselves without a job in the next 5 years (and 2 1/2 million after that when short-haul driving is mostly automated, automated drone delivery of packages and mail and such.)
I can picture a future 50 years from now, but like you, getting there appears to be painful.
What do you do with all those people when they no longer are employable? Find them something else to do? Perhaps... but if we make everything with robots, at some point, humans aren't... really needed...
Do you have any ideas on how we can be part of that transition?
No, because so many people are stuck in old mindsets and don't want to change. People are quite stubborn, myself included sometimes. :)
I'm as capitalist as they come, but even I see a problem with such a system when you no longer need workers to make stuff. Who is going to buy your stuff? The whole concept of money may end up strained when more and more people unemployable.
Perhaps Denmark's Basic Income system will work, those who own and control the robot factories will get some things the rest of us don't, but in return, we'll all be fed and have a place to live and plenty of entertainment to watch and no jobs to worry about.
I do have to say, there will have to be one thing that I really, really don't like, but I see no way around it. If you want a basic income for not working, then you have to accept population control. If 100 million don't have to work, they may end up making a lot more humans. Naturally, unchecked, that could be a problem.
My gut says "that is terrible", but then my gut has been wrong about lots of stuff, so perhaps my "gut" is a lousy indicator of things.
I agree with you, but not completely. For contrast, the Darpa grand challenge led to Google's self-driving car, which is poised to put 3 million truck drivers out of work.
You didn't reply to me, but I'll give it a shot...
Go back 115 years ago and look at how many jobs Horses had in the year 1900. They did everything from move people to haul stuff to ride into war. All those jobs sucked for horses.
Imagine the horses looked at cars and thought, "well, those cars might replace some of our jobs, but as we move into the city, there will be lots of people, so there will be plenty of new things for us to do.
As a human looking back past the year 2000, you know this is absurd, there are few jobs today that a horse can do that pays for its care and feed.
Horses didn't become unemployed because they became fat and lazy, they became unemployable. The horse population peaked around 100 years ago and it has been nothing but downhill since.
It won't happen next year, or even 5 years from now... but at some point... all those drivers, from taxis to trucks, will become unemployable through no fault of their own. They simply will not be able to compete with the cost of a robot.
But this is an embarrassingly parallel problem.
Yep, the idea that we'll continue to employ hundreds of thousands of people in warehouses for hundreds of companies in 10 to 20 years is just silly.
Clearly they'll get replaced in one form or another. Oh sure, you'll need a few people to run the machines and a few people to build or repair them, but you won't need hundreds of thousands of them.
And of course the people losing their $10/hr jobs at Amazon aren't the people who will build or repair these robots.
Yep, once the hardware is in place, I imagine the software will do nothing but get better over time.
Companies like Amazon have all the incentive in the world to make it work, and they aren't alone. There are thousands of other companies that also need to make this all cheaper and more reliable.
https://www.google.com/search?...
That is a Google Search of "Newegg Warehouse" and I clicked on images.
Some of those are not of Newegg of course, but many are. This is a huge problem to solve...
I think that "faster" is still the wrong term...
"Cheaper" is likely what counts...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...
If that Paywalls (WSJ), then this one:
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/20...
Amazon simply bought a robot company, they are already using thousands of these robots...
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A 10th of the speed doesn't matter if it is 100th the price...
Replying to my own post...
http://www.rethinkrobotics.com...
Found it...
It costs $25,000 (down from the $30K number I remembered), it doesn't require special programming, you just show it what to do.
Scroll down that page, look at what it can do, including putting items in boxes.
Now it might not be ready for what Amazon needs, but given the size of Amazon's workforce, their budget, and the possible savings from having a million such robots and not needing to "surge hire" for the holidays, clearly this is a goal that Amazon will continue to peruse.
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A tenth of the speed of a human is not a problem when the hourly cost is 1/100th the price of a human.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Found that video as well, it is called "Humans Need Not Apply" and it covers some of the ideas for the future of such robots.
Amazon's contest demonstrated anything, it's that it could be quite a long time before robots are capable of identifying and sorting through objects at speeds even remotely approaching human (and thus taking over those jobs).
This is from the summary, and it is wrong.
It implies that it will be awhile before the robots are as fast as humans and thus replacing their jobs.
This is not it at all. The robot doesn't have to be faster than humans, just cheaper. If the robot can only handle 12 items in 20 min, but it costs 50 cents an hour to run, then you can simply order up more robots.
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I was watching a show on The Discovery Channel recently that was profiling new robots, and one of them is a new learning robot that you teach to do things by just showing it. It isn't fast, it takes maybe 5 minutes to fold a shirt for example, but you can teach it to fold a shirt by just showing it, the same way you'd show another human. Make some adjustments and corrections as it tries to do it and then it has "learned" how to do it. That robot costs just $30,000 to purchase and is expected to last for years. It can also be taught how to do other things.
It doesn't have to be fast if the job is one that you can scale up and just buy more robots, that robot will work 24/7/365, it never calls in sick, it never asks for a raise, and it doesn't complain about working conditions.
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Amazon ships stuff from warehouses, it can simply order up 500,000 such robots if needed.
Of course that all misses the point I was trying to make...
If you buy one of these based on "power savings" from shifting from off-peak to peak, those "savings" go away when the various rates go away...
As for competition, a lot of places with time of day charges don't have any competition, but it probably will help in some places.
So a 2x speedup in 6.5 years (unless you take into account the nearly 1.5x overclocking of my i7-920). Sure, lower dissipation is worth something, but sorry if my socks aren't blown off by a speed doubling every 6.5 years.
I understand your point... I was simply saying where the development went... Rather than speed, less power consumption was the goal...
Do you not think that a doubling of speed while halving power consumption is impressive? I do in any case... what it also tells me is that for the same power, they could have quadrupled performance (give or take), if that had been their goal, but it clearly wasn't.
And you're right, software hasn't done a great job of adapting to many cores, which is a shame.
Fair enough... I infered from your post that you wanted more performance, that you wanted to know how to get a 25%+ speed jump.
i7-5960X would do it...
Not cheap, but have you considered such an 8 core, 16 thread system with 64GB of RAM, then using 32GB as a RAM disk and doing your work there rather than off a SSD?
You might find your 5-10 min becomes sub-5 min...
Keep in mind that your jump from an Athlon 64x2 to an Ivy Bridge was about a 10 year leap in technology. Even the Core2Duo was faster nearly 10 years ago than the 64x2. It will be hard to do that again without either spending megabucks, or waiting another 10 years.
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As a side note, if I'm not mistaken, you're doing this on an amateur basis, which is fine of course... If this was professional work, it screams for a multi-CPU Xeon system. It also seems like it would be idea for a GPU application as well, given the professional cards that nVidia puts out, that might be even faster.
Reform of the FBI, NSA, etc is unlikely, they just "keep doing it".
These guys are supposed to be the watchers, but who is watching the watchers? And even if someone was what can they do about it?
What could they do about it?
That depends... Who do the Joint Chiefs of Staff really serve? The President? Someone else?
Do the military's generals serve our elected leaders?
If so, I hate to say it, but that is the only recourse. You aren't going to stop the NSA/CIA/FBI using... themselves... It would take the military getting involved...
The CIA might be powerful, but so is the 101st Airborne...
I would expect that it would be, given the 486 being limited to a 33 MHz bus speed compared to the Pentium 133's 66 MHz bus.
Like I said, the jump from a 486DX2-66 to a Pentium 75 was rather ho hum, at the time those two chips were mainstream. The 486 was still selling strong in 1994 when the Pentium 75 came out. By the end of 1995 when the Pentium 133 was released, the 486 was no longer mainstream, being really slow for Windows 95 at that point. Keep in mind that the Pentium 75 had a 50 MHz bus, compared to the Pentium 133 having a 66 MHz bus. In those case, with almost no on-die cache (they were very small), bus speed meant a lot. A 486DX-50 often could outperform a 486DX2-66, depending on the task at hand.
Also, there was no 486DX4-133. Intel stopped at 100 MHz but called it the DX4 anyway. AMD did make a 133 MHz version, but called it "Am5x86-P75"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
If you are comparing an Intel 486DX4-100 chip to a Pentium 133, well then yes, the Pentium is probably double the speed.
Even the AMD 133 chip was not really any faster than a Pentium 75, the 33 MHz bus speed was too much of a limiter to see the gains the high clock speed would indicate. Once the Pentium got to 100 MHz and a 66 MHz bus, the 486 line was more or less finished for mainstream computing.
I remember those days well, I owned a computer networking and support business back then, I spent many a weekend ripping out 486 computers that we had installed in 1993 and 1994 with Pentium 133 and 166 machines in 1995 and 1996 due to the 486's inability to run Windows 95 at acceptable speeds (at least for our business users). A P75 would do it, but the difference in performance between a P75 and a P133 were noticeable to the average person.
Keep in mind that Intel has focused much of its efforts the past 6 years on power reduction, not speed.
The speed can come later, at the moment they don't need it due to lack of competition.
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Consider, 2009, i7-920 running at 2.66 GHz was a 130W CPU.
Today, these new CPUs are running at 3.3 GHz with a turbo to 3.7 GHz, with a FAR superior iGPU, along with better IPC, while pulling half the power, 65W.
To get similar performance out of the i7-920 chip you'd need to run it at 4 GHz, perhaps a bit more, to counter the IPC improvements.
How much power would that chip consume, assuming it would overclock to 4 GHz? 200W? More?
So we've tripled the power per watt that can be provided in 6 years.
That is an amazing improvement. The only trick is that we need multi-threaded applications to see that translate into more performance.
My experience would indicate this as I have an i7 3770k (I think that is what is is) and I can load all 8 virtual cores at 100% for extended periods.
If that is the case, then Haswell-E is probably what you need. Another 4 core chip won't help you nearly as much as having 8 real cores will.
Not the cheapest thing in the world, but if you're actually running for "extended periods" at 100% CPU usage, then maybe it is time.
've got a machine over two years old now - I do some pretty heavy number-crunching with GIS map programs and always tell the counter guy I want the nearest thing he's got to a machine that finishes infinite loops. After conceding that the next model up from the i7-3930K was $500 more for another 15% of horsepower, I picked that one.
It is very rare that 2 years will provide a huge jump in performance.
The exceptions are when major new developments come out.
The Core2Duo was one such development, it was so much faster than Netburst, it was obvious and major.
I remember the old Athlon Thunderbird chips, those were good and a nice upgrade over a middle range Pentium II.
Other times, CPU speed tends to just sit around. The jump from a 486DX/2-66 to a Pentium 75 was very ho-hum back in the day, at least until Windows 95 showed up, then it became more clear. On Windows 3.1? Meh.
Go back further, In 1991 I had a 386DX-25, wonderful machine that was fast for its day, until 2 years later in 1993 I spent a decent chunk of money and got a 486DX2-66, that was a noticable upgrade.
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Go back further, I remember when the 80286-12 chips came out, compared to the older XT that we had at the time, lord that was a rocketship. Anyone else remember the "turbo button"? :)