Last time I checked my PC has a very nice sounding Klipsch Promedia setup. I could hook it up to something nicer but I dont have the money. As far as less expensive stuff sounds you can do extremely good for $150-200 if you get a couple regular 2.1 setups. Wait! No! Then you get a 4.2 setup. Oh well better then plain stereo and better then the dolby pro logic you get from the PS2.
Intel is going the clock speed route for a reason, and it is pretty clear to me. While a 1.4Ghz PIII or Thunderbird may be a good deal faster then a 1.4Ghz P4, the P4 will be avalible at significantly higher clock speeds (2Ghz planned in Q4 2001 I believe) because of its hyper-pipelined design. Also, Intel will be able to (Hopefully from Intel's business perspective) charge obscene amouts of money for these CPUs because their clock speeds are so high.
Intel, however, is truly making an innovative processor design with the P4. The speed of electricity is possibly becoming a bottleneck (As the 2 "drive" stages in the pipe Ace's pointed out as possibly being for the signal to reach the other side of the chip)
The only problem with this is that AMD has caught up extremely quickly in the past year, and while imperfect, the Athlon design scales in clock speed extremely well. With the 1.2Ghz Thunderbird here, on a.18 micron process, no less, as long as AMD can keep up with the process technology they will stay in the high end market.
The P4 uses about twice as many transistors as a Thunderbird or Coppermine, in order to achieve the massive hyper-pipelined design that they have. AMD on the other hand, with Sledgehammer, will integrate 2 CPU cores onto one die with a shared L2 cache. I would imagine that the design for Sledgehammer is similar to the Athlon, but with 64 bit extensions. Why not use what technology they have and refine it instead of reiinventing the weel?
IBM, with Blue Gene, is taking this parallelism to an extreme (Quote at bottom of my post is directly off of IBM's site), and AMD is taking a similar route on a much smaller scale. Now think of the potential performance difference between a P4 1.5Ghz and a 1.2Ghz Thunderbird given that the P4 is slower at the same clock speed. Almost no perceptible performance difference, in all likelyhood. Now imagine a dual 1.2Ghz thunderbird, and imagine how that would perform in comparison: yes, all of the systems are extremely fast, but the "dual" system would stand out as the fastest. Take into consideration that the die size for Sledgehammer won't be much more then what it is for the P4. So, you will be able to get a dual-cored CPU for around the same price as a single cored CPU that gets lower IPC and runs at a higher clock speed.
As you can see, there will be no comprison for Sledgehammer on the desktop as long as there is enough memory bandwidth to satisfy its needs.
Blue Gene will consist of more than one million processors, each capable of one billion operations per second (1 gigaflop). Thirty-two of these ultra-fast processors will be placed on a single chip (32 gigaflops). A compact two-foot by two-foot board containing 64 of these chips will be capable of 2 teraflops, making it as powerful as the 8000-square foot ASCI computers.
Eight of these boards will be placed in 6-foot-high racks (16 teraflops), and the final machine (less than 2000 sq. ft.) will consist of 64 racks linked together to achieve the one petaflop performance..."
I would make a strong argument that Napster can and does hurt CD sales... Only of popular artists however. Through Napster I have discovered many groups I wouldn't have given a second thought of listening to, and shortly thereafter turned around and purchased several of their CDs. Without Napster I would have never discovered these groups, and I would still be listening to the crap that they play on the radio. Now I have a way to discover more good music, and then I order it from amazon.com or another retailer. Without the chance of hearing those groups I would have never bought any of the CDs.
Because of Napster I have made perhaps $800 or so in CD purchases that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise, and most of that would have gone to upgrading my computer or sound system had I not discovered Napster.
Napster increases sales of many types of music, and I think I am a prime example of that.
I know this is offtopic, but at work I have a G4 system, and it is a piece of junk. First of all, the computer is extremely sluggish compared to a $300 box I have win2k on (And am currently typing this with). Second, I have never had any problems installing a program like Office on any of my computers, whether Mac or Windows. Both are very easy to use. But, Windows has a much less cumbersone GUI, and it is much faster, and the computers it comes on are cheaper, and crash a lot less. Did I forget to mention that my G4 crashes a ton? More then Windows Mellenium does for sure.
As far as Mac users go, anything Apple tells them they believe. So they actually do believe that their 500Mhz G4's are much faster then my Celeron 400, when in fact my Celeron 400 is much snappier. Even if you a die-hard Mac user use a PC for a week, they will complain that Windows is slow, ugly, and crashed more then Mac OS 9.
So why do people buy them? Yes! Because both
a) People buy Macs because they are "cute"
b) People buy Macs because they are the "fastest"
c) People buy Macs because they are "easy to use"
While I think Macs look toylike, others may like the way they look.
While I think Macs (I use a G4 400 with 128MB ram on a regular basis) are very sluggish to respond compared to Windows machines, other people will claim the world that a Mac is *much faster* then any Windows based computer that you can get.
Lastly, Macs streamline a lot of things so they are easier for the non computer user to understand. This is the one valid reason to purchase a Mac, in my opinion.
Why do I use a Mac at work? Because most of the computers there are Macs and I need compatability with them.
Wow! Intel's marketing division has really lost it! I could have sworn that the current 600Mhz speedstep PIII was supposed to consume 1 watt of power, and it says the peak usage will be around 1.5 watts of power for the "new" CPU. The 1 watt for the "old" model is probably an idle wattage, but they need to clarify some things.
Now we will look at the various advantages that each CPU has behind it (The current PIII for laptops, as it is basically the same thing as the "new" one)
The PIII has a moderate performance advantage over the Crusoe processor in standard applications. In my opinion this is almost irrelevant for most people, as I do some very heavy multitasking with regular apps (Word, IE, Excel, IE, IE, IE, Outlook Express, a couple instant messanger services, and some more copies of IE) and my Celeron 466 with 128 megs of ram is very snappy.
FPU performance is better again for the PIII, but I would never think of playing a game on a laptop computer, as the LCD screens are generally bad, and the video chipsets worse for gaming. Also, in applications where FPU capability (CAD, many games) is the most important part of the computer are reserved for desktop computers.
Crusoe uses a good deal less power then the current PIII, and offers very good general application performance. Another thing is the Longrun technology, which, unlike the PIII's speedstep (And like AMD's notebook technology), dynamically adjusts the clock speed so that even when you are on a battery you get very close to full performance of the CPU, whereas with Intel's solution, you are stuck with the lower speed.
The Crusoe processor also intehrates the memory controller into the CPU core, which reduces the amount of power even more relative to the Intel CPU.
The Intel CPUs also put out a good deal more heat then the Crusoe, which forces manufacturers into making heavier notebooks with fans, loaded with metal for use as a heatsink material, and heavier.
I would imagine that with such a small die size, Transmeta could integrate all of the functions of the chipset into the CPU if they wanted, even further reducing power consumption, motherboard space, and cost.
In my opinion the Crusoe processor will start a new revolution in the subnotebook industry. Instead of Subnotebooks having very poor performance and horrid battery life, they will be even lighter, have much better battery life, and offer decent performance.
The only real issue I see with Transmeta is that they will suffer from the same problems AMD suffered from when their flagship processor was the K6-2. AMD's average selling price per processor was well under $100, and the budget CPU world is one of extremely slim profit margins. Transmeta will encounter a similar problem with Crusoe, so they will need to find a way to come out with a more high end product that will net them better profits. Lastly, AMD has their own fabs, so after the inital investment and operating costs, they don't need to pay any more for producing their CPU's, whereas a good chunk of income from selling Crusoe CPUs will go towards TSMC.
Bottom line: Crusoe = revolutionary processor in many ways, but in a business sense they are lacking a way to truly make a good profit.
MP3s would probably not work for storage of anything, as the compression causes a lot of artifatcs that would quite possibly mess up the reading. Then again, this thing could be using 200Hz pulses for a logic 0 and 10Khz pulses for a logic 1, or something to that effect, and MP3 might work then.
How exactly did this old computer store data on audio tape?
Microsoft wants all of the legal stuff to take so long because the longer the trial waits, the less viable the case against Microsoft is. I think it really is that smiple. If Microsoft drags the litigation long enough, people will forget why it was even started iin the first place, and will realize that the entire point is moot because it is an issue that resolved itself. Do very many people care about OJ Simpson any more? I don't think so. Microsoft was never in the news as much as OJ. As for what happens in court, that will remain to be seen, but I can assure you that it won't affect most of us, even if the split Microsoft into ten seperate companies.
This is one of the many mistakes they have made recently. Not only has Intel planned on using RDRAM for the Timna platform, but also there is a extremely high transistor count. That would make it a lot more expensive to manufacture, inducing much higher failure rates, higher costs, and much slower clock speeds. These in combination with the already very inexpensive i810 platform which would offer similar performance at a much lower cost is most definantly what caused Intel to can Timna.
Now, had Intel released Timna, with RDRAM and all (Assuming RDRAM was, say, half as expensive as it is now)it would bring the low end PC market to even smaller profit margins, with higher prcies too.
In mass quantites, a Celeron 600 would probably cost around $50-60, and a cheap i810 motherboard with built in sound, video, and winmodem for another $50 or so. In the case of the Timna, the CPU would probably be in the $160 range, going by past "low end" CPUs from Intel, but the motherboard will naturally be cheaper, so maybe $30-40 for a motherboard. Add another $100 for the same amount of memory, and you have something that costs a bit more then $200 over a similarly equipped Celeron system.
Had Intel chosen to go this route, they would have shoved Timna down the throats of companies, stopped making Celerons, and we would have more expensive "cheap" computers that aren't any better then the old ones. Not only this, but also consider that because the computers would be in the "cheap" range, they would need to keep profit margins low. Very low. In order to offset the cost difference, they would have probably had to sell Timna systems at a gross loss (Not a Net loss, a Gross loss), which would cause a mass exodus amongst a lot of PC building companies, who would revert over to AMD where they could see more profits, better sales, etc.
This situation would see Intel almost completely drop out of the low end market, and their midrange stuff would be sorely lacking. While this may have been a good thing for AMD, it is not for the consumer, as less competition on any level (As in AMD owning the low end market) causes less price competition, and we would see prices drop slower, slower releases of new processors, and higher pricing.
A lot of this can be found with the religious right. Our neighobers are, to put it mildly, a duplicate of the Flander's (Christian rights), and their childeren are treated like the Flander's children. They are not allowed to do anything, see anything, or otherwise know about anything that their parents do not want them to hear (I wonder what would happen if I said the word damn in front of any of thier children, never mind any of the seven words). A lot of Americans, for some strange reason, are reverting to this type of conservatisim as if it were beneficial to our country.
People need to stop blaming guns, words, games, and other people and start teaching proper morals, and in this set of morals people should realize that "obscene" language is indeed merely a strong expression of an emotion. So what if someone swears a lot? It does not make them sound very intelligent but believe me, younger people would swear less if it was not treated the way many people treat it right now. And it would not matter the slightest bit.
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Rare. Nintendo has Rare. Likewise Microsoft has their 20 or so internal develpoment teams.
Last time I checked my PC has a very nice sounding Klipsch Promedia setup. I could hook it up to something nicer but I dont have the money. As far as less expensive stuff sounds you can do extremely good for $150-200 if you get a couple regular 2.1 setups. Wait! No! Then you get a 4.2 setup. Oh well better then plain stereo and better then the dolby pro logic you get from the PS2.
Intel, however, is truly making an innovative processor design with the P4. The speed of electricity is possibly becoming a bottleneck (As the 2 "drive" stages in the pipe Ace's pointed out as possibly being for the signal to reach the other side of the chip) The only problem with this is that AMD has caught up extremely quickly in the past year, and while imperfect, the Athlon design scales in clock speed extremely well. With the 1.2Ghz Thunderbird here, on a .18 micron process, no less, as long as AMD can keep up with the process technology they will stay in the high end market.
The P4 uses about twice as many transistors as a Thunderbird or Coppermine, in order to achieve the massive hyper-pipelined design that they have. AMD on the other hand, with Sledgehammer, will integrate 2 CPU cores onto one die with a shared L2 cache. I would imagine that the design for Sledgehammer is similar to the Athlon, but with 64 bit extensions. Why not use what technology they have and refine it instead of reiinventing the weel?
IBM, with Blue Gene, is taking this parallelism to an extreme (Quote at bottom of my post is directly off of IBM's site), and AMD is taking a similar route on a much smaller scale. Now think of the potential performance difference between a P4 1.5Ghz and a 1.2Ghz Thunderbird given that the P4 is slower at the same clock speed. Almost no perceptible performance difference, in all likelyhood. Now imagine a dual 1.2Ghz thunderbird, and imagine how that would perform in comparison: yes, all of the systems are extremely fast, but the "dual" system would stand out as the fastest. Take into consideration that the die size for Sledgehammer won't be much more then what it is for the P4. So, you will be able to get a dual-cored CPU for around the same price as a single cored CPU that gets lower IPC and runs at a higher clock speed.
As you can see, there will be no comprison for Sledgehammer on the desktop as long as there is enough memory bandwidth to satisfy its needs.
Eight of these boards will be placed in 6-foot-high racks (16 teraflops), and the final machine (less than 2000 sq. ft.) will consist of 64 racks linked together to achieve the one petaflop performance..."
Because of Napster I have made perhaps $800 or so in CD purchases that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise, and most of that would have gone to upgrading my computer or sound system had I not discovered Napster.
Napster increases sales of many types of music, and I think I am a prime example of that.
I know this is offtopic, but at work I have a G4 system, and it is a piece of junk. First of all, the computer is extremely sluggish compared to a $300 box I have win2k on (And am currently typing this with). Second, I have never had any problems installing a program like Office on any of my computers, whether Mac or Windows. Both are very easy to use. But, Windows has a much less cumbersone GUI, and it is much faster, and the computers it comes on are cheaper, and crash a lot less. Did I forget to mention that my G4 crashes a ton? More then Windows Mellenium does for sure. As far as Mac users go, anything Apple tells them they believe. So they actually do believe that their 500Mhz G4's are much faster then my Celeron 400, when in fact my Celeron 400 is much snappier. Even if you a die-hard Mac user use a PC for a week, they will complain that Windows is slow, ugly, and crashed more then Mac OS 9. So why do people buy them? Yes! Because both a) People buy Macs because they are "cute" b) People buy Macs because they are the "fastest" c) People buy Macs because they are "easy to use" While I think Macs look toylike, others may like the way they look. While I think Macs (I use a G4 400 with 128MB ram on a regular basis) are very sluggish to respond compared to Windows machines, other people will claim the world that a Mac is *much faster* then any Windows based computer that you can get. Lastly, Macs streamline a lot of things so they are easier for the non computer user to understand. This is the one valid reason to purchase a Mac, in my opinion. Why do I use a Mac at work? Because most of the computers there are Macs and I need compatability with them.
Wow! Intel's marketing division has really lost it! I could have sworn that the current 600Mhz speedstep PIII was supposed to consume 1 watt of power, and it says the peak usage will be around 1.5 watts of power for the "new" CPU. The 1 watt for the "old" model is probably an idle wattage, but they need to clarify some things. Now we will look at the various advantages that each CPU has behind it (The current PIII for laptops, as it is basically the same thing as the "new" one) The PIII has a moderate performance advantage over the Crusoe processor in standard applications. In my opinion this is almost irrelevant for most people, as I do some very heavy multitasking with regular apps (Word, IE, Excel, IE, IE, IE, Outlook Express, a couple instant messanger services, and some more copies of IE) and my Celeron 466 with 128 megs of ram is very snappy. FPU performance is better again for the PIII, but I would never think of playing a game on a laptop computer, as the LCD screens are generally bad, and the video chipsets worse for gaming. Also, in applications where FPU capability (CAD, many games) is the most important part of the computer are reserved for desktop computers. Crusoe uses a good deal less power then the current PIII, and offers very good general application performance. Another thing is the Longrun technology, which, unlike the PIII's speedstep (And like AMD's notebook technology), dynamically adjusts the clock speed so that even when you are on a battery you get very close to full performance of the CPU, whereas with Intel's solution, you are stuck with the lower speed. The Crusoe processor also intehrates the memory controller into the CPU core, which reduces the amount of power even more relative to the Intel CPU. The Intel CPUs also put out a good deal more heat then the Crusoe, which forces manufacturers into making heavier notebooks with fans, loaded with metal for use as a heatsink material, and heavier. I would imagine that with such a small die size, Transmeta could integrate all of the functions of the chipset into the CPU if they wanted, even further reducing power consumption, motherboard space, and cost. In my opinion the Crusoe processor will start a new revolution in the subnotebook industry. Instead of Subnotebooks having very poor performance and horrid battery life, they will be even lighter, have much better battery life, and offer decent performance. The only real issue I see with Transmeta is that they will suffer from the same problems AMD suffered from when their flagship processor was the K6-2. AMD's average selling price per processor was well under $100, and the budget CPU world is one of extremely slim profit margins. Transmeta will encounter a similar problem with Crusoe, so they will need to find a way to come out with a more high end product that will net them better profits. Lastly, AMD has their own fabs, so after the inital investment and operating costs, they don't need to pay any more for producing their CPU's, whereas a good chunk of income from selling Crusoe CPUs will go towards TSMC. Bottom line: Crusoe = revolutionary processor in many ways, but in a business sense they are lacking a way to truly make a good profit.
MP3s would probably not work for storage of anything, as the compression causes a lot of artifatcs that would quite possibly mess up the reading. Then again, this thing could be using 200Hz pulses for a logic 0 and 10Khz pulses for a logic 1, or something to that effect, and MP3 might work then. How exactly did this old computer store data on audio tape?
Microsoft wants all of the legal stuff to take so long because the longer the trial waits, the less viable the case against Microsoft is. I think it really is that smiple. If Microsoft drags the litigation long enough, people will forget why it was even started iin the first place, and will realize that the entire point is moot because it is an issue that resolved itself. Do very many people care about OJ Simpson any more? I don't think so. Microsoft was never in the news as much as OJ. As for what happens in court, that will remain to be seen, but I can assure you that it won't affect most of us, even if the split Microsoft into ten seperate companies.
This is one of the many mistakes they have made recently. Not only has Intel planned on using RDRAM for the Timna platform, but also there is a extremely high transistor count. That would make it a lot more expensive to manufacture, inducing much higher failure rates, higher costs, and much slower clock speeds. These in combination with the already very inexpensive i810 platform which would offer similar performance at a much lower cost is most definantly what caused Intel to can Timna.
Now, had Intel released Timna, with RDRAM and all (Assuming RDRAM was, say, half as expensive as it is now)it would bring the low end PC market to even smaller profit margins, with higher prcies too.
In mass quantites, a Celeron 600 would probably cost around $50-60, and a cheap i810 motherboard with built in sound, video, and winmodem for another $50 or so. In the case of the Timna, the CPU would probably be in the $160 range, going by past "low end" CPUs from Intel, but the motherboard will naturally be cheaper, so maybe $30-40 for a motherboard. Add another $100 for the same amount of memory, and you have something that costs a bit more then $200 over a similarly equipped Celeron system.
Had Intel chosen to go this route, they would have shoved Timna down the throats of companies, stopped making Celerons, and we would have more expensive "cheap" computers that aren't any better then the old ones. Not only this, but also consider that because the computers would be in the "cheap" range, they would need to keep profit margins low. Very low. In order to offset the cost difference, they would have probably had to sell Timna systems at a gross loss (Not a Net loss, a Gross loss), which would cause a mass exodus amongst a lot of PC building companies, who would revert over to AMD where they could see more profits, better sales, etc.
This situation would see Intel almost completely drop out of the low end market, and their midrange stuff would be sorely lacking. While this may have been a good thing for AMD, it is not for the consumer, as less competition on any level (As in AMD owning the low end market) causes less price competition, and we would see prices drop slower, slower releases of new processors, and higher pricing.
It truly is a good thing Timna was cancled.
A lot of this can be found with the religious right. Our neighobers are, to put it mildly, a duplicate of the Flander's (Christian rights), and their childeren are treated like the Flander's children. They are not allowed to do anything, see anything, or otherwise know about anything that their parents do not want them to hear (I wonder what would happen if I said the word damn in front of any of thier children, never mind any of the seven words). A lot of Americans, for some strange reason, are reverting to this type of conservatisim as if it were beneficial to our country.
People need to stop blaming guns, words, games, and other people and start teaching proper morals, and in this set of morals people should realize that "obscene" language is indeed merely a strong expression of an emotion. So what if someone swears a lot? It does not make them sound very intelligent but believe me, younger people would swear less if it was not treated the way many people treat it right now. And it would not matter the slightest bit.
Am I making sense or should I go to sleep now?