Their new stuff actually sounds pretty good ( search youtube for it ). The band has acknowledged that what they've put out since the black album has been pretty weak. They claim the new stuff will be a fresh take on the RTL/MOP/AJFA sound ( and it is, so far so good, hopefully it's been polished up quite a bit since those youtube videos were made ). St Anger was an interesting piece of... work. The book "This Monster Lives" describes what the band was going through when they wrote that album. It seems it mostly revolved around issues with James - his alcoholism and control issues with the band's creative direction. The conslusion appears to be that James needs to keep the drinking under control or he will destroy himself and the band can't make an album without James at the helm. The collaborative effort produced a POS ( see St. Anger ). Anyways, I think I'll buy the new album, hopefully I'll get to pay what I think it's worth.
Select to display the processor name. Sort primary by results. Scroll to the bottom. In a 4-way configuration the Xeon X7350 DOES NOT EVEN COME CLOSE to the Opteron WITH THE TLB BUG at 2.3GHz. That's with the erratum. Not that it's competing now, but with the TLB-bug-free and higher-clocked revs coming soon the Xeon will not compete in this space. Currently AMD's architecture is superior to Intel's on 4-way and up. The money is not made on fanboi gamer rigs. Thanks for playing. By the end of 2008 AMD should have the advantage across the board.
You Sir are an ugly troll. The grandparent wasn't painting an entirely clear picture (not wrong, just incomplete), but you are taking misunderstanding to a whole new level. You must've taken an introductory physics course and stopped your pursuit of physics there, thinking you now now it all ( Yay Newton! Einstein who? Heisenwha? ). By observing the photon with whatever instrument (eyeballs, photoreceptor, etc) you're transferring energy. The GP said nothing of these thing all happening instantaneously or anything necessitating time travel. The GP also was not confused about whether the photon was/was not generated by the object. What I think the GP was getting at was that he thinks that "spooky action at a distance" does not happen. By observing photons here on Earth we are not instantaneously altering state light-years away. I tend to agree with him. One hypothesized way in which we could change the state is by forcing a photon that's part of an entangled pair into a known state by observation, forcing the counterpart into a state (instantaneously). TFA is pretty weak on details. Anyways, I mod you "-2 Improper Use of Comma and Improper Use of F-bomb in Same Sentence". Dickhead.
Actually, massively oversampling with a 1-bit ADC/DAC is one of ( if not the ) most prominent methods used in high-resolution audio. The method is called delta-sigma modulation. For ADC it involves an analog integrator followed by a one-bit comparator and usually switched-capacitors to add/subtract charge off the integrator. The method is simple. Let's assume our analog input 'Vin' can take on values between 0V and 1V. The comparator outputs '1' if the value stored on the integrator is greater than 0V and '0' if it's less than 0V. If the last comparison was a '1' that means we've overshot our true Vin value by 1V-Vin, so we subtract 1V-Vin volts off the integrator. If your last output was a 0, then we've underestimated the output be Vin volts so we add Vin volts to the integrator. In this manner the ratio of 1's to 0's in our output will represent the value of our input. By oversampling at a very high rate we can capture the signal with a simple opamp/comparator combo ( which can be relatively crappy analog components and still give a high-res output ). One very interesting thing about delta-sigma is the power of the error in the signal is at a frequency that is usually outside of the frequency of interest. The algorithm is also recursive and you can add a second integrator to push the error power up to even higher frequencies. These types of ADCs allow compact, low-power high-fidelity audio. The algorithm works equally well for DACs. A digital state machine is used to decide when to add or subtract charge from a storage capacitor containing our analog value. A simple RC filter is used to remove the error signal.
How about just a good Floyd Rose? A good FR implementation can keep a guitar in tune for weeks at a time, even with lots of bends (including the trem) and heavy palm-muted thrashing. The Edge-Pro or whatever it is on my Ibanez makes it trivial to get quickly back in tune as strings stretch - the fine-tuning knobs on the trem only take a slight turn to get right back to the right pitch. IIRC Ibanez guitars even in the $400-$500 range come with pretty good Floyd Rose tremolos.
The entirety of Rush's "Vapor Trails" was ruined in this fashion. The band knows it, a remaster has already been done, but it's not for sale as the label is apparently waiting for all of the first mastering to sell, how sad...
Neal Stephenson wrote a book about this kind of tech back in 1995 or so, entitled "The Diamond Age" (or "A Young Girl's Primer or something like that). He envisions some pretty incredible stuff made out of this tech. Great book, lots of nerdy CS-type stuff in it. Go to the library and pick it up, very fun stuff. I think this one of his works is very underrated. If we can actually engineer stuff like this it would be impressive, indeed.
Yeah, I've never understood that statement, either. I think maybe it was made by some physicists who were _very_ good at math and Einstein wasn't quite up to their level at the time when his hobby turned into revolutionary new thinking. It might also be understood as commenting on the mathematics of general relativity and the fact that Einstein himself didn't quite know how to set down the mathematical framework for the theory in his head, he had some help. Given that the math behind GR was non-existant, or at least poorly disseminated at the time, one could hardly equate "trouble inventing new mathematical/geometrical concepts" with "bad at math". Then again, maybe the math isn't that hard, just all the wacky notation?
Typically the only people who know the true details of the errata are the engineers that own the circuits in question. Sometimes the cause is the result of a "perfect storm" of electrical events that wasn't seen as being possible in the pre-tapeout design phase, other times the cause is just plain igonorance/inexperience on the engineer's part. In any case you'll have only your most experienced engineers on the case and they'll be very tight-lipped about it. I know about a few of 'em, but I work over at AMD now, not that I could comment on this one even if I was still at Intel.
OLGA taught me, too. This is so sad. I wonder if we can bring this to the attention of any rockers that would help bring it back so future generations of guitar players can have it as a learning source? I bet Rush would back OLGA, maybe The Boss would, too. I'm thinking Geoff Tate and Co might rally behind OLGA as well ( besides, all the QR tabs on OLGA were baaaaaad, no offense to the authors). Luckily www.ultimate-guitar.com is hosting most of the old OLGA content, don't know how long that will last. However, I think there are a lots of tabs that were copied straight out of books on ultimate-guitar which might get them shut down.
It's like the companies selling photo printers and photo paper. They tune their printers to their specific type of paper, if you use their paper (like Mac hardware) you'll get the best experience. Try using Kodak paper with your HP and vice versa and you'll see what I mean. But you're free to use any paper you wish, but YMMV. You can argue about the "vendor lock-in" and how it's evil, but controlling both the printer and the paper is what allows HP to make a printer so cheap that prints so well. The market will decide if this "lock-in" is livable ( and many have decided it is), much like the market accepts iTunes DRM and the iPod lock-in because in turn they get slick ease-of-use ( and most play ripped CDs anyways, so who cares about the DRM? ).
I was happy to find that my wife's Motorola RAZR v3m on Sprint is "unlocked". Moto's "phone tools" let you copy music/pictures/video freely to/from the phone and sync calendar. The music player supports AAC, so all those imported iTunes tracks play. The phone has a microSD slot, which last I checked one can get in 2GB capacity for ~$60. Sprint also allows apps to be installed on the phone and the Google Mail & Maps are quite nice. Moto has also done away with their propreitary interface cables, this one connects/charges via USB. The only missing feature is a flash for the camera. All in all a pretty solid product for $50. I'm still waiting for iPhone, if it doesn't please I'll just get a RAZR like my wife's. On the other side of the coin, a friend of mine and his wife both recently purchased the same phone but with T-Mobile. I was going to show him the google apps only to find they're not allowed.
If you've plenty of memory on-die the bus becomes irrelevant;) That's how Intel is keeping up with AMD - big cache band-aid on the slow FSB so they can compete with HT.
I'm guessing that the capacitance of the interconnect dominates over the gate capacitance in the RC delays?
I'm willing to wager that most of the time it is. To scale (or keep constant) R the metal aspect ratios are ridiculous, resulting in high lateral cap. Either high R or C drowns out the gate cap (but it's still situation-dependent).
These FETs should be great for analog - no gate leakage, reduced short-channel effects should make current-mirrors/sources a pleasure and the high gm won't hurt analog circuits, either...
Um, by definition the gate _capacitance_ is part of the RC network. The grandparent is right in that if Tox was kept constant then the RC delay would go up.
The high-k material doesn't necessarily mean the capacitance of the gate will be higher, that depends on the dimensions of the gate as well as the material. If the thickness of the dielectric was kept constant the cap would go up, but what we're trying to do here is increase the dielectric thickness while maintaining performance. By increasing the dielectric thickness we can put a stop to the quantum tunneling that creates gate leakage. If we did this using the same Si02 gate dielectric it would cause an increase in threshold voltage and decrease in transistor gain. Gate cap is not usually the largest capacitive component on a given route (interconnect, usually). I'm sure there's a sweet spot for transistor performance vs average RC. However, those finite RC contants might be what limits these designs in the end, something a lower impedance connection to VDD/VSS can't do anything about.
The cost of a 12-inch bulk wafer is about $400, an SOI wafer $600. The back-end processing for each is $2000+ ( slightly more for bulk for additional junction engineering to get the additional performance ). The cost difference is about a wash. I guess SOI does take a cost hit when it comes to yield. I'm not trying to take anything away from Intel's accomplishment, but they're not the only ones working on exciting new technologies. I think they're just shouting about this because they're the first ones to metal gate and they want to make up for getting beat to SOI ( and then being stubborn about it and not using it, I'm pretty sure Intel had some great SOI tech but won't use it out of spite ).
I think this is just a lot of Intel FUD. There are other semiconductor companies that will have similar improvements in their designs as well. One that I think is most interesting that Intel will not have is called HOT - Hybrid Orientation Technology. This is only possible for the vendors that use an SOI process. Basically, HOT allows for the Si crystal to be oriented in two different ways, one way for PFETs and one for NFETs. What this means is that we no longer have to choose which FET is fastest in a given process, P and NFETs have the same gain, NOR gates are as fast as NAND, etc. Now you don't have to make PFETs more than 2x the size of your NFETs to get the needed drive and your design gets more dense - smaller, cheaper die or more on-die cache. You also get to keep one FET type in SOI, and the other in bulk to get the best of both worlds (fast SOI fets and predictable bulk FETs with fixed body voltages). Intel may be able to create some form of HOT for their fin-FET, until then they won't get HOT because they don't use SOI due to NIH (Not Invented Here).
You're not alone. There are lots of posts, and lots of people here at work that are echoing the same thing. I was hoping for the widescreen iPod, too... I think it can't be too far behind...
Slashdot Mirror
Their new stuff actually sounds pretty good ( search youtube for it ). The band has acknowledged that what they've put out since the black album has been pretty weak. They claim the new stuff will be a fresh take on the RTL/MOP/AJFA sound ( and it is, so far so good, hopefully it's been polished up quite a bit since those youtube videos were made ). St Anger was an interesting piece of ... work. The book "This Monster Lives" describes what the band was going through when they wrote that album. It seems it mostly revolved around issues with James - his alcoholism and control issues with the band's creative direction. The conslusion appears to be that James needs to keep the drinking under control or he will destroy himself and the band can't make an album without James at the helm. The collaborative effort produced a POS ( see St. Anger ). Anyways, I think I'll buy the new album, hopefully I'll get to pay what I think it's worth.
Go here: http://www.spec.org/cgi-bin/osgresults?conf=cpu2006;op=form
Select to display the processor name. Sort primary by results. Scroll to the bottom. In a 4-way configuration the Xeon X7350 DOES NOT EVEN COME CLOSE to the Opteron WITH THE TLB BUG at 2.3GHz. That's with the erratum. Not that it's competing now, but with the TLB-bug-free and higher-clocked revs coming soon the Xeon will not compete in this space. Currently AMD's architecture is superior to Intel's on 4-way and up. The money is not made on fanboi gamer rigs. Thanks for playing. By the end of 2008 AMD should have the advantage across the board.
I almost fell out of my chair when I read your sig, well done ;)
Tommy: You know a lot of people go to college for seven years.
Richard : I know, they're called doctors.
You Sir are an ugly troll. The grandparent wasn't painting an entirely clear picture (not wrong, just incomplete), but you are taking misunderstanding to a whole new level. You must've taken an introductory physics course and stopped your pursuit of physics there, thinking you now now it all ( Yay Newton! Einstein who? Heisenwha? ). By observing the photon with whatever instrument (eyeballs, photoreceptor, etc) you're transferring energy. The GP said nothing of these thing all happening instantaneously or anything necessitating time travel. The GP also was not confused about whether the photon was/was not generated by the object. What I think the GP was getting at was that he thinks that "spooky action at a distance" does not happen. By observing photons here on Earth we are not instantaneously altering state light-years away. I tend to agree with him. One hypothesized way in which we could change the state is by forcing a photon that's part of an entangled pair into a known state by observation, forcing the counterpart into a state (instantaneously). TFA is pretty weak on details. Anyways, I mod you "-2 Improper Use of Comma and Improper Use of F-bomb in Same Sentence". Dickhead.
Actually, massively oversampling with a 1-bit ADC/DAC is one of ( if not the ) most prominent methods used in high-resolution audio. The method is called delta-sigma modulation. For ADC it involves an analog integrator followed by a one-bit comparator and usually switched-capacitors to add/subtract charge off the integrator. The method is simple. Let's assume our analog input 'Vin' can take on values between 0V and 1V. The comparator outputs '1' if the value stored on the integrator is greater than 0V and '0' if it's less than 0V. If the last comparison was a '1' that means we've overshot our true Vin value by 1V-Vin, so we subtract 1V-Vin volts off the integrator. If your last output was a 0, then we've underestimated the output be Vin volts so we add Vin volts to the integrator. In this manner the ratio of 1's to 0's in our output will represent the value of our input. By oversampling at a very high rate we can capture the signal with a simple opamp/comparator combo ( which can be relatively crappy analog components and still give a high-res output ). One very interesting thing about delta-sigma is the power of the error in the signal is at a frequency that is usually outside of the frequency of interest. The algorithm is also recursive and you can add a second integrator to push the error power up to even higher frequencies. These types of ADCs allow compact, low-power high-fidelity audio. The algorithm works equally well for DACs. A digital state machine is used to decide when to add or subtract charge from a storage capacitor containing our analog value. A simple RC filter is used to remove the error signal.
How about just a good Floyd Rose? A good FR implementation can keep a guitar in tune for weeks at a time, even with lots of bends (including the trem) and heavy palm-muted thrashing. The Edge-Pro or whatever it is on my Ibanez makes it trivial to get quickly back in tune as strings stretch - the fine-tuning knobs on the trem only take a slight turn to get right back to the right pitch. IIRC Ibanez guitars even in the $400-$500 range come with pretty good Floyd Rose tremolos.
children of Khan Noonian-Singh :)
The entirety of Rush's "Vapor Trails" was ruined in this fashion. The band knows it, a remaster has already been done, but it's not for sale as the label is apparently waiting for all of the first mastering to sell, how sad...
Neal Stephenson wrote a book about this kind of tech back in 1995 or so, entitled "The Diamond Age" (or "A Young Girl's Primer or something like that). He envisions some pretty incredible stuff made out of this tech. Great book, lots of nerdy CS-type stuff in it. Go to the library and pick it up, very fun stuff. I think this one of his works is very underrated. If we can actually engineer stuff like this it would be impressive, indeed.
Duke Nukem Forever?
You must be new here...
Yeah, I've never understood that statement, either. I think maybe it was made by some physicists who were _very_ good at math and Einstein wasn't quite up to their level at the time when his hobby turned into revolutionary new thinking. It might also be understood as commenting on the mathematics of general relativity and the fact that Einstein himself didn't quite know how to set down the mathematical framework for the theory in his head, he had some help. Given that the math behind GR was non-existant, or at least poorly disseminated at the time, one could hardly equate "trouble inventing new mathematical/geometrical concepts" with "bad at math". Then again, maybe the math isn't that hard, just all the wacky notation?
Because it is? Like the GP said, it's not solely Einstein's.
Typically the only people who know the true details of the errata are the engineers that own the circuits in question. Sometimes the cause is the result of a "perfect storm" of electrical events that wasn't seen as being possible in the pre-tapeout design phase, other times the cause is just plain igonorance/inexperience on the engineer's part. In any case you'll have only your most experienced engineers on the case and they'll be very tight-lipped about it. I know about a few of 'em, but I work over at AMD now, not that I could comment on this one even if I was still at Intel.
OLGA taught me, too. This is so sad. I wonder if we can bring this to the attention of any rockers that would help bring it back so future generations of guitar players can have it as a learning source? I bet Rush would back OLGA, maybe The Boss would, too. I'm thinking Geoff Tate and Co might rally behind OLGA as well ( besides, all the QR tabs on OLGA were baaaaaad, no offense to the authors). Luckily www.ultimate-guitar.com is hosting most of the old OLGA content, don't know how long that will last. However, I think there are a lots of tabs that were copied straight out of books on ultimate-guitar which might get them shut down.
It's like the companies selling photo printers and photo paper. They tune their printers to their specific type of paper, if you use their paper (like Mac hardware) you'll get the best experience. Try using Kodak paper with your HP and vice versa and you'll see what I mean. But you're free to use any paper you wish, but YMMV. You can argue about the "vendor lock-in" and how it's evil, but controlling both the printer and the paper is what allows HP to make a printer so cheap that prints so well. The market will decide if this "lock-in" is livable ( and many have decided it is), much like the market accepts iTunes DRM and the iPod lock-in because in turn they get slick ease-of-use ( and most play ripped CDs anyways, so who cares about the DRM? ).
I was happy to find that my wife's Motorola RAZR v3m on Sprint is "unlocked". Moto's "phone tools" let you copy music/pictures/video freely to/from the phone and sync calendar. The music player supports AAC, so all those imported iTunes tracks play. The phone has a microSD slot, which last I checked one can get in 2GB capacity for ~$60. Sprint also allows apps to be installed on the phone and the Google Mail & Maps are quite nice. Moto has also done away with their propreitary interface cables, this one connects/charges via USB. The only missing feature is a flash for the camera. All in all a pretty solid product for $50. I'm still waiting for iPhone, if it doesn't please I'll just get a RAZR like my wife's. On the other side of the coin, a friend of mine and his wife both recently purchased the same phone but with T-Mobile. I was going to show him the google apps only to find they're not allowed.
Info here.
If you've plenty of memory on-die the bus becomes irrelevant ;) That's how Intel is keeping up with AMD - big cache band-aid on the slow FSB so they can compete with HT.
I'm guessing that the capacitance of the interconnect dominates over the gate capacitance in the RC delays?
I'm willing to wager that most of the time it is. To scale (or keep constant) R the metal aspect ratios are ridiculous, resulting in high lateral cap. Either high R or C drowns out the gate cap (but it's still situation-dependent).
These FETs should be great for analog - no gate leakage, reduced short-channel effects should make current-mirrors/sources a pleasure and the high gm won't hurt analog circuits, either...
Um, by definition the gate _capacitance_ is part of the RC network. The grandparent is right in that if Tox was kept constant then the RC delay would go up.
The high-k material doesn't necessarily mean the capacitance of the gate will be higher, that depends on the dimensions of the gate as well as the material. If the thickness of the dielectric was kept constant the cap would go up, but what we're trying to do here is increase the dielectric thickness while maintaining performance. By increasing the dielectric thickness we can put a stop to the quantum tunneling that creates gate leakage. If we did this using the same Si02 gate dielectric it would cause an increase in threshold voltage and decrease in transistor gain. Gate cap is not usually the largest capacitive component on a given route (interconnect, usually). I'm sure there's a sweet spot for transistor performance vs average RC. However, those finite RC contants might be what limits these designs in the end, something a lower impedance connection to VDD/VSS can't do anything about.
The cost of a 12-inch bulk wafer is about $400, an SOI wafer $600. The back-end processing for each is $2000+ ( slightly more for bulk for additional junction engineering to get the additional performance ). The cost difference is about a wash. I guess SOI does take a cost hit when it comes to yield. I'm not trying to take anything away from Intel's accomplishment, but they're not the only ones working on exciting new technologies. I think they're just shouting about this because they're the first ones to metal gate and they want to make up for getting beat to SOI ( and then being stubborn about it and not using it, I'm pretty sure Intel had some great SOI tech but won't use it out of spite ).
I think this is just a lot of Intel FUD. There are other semiconductor companies that will have similar improvements in their designs as well. One that I think is most interesting that Intel will not have is called HOT - Hybrid Orientation Technology. This is only possible for the vendors that use an SOI process. Basically, HOT allows for the Si crystal to be oriented in two different ways, one way for PFETs and one for NFETs. What this means is that we no longer have to choose which FET is fastest in a given process, P and NFETs have the same gain, NOR gates are as fast as NAND, etc. Now you don't have to make PFETs more than 2x the size of your NFETs to get the needed drive and your design gets more dense - smaller, cheaper die or more on-die cache. You also get to keep one FET type in SOI, and the other in bulk to get the best of both worlds (fast SOI fets and predictable bulk FETs with fixed body voltages). Intel may be able to create some form of HOT for their fin-FET, until then they won't get HOT because they don't use SOI due to NIH (Not Invented Here).
You're not alone. There are lots of posts, and lots of people here at work that are echoing the same thing. I was hoping for the widescreen iPod, too... I think it can't be too far behind...