Yes, but you get about 3:1 lossless compression extremely cheaply, which means a much simpler storage solution will do. I'm actually aware of a person who did this before anyone managed to break AACS, it took a HDCP decrypter, a HDMI capture card - very rare indeed - and a fast RAID solution, but it was done like 2007. Today there's not much point but it could be done years ago already.
Not losslessly, but heh... if you can spot the difference on a BluRay recoded to BluRay size, you're *good*, I mean even the DVD9 rips look very, very close to the original.
Okay, how about something that's always been designed more as a PC game, and IMHO plays better on a PC and reaps the advantages of mods where consoles can't - Skyrim?: X360: 2 million PS3: 0.9 million PC: 0.5 million
Box sales. That does not count *one* digital download.
Yeah, I think it's pretty clear gamers aren't buying Ubisoft's PC games... I wouldn't either, who knows what crap they'll bundle with their next game. Really, really horrible DRM is a piracy driver, not a sales driver. Most people are lazy and uninformed and will buy that shit the first time, but then you've pissed on all your sales after that. They're just too dense so understand the pool of piss they're in is of their own making.
If we burn coal, we still have carbon and oxygen just in a much lower energy state. We can't get that back without spending at least as much energy as we got out (in reality a lot more), which would defeat the whole point. Same with oil, gas and nuclear. So solar panels have a limited lifespan, but it's not like they disappear when they break down. Recycle them and make new ones, as long as you manage to get a net positive contribution of energy it's sustainable. The reason is of course that solar panels have an external power source while coal does not. Of course we have to design them to be recyclable and actually do it, but that's a matter of will and economics. But there's no way to do the same with fossil fuels, they'll never be sustainable because their energy is consumed.
There's no magic in light, any object at any distance is just a pattern of light when it hits your eye. If we place a contact lens over your eye and emit that same pattern, you'll see the same. You're not focusing on the lens itself, the lens is sending light that will look focused when it hits your retina. It's an optical illusion, sort of like the opposite of a 3D screen - we can make things appear at any depth we want.
The ruling is not quite as broad as I would have liked, since it only pertains to filtering 'which applies indiscriminately to all its customers; exclusively at its expense; and for an unlimited period."
That seems like a perfectly adequate compromise position. This ruling places the onus for detection back on the rights holder, where it belongs.
That's one big conditional AND. If it applies to only some people - like people that have had their first "strike" in a three strike system or the copyright holder copays or it is only for a limited time may still be legal. Courts like to make their decisions as narrow as possible, the really big principled decisions are only decided if no lesser decision could suffice.
Tests done by Anandtech and other people indicate an underwhelming performance on these CPUs so I was a little confused as to why they would resort to such a cheap and fraudulent marketing trick, but I have now figured out what this is all about. (...) Microsoft used to charge their server software on a per-CPU basis or per-chip basis but they are already transitioning into a per-core license model starting with their SQL Server Enterprise 2012. So, by doubling the core count instead of just calling it hyperthreading, they can generate twice the license income for software producers.
So your conclusion is that AMD did this to increase the total cost of their platform, making their chips less attractive to buy? You're rambling without making any sense.
Except that the idea of degrees of separation isn't 'friends', it's 'People who know each other'. No one ever said those people had to be 'friends'. No one's ever bothered to try to define exactly what that means, although at minimum you probably have to have exchanged words with them at some point, and have a way of contacting them.
I would say "have known" and "have had", like there are people I haven't spoken to in 10-20 years that I can't possibly say I know today but that surely should count. If you restrict it to only current maintained contacts the degree of separation would be a lot higher.
The recording/music industry boasted standard profits before taking iTunes into account. After taking it into account, they have sold more music and made more money than any other decade in history. When they say they are being harmed by digital sales, they are 100% lying.
I recommend reading this. Yes, the 90s and early 00s were good but they're now at an all-time low in inflation-adjusted dollars, below the vinyl and cassette era. And it's not like the cost of living has gone down from the last low in the 1980s either.
I think it would be interesting to see the average degrees of separation for each individual. One person might have an average of 9 degrees separation to everyone else while another individual might average 3.
Extremely unlikely. Remember that the number of people connected grow exponentially. Your friends are few. Friends of friends are many. Friends of friends of friends is insanely many. Even if you're a tightly knit bunch already after 1-2 steps you're bound to have many connected to the "main" network. Personally I know I have people in my friend list that have gone through every class list since primary school - that's how I'm their friend. If you have *one* of those people as friends, or even friend of friend you're extremely well "connected" even if you can count your Facebook friends on one hand.
Likewise it's not likely to go as low as 3 because if you say 100 friends average then the most people you can reach in 4 connections is 100^4 = 100 million. The only reason I think you'd go as high as 9 would be if you're an isolated tribe deep in the Amazons with 3 degrees of separation to the few researchers that are there, that are 6 degrees from the rest of the world.
You can do the math the other way around, to connect 7 billion people with six degrees of separation each degree of separation must expand the network 7 000 000 000^(1 / 6) = 44 times. Is that likely? Yes. That doesn't mean 44 friends though, it's more complicated than that. The first degree is my direct friends, that is simple. The second degree is friends of friends minus those I'm friends with directly but only counting each person once. So if five of my friends went to the same school and know the same person (that I don't), he's only counted once. So the formula is
Unique persons brought into the network * 1 + Shared people brought into the netowork * 1/n where n are the people shared with + People already known to the network * 0 = 44.
That doesn't seem that unreasonable, to my friends my work mates and family are new, to my work mates my friends and family are new and to my family my friends and work mates are new. Different school history, work history, different family, lived different places... each degree brings plenty new. Take for example my study mates, very many of them studied abroad. Each of them is like a new boom of contacts entirely new to the network.
It extends far beyond iTunes, the TV and movie industry look at the music industry as an experiment, both when it comes to DRM-free content and streaming services. Netflix is after all more like Spotify than iTunes. What are they seeing? A recording industry that's facing massive decline in revenue. CD sales are dying fast and digital streaming and sales aren't making up for it. They're worried they're pushing people from expensive cable TV subscriptions to cheap streaming subscriptions, less premium channels, less PPV, less ad revenue.
For the movie industry it's even clearer, do people take their kids to see Harry Potter? Yes. *ka-ching* both for the kid(s) and adult(s) and you only get to see it once - there's probably some other sale there in the future. Are they going to pay the same for a PPV ticket as the whole family in total spent at the cinema? For an expensive ticket, would the kids have 2-3 friends over to watch it with them leading to more lost cinema tickets? Yes. They know what they're doing with the BluRay only coming 3-6 months later. And they're afraid that while making a good Spotify-like service will bring some pirates to it, but it'll also kill their DVD/BluRay sales just like the music industry and CDs.
Just about everything we've seen as progress about the music industry is what they've seen as less control and most importantly, less profit. They can't ask for time to be turned back, but they can make sure it goes very, very slowly....
I really doubt the $500 TV is sold at a loss. Maybe if it's the headline TV in a major sale, but not normally. But the profits come from selling $100 cables, extended warranty and whatnot. A grocery store is much more likely to have true loss leaders, giving you a few items on sale below cost to make you shop a basket full of goods. Apart from short lived marketing campaign, true loss leaders are actually quite rare.
So while the guys that run gamer sites or live for benchmarks will scoff frankly the average user, which outnumbers them by a 100,000 to one (last number on hardcore PC gamers I saw put the number at 30 million)
Okay I heard Earth has an overpopulation problem, but did I doze off there for a while? Because I seem to have missed some recent developments...
Doesn't matter if the chess program can look at a million more moves or a billion. Chess Grand Masters look at patterns and compute which patterns are better than other patterns, which means that the pattern itself is a function. The better the Grand Master, the better the evaluation function. You need only have a function that evaluates the permutation of pieces on the board to a degree that is greater than the computer's evaluation of the permutation of a billion moves. (...) So, yes, it is because you're lazy.
...okay, I don't even know what to say to that. I have no idea what it's like on your planet, but around here we're only human. No wonder developers aren't up to your standards....
Lastly, compilers are often god-awful bad at adding in parallel processing. Not that they should have to -- the programmer is SUPPOSED to be competent at this. Parallel programming has only been standard CS material since 1978! If programmers aren't capable of writing efficient parallel programs by now, they need to be dropped off a cliff and replaced with programmers who can write. (...) What matters, though, is that high performance IS achieved by people who bother. If a given programmer can't achieve the same results, it is because they can't be bothered. For all the problems with compilers, I refuse to blame the available technology for the incompetence of code monkeys.
So what? Mathematicians have had number and field theory for centuries, it doesn't make it easier to understand. Recipe-programming is easy to understand, there's no dependency issues, no resource contention, just a simple start-to-finish sequence of events. Simple interactions like worker threads and resource pools are easy to work out, only mutex it so that you don't grab the same work packet or resource.
Truly parallel programming is to me like having 20 chefs in my house cooking a meal, all using limited utensils and all being completely brain dead. I have to make sure they don't end up in a race condition grabbing the same utensils, deadlock at the stove or one chef pouring something into another chef's casserole. And instead of doing this like a recipe with threads and resource locks, I have to come up with some kind of parallel execution plan. That's what it feels like to me at least.
That's complicated. Not just a little bit complicated, but like extremely messy complicated. I just want to hand out a bunch of recipes, set them off doing it and have simple rules which means they can't block like for example "get items in alphabetical order" so if both need a fork and knife it'll never happen that one has a fork and the other a knife so they block each other. I don't have to explicitly lay out the parallelism, just do it in parallel until it hits a blocker. Then solve that blocker based on simple rules that'll have a deterministic answer.
Parallel languages turn this upside down, if I want all the chefs to start in parallel I have to declare that. But then I also have to declare all the exceptions to the rule. That no, there's only four plates on the stove, there's one oven, five kitchen knives and so on. I guess in this case with static recipes it's rather simple. But throw in a lot of branching and function calling and it becomes a complete mess trying to figure out if it's safe to declare something a parallel section or not.
If I lose to a chess program it's not because I'm lazy, it's because the computer can check millions of moves more than me. Resource locks lets threads block on demand as needed. Parallel programming puts the problem in your lap. The more complicated the system gets, the better to let the system deal with it than you. If you haven't experienced it that way, you haven't worked on a system complicated enough to overwhelm you. Massive, simple parallelism? Sure. Complex parallelism? I'd do threads any day.
Looking at forthcoming offerings, AMD especially seems to be assuming that we're all constantly using our CPUs to run handbrake 24/7 or batch encode a couple hundred wavs to mp3 at a time, and thus would love 12 cores.
I think it's quite obvious that AMD didn't have the resources to hit many targets, so they picked two:
1) Laptops/Low-end PCs with Bobcat cores (Fusion/Llano APUs) 2) Servers with Bulldozer cores (Valencia/Interlagos)
Sadly the latter seems to have misfired a bit even in the server arena, but it's no question IMHO that the high-end desktop market was intentionally abandoned. Either that or they've missed their design targets by many miles, they can't have been that off on single core performance. I can sort of understand, Intel was already dominating and the Atom threatened their low end (remember, CPU designs have a 2-3 years lead time) and they couldn't afford to lose their bread and butter machines. So they aimed Bobcat low (power), Bulldozer wide (cores) and left Intel to compete with themselves. Not to be too much of a cynic, but it's better for AMD to win some markets than being a loser in all of them.
Oh, they can go slower. The world market is still expanding both in size and average price they can afford, companies will still buy them for their X years of support, laptops break down and so on. Intel wouldn't drive prices up as such, they'd bring costs down. Sell 22nm processors at same prices as 32nm processors, does that sound massively profitable to you? It does to me. In the end they'll sell you something that costs like an Atom for the price of a 2600K. Or maybe just slow down their tick-tocks, let each generation soak up twice the profits. I doubt Intel would let AMD die though, that'd bring too much anti-trust scrutiny on their total domination of the world's computers. At death's door would be just fine though.
In any case, I find this news unlikely. TSMC has crap record for delivering on time with decent yields, their 32nm process was so bad it got scrapped and the 28nm process is still struggling from what I gather. The only reason they've not been slain in the market for that is that both AMD and nVidia depend on them now so the graphics market just took a timeout. If Intel had a real graphics division they'd be eating them for lunch by now. GlobalFoundries is what used to be AMD proper, if they aren't able to do 28nm then they've got a total of zero reliable production facilities if you ask me. And Intel's already doing volume production on 22nm....
On the desktop, it is different. More of the benchmarks show that the core i5 is faster than the Phenom2 x6 and 8150. But some benchmarks show that the AMD showings can be considerably faster. The choice is really simple. If your workload is dominated by the kind of things that Intel do well, then buy intel, otherwise buy AMD.
The question is, what are they? Take a look at the bench scores at Anandtech. Note that it switches between "higher is better" and "lower is better", a bit annoying. Significant wins (>10%) that I see:
x264 HD encode test - 2nd pass (listed twice) - though it loses the first pass by 20-25% and the DivX test 3dsmax9 - SPECapc - SinglePipe2 - though it loses the composite CPU test POV-ray 3.7 Par2 - multithreaded Cinebench 11.5 multitheaded - but it lost Cinebench 10 multithreaded 7zip - benchmark AES-128 Performance -Truecrypt 7.1
And that was it, against the i5. If you go to the 2600K the results are:
(this space intentionally left blank)
That's right, there's not a single benchmark where the FX-8150 outperforms the 2600K by more than 10%, the closest is 6-7% in the 7zip test. Some of the big wins over the 2500K like Cinebench 11.5 is now lost by 14% because of hyperthreading. And both of these absolutely spank the FX-8150 at anything single/few-threaded and use a lot less power. Yes you could find a few niches where the $245 FX-8150 beats the $216 2500K and the $317 2600K isn't worth it, but that it's "too close to call"... heh, it hasn't been this clear to call in years. And I pity AMD when they're fighting Ivy Bridge in a few month's time, Intel has said they started volume production in Q3 so I think March next year is a too kind estimate. My guess is January, just like Sandy Bridge - hopefully with no mobo screwups this time.
A lot of that is due to the die shrink from 45 to 32nm. AMD isn't following Intel's tick-tock principle, this is both a tick and a tock. So people are comparing this to what they'd expect from a die shrunk Magny-Cours. Same on the desktop side, many were wondering why not just die shrink the X6. Unfortunately you don't get the simple side-by-side comparisons on the same die size, but since it's not very clear if Bulldozer is helping or hurting that's bad in itself.
I don't go there for the tech articles, but the part on page 2 where they pull AMDs TPC-C numbers apart is pretty damn good.
AMD claims 1.2 million tpmC for a two-socket Opteron 6282 SE system. The company compares this to a score for a two-socket Opteron 6176 SE system (each socket having 12 cores), (...) AMD also claims that this beats "competing solutions" by "as much as" 18 percent. (...) the reference AMD uses is another official result: dual Xeon X5690s (6 core, 12 thread, 3.46 GHz) with 384GB RAM. (...) looking just at the servers and their storage, and assuming similar discounts, we get prices of around $260,000 for the Opteron 6100 system, $879,000 for the Opteron 6200 system, and $511,000 for the Xeon system.
Basically their figures are doped with a massive SSD storage solution to make a slow CPU look good. And they show that if you wanted to spend $879,000 on a system, there's much faster Intel solutions (even though the CPUs cost more). So they're doing pretty good on the economics end at least.
Or maybe you should have finished that paragraph that explains:
Server workloads, in contrast, typically have to handle multiple users, network connections, and virtual machines concurrently. This makes them a much better fit for processors that support lots of concurrent threads. Some commentators have even suggested that Bulldozer was, first and foremost, a server processor; relatively weak desktop performance was to be expected, but it would all come good in the server room.
You're bashing them for not understanding exactly what the paragraph is meant to show that they do understand. Epic fail.
Recall however that most implementations have a fixed short encryption exponent (e = 65537, for example) requiring a constant number of multiplications. So, one could argue that RSA encryption has superlinear but subquadratic complexity.
I didn't go into that much detail but performance is asymmetric as well. Encryption and verification is cheap, decryption and signing is expensive. I'll just quote from this table: http://www.cryptopp.com/benchmarks.html (time in ms):
For the most common case of a secure web server, the client encrypts using the server's public key and the server decrypts, so they get the expensive part of the deal. I also realize my last post was a bit imprecise, yes it's a^b mod n but both b and n will be much bigger on decryption/signing, not just n. I just guesstimated the complexity based on it going from 1.5ms to 6ms.
Precisely, ADHD is almost certainly overdiagnosed at this point, but it clearly does exist. (...) Same tends to go for other trendy diagnoses as well. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome was heavily diagnosed in the 90s and mysteriously the rate has plummeted in the last decade or so.
Most of these trends are because we're redefining the boundaries of what's normal and what's an illness. Maybe some kids have ADHD but most unruly kids don't. You see this in adults too, I remember reading one essay from a frustrated GP who said there were rather constantly people asking him for sick leave or medications to deal with what he called the trauma of everyday life. On the one side they don't really get to call the patient on it, the patient is the one with first hand knowledge and they get flak from patients feeling they're not being taken seriously. On the other hand, they wouldn't prescribe morphine if you came in with a paper cut no matter how much agony you claimed to be in.
He was of course not denying that there are people that really do need help and they get it. But that it's normal that it's not all flowers and sunshine at home or at work or with friends and family and that dealing with that is mostly just life. They're asking him to sign papers saying they're in a so bad condition - mostly mental - that they're unfit to work. If your wife and kid got run over by a drunk driver yesterday, that may be true. But not because you and your gf had an argument or any other mundane little thing. What happened if he said no? The patients moved to a different doctor and got what they wanted there. That's true whether it's a private or public doctor, you still get "shopping" until those who want a pushover find a pushover.
That means RSA-1024 is a huge bargain for the user -- significant improvement in short-term security for the user compared to using RSA-512, for only 2x the amount of CPU resources.
Shame on whoever modded this up. The main calculation in RSA is a^b mod n, with n being the 512/1024 bit integer. Most implementations will scale with O(n^2), certainly never O(n). That said, even a 2048 bit key should be done in a few microseconds and there's no real reason not to do it proper. Remember that you generally you make a digest and just do one RSA operation to sign/verify it. When used for SSL you encrypt/decrypt a symmetric key then use AES for bulk encryption, again doing just one RSA operation. Of course if you got hundreds or thousands of connections per second that might be an issue, but normally it should not be.
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Yes, but you get about 3:1 lossless compression extremely cheaply, which means a much simpler storage solution will do. I'm actually aware of a person who did this before anyone managed to break AACS, it took a HDCP decrypter, a HDMI capture card - very rare indeed - and a fast RAID solution, but it was done like 2007. Today there's not much point but it could be done years ago already.
Not losslessly, but heh... if you can spot the difference on a BluRay recoded to BluRay size, you're *good*, I mean even the DVD9 rips look very, very close to the original.
Okay, how about something that's always been designed more as a PC game, and IMHO plays better on a PC and reaps the advantages of mods where consoles can't - Skyrim?:
X360: 2 million
PS3: 0.9 million
PC: 0.5 million
Box sales. That does not count *one* digital download.
Yeah, I think it's pretty clear gamers aren't buying Ubisoft's PC games... I wouldn't either, who knows what crap they'll bundle with their next game. Really, really horrible DRM is a piracy driver, not a sales driver. Most people are lazy and uninformed and will buy that shit the first time, but then you've pissed on all your sales after that. They're just too dense so understand the pool of piss they're in is of their own making.
If we burn coal, we still have carbon and oxygen just in a much lower energy state. We can't get that back without spending at least as much energy as we got out (in reality a lot more), which would defeat the whole point. Same with oil, gas and nuclear. So solar panels have a limited lifespan, but it's not like they disappear when they break down. Recycle them and make new ones, as long as you manage to get a net positive contribution of energy it's sustainable. The reason is of course that solar panels have an external power source while coal does not. Of course we have to design them to be recyclable and actually do it, but that's a matter of will and economics. But there's no way to do the same with fossil fuels, they'll never be sustainable because their energy is consumed.
There's no magic in light, any object at any distance is just a pattern of light when it hits your eye. If we place a contact lens over your eye and emit that same pattern, you'll see the same. You're not focusing on the lens itself, the lens is sending light that will look focused when it hits your retina. It's an optical illusion, sort of like the opposite of a 3D screen - we can make things appear at any depth we want.
The ruling is not quite as broad as I would have liked, since it only pertains to filtering 'which applies indiscriminately to all its customers; exclusively at its expense; and for an unlimited period."
That seems like a perfectly adequate compromise position. This ruling places the onus for detection back on the rights holder, where it belongs.
That's one big conditional AND. If it applies to only some people - like people that have had their first "strike" in a three strike system or the copyright holder copays or it is only for a limited time may still be legal. Courts like to make their decisions as narrow as possible, the really big principled decisions are only decided if no lesser decision could suffice.
Tests done by Anandtech and other people indicate an underwhelming performance on these CPUs so I was a little confused as to why they would resort to such a cheap and fraudulent marketing trick, but I have now figured out what this is all about. (...) Microsoft used to charge their server software on a per-CPU basis or per-chip basis but they are already transitioning into a per-core license model starting with their SQL Server Enterprise 2012. So, by doubling the core count instead of just calling it hyperthreading, they can generate twice the license income for software producers.
So your conclusion is that AMD did this to increase the total cost of their platform, making their chips less attractive to buy? You're rambling without making any sense.
Except that the idea of degrees of separation isn't 'friends', it's 'People who know each other'. No one ever said those people had to be 'friends'. No one's ever bothered to try to define exactly what that means, although at minimum you probably have to have exchanged words with them at some point, and have a way of contacting them.
I would say "have known" and "have had", like there are people I haven't spoken to in 10-20 years that I can't possibly say I know today but that surely should count. If you restrict it to only current maintained contacts the degree of separation would be a lot higher.
The recording/music industry boasted standard profits before taking iTunes into account. After taking it into account, they have sold more music and made more money than any other decade in history. When they say they are being harmed by digital sales, they are 100% lying.
I recommend reading this. Yes, the 90s and early 00s were good but they're now at an all-time low in inflation-adjusted dollars, below the vinyl and cassette era. And it's not like the cost of living has gone down from the last low in the 1980s either.
I think it would be interesting to see the average degrees of separation for each individual. One person might have an average of 9 degrees separation to everyone else while another individual might average 3.
Extremely unlikely. Remember that the number of people connected grow exponentially. Your friends are few. Friends of friends are many. Friends of friends of friends is insanely many. Even if you're a tightly knit bunch already after 1-2 steps you're bound to have many connected to the "main" network. Personally I know I have people in my friend list that have gone through every class list since primary school - that's how I'm their friend. If you have *one* of those people as friends, or even friend of friend you're extremely well "connected" even if you can count your Facebook friends on one hand.
Likewise it's not likely to go as low as 3 because if you say 100 friends average then the most people you can reach in 4 connections is 100^4 = 100 million. The only reason I think you'd go as high as 9 would be if you're an isolated tribe deep in the Amazons with 3 degrees of separation to the few researchers that are there, that are 6 degrees from the rest of the world.
You can do the math the other way around, to connect 7 billion people with six degrees of separation each degree of separation must expand the network 7 000 000 000^(1 / 6) = 44 times. Is that likely? Yes. That doesn't mean 44 friends though, it's more complicated than that. The first degree is my direct friends, that is simple. The second degree is friends of friends minus those I'm friends with directly but only counting each person once. So if five of my friends went to the same school and know the same person (that I don't), he's only counted once. So the formula is
Unique persons brought into the network * 1 +
Shared people brought into the netowork * 1/n where n are the people shared with +
People already known to the network * 0 = 44.
That doesn't seem that unreasonable, to my friends my work mates and family are new, to my work mates my friends and family are new and to my family my friends and work mates are new. Different school history, work history, different family, lived different places... each degree brings plenty new. Take for example my study mates, very many of them studied abroad. Each of them is like a new boom of contacts entirely new to the network.
It extends far beyond iTunes, the TV and movie industry look at the music industry as an experiment, both when it comes to DRM-free content and streaming services. Netflix is after all more like Spotify than iTunes. What are they seeing? A recording industry that's facing massive decline in revenue. CD sales are dying fast and digital streaming and sales aren't making up for it. They're worried they're pushing people from expensive cable TV subscriptions to cheap streaming subscriptions, less premium channels, less PPV, less ad revenue.
For the movie industry it's even clearer, do people take their kids to see Harry Potter? Yes. *ka-ching* both for the kid(s) and adult(s) and you only get to see it once - there's probably some other sale there in the future. Are they going to pay the same for a PPV ticket as the whole family in total spent at the cinema? For an expensive ticket, would the kids have 2-3 friends over to watch it with them leading to more lost cinema tickets? Yes. They know what they're doing with the BluRay only coming 3-6 months later. And they're afraid that while making a good Spotify-like service will bring some pirates to it, but it'll also kill their DVD/BluRay sales just like the music industry and CDs.
Just about everything we've seen as progress about the music industry is what they've seen as less control and most importantly, less profit. They can't ask for time to be turned back, but they can make sure it goes very, very slowly....
I really doubt the $500 TV is sold at a loss. Maybe if it's the headline TV in a major sale, but not normally. But the profits come from selling $100 cables, extended warranty and whatnot. A grocery store is much more likely to have true loss leaders, giving you a few items on sale below cost to make you shop a basket full of goods. Apart from short lived marketing campaign, true loss leaders are actually quite rare.
So while the guys that run gamer sites or live for benchmarks will scoff frankly the average user, which outnumbers them by a 100,000 to one (last number on hardcore PC gamers I saw put the number at 30 million)
Okay I heard Earth has an overpopulation problem, but did I doze off there for a while? Because I seem to have missed some recent developments...
Doesn't matter if the chess program can look at a million more moves or a billion. Chess Grand Masters look at patterns and compute which patterns are better than other patterns, which means that the pattern itself is a function. The better the Grand Master, the better the evaluation function. You need only have a function that evaluates the permutation of pieces on the board to a degree that is greater than the computer's evaluation of the permutation of a billion moves. (...) So, yes, it is because you're lazy.
...okay, I don't even know what to say to that. I have no idea what it's like on your planet, but around here we're only human. No wonder developers aren't up to your standards....
Lastly, compilers are often god-awful bad at adding in parallel processing. Not that they should have to -- the programmer is SUPPOSED to be competent at this. Parallel programming has only been standard CS material since 1978! If programmers aren't capable of writing efficient parallel programs by now, they need to be dropped off a cliff and replaced with programmers who can write. (...) What matters, though, is that high performance IS achieved by people who bother. If a given programmer can't achieve the same results, it is because they can't be bothered. For all the problems with compilers, I refuse to blame the available technology for the incompetence of code monkeys.
So what? Mathematicians have had number and field theory for centuries, it doesn't make it easier to understand. Recipe-programming is easy to understand, there's no dependency issues, no resource contention, just a simple start-to-finish sequence of events. Simple interactions like worker threads and resource pools are easy to work out, only mutex it so that you don't grab the same work packet or resource.
Truly parallel programming is to me like having 20 chefs in my house cooking a meal, all using limited utensils and all being completely brain dead. I have to make sure they don't end up in a race condition grabbing the same utensils, deadlock at the stove or one chef pouring something into another chef's casserole. And instead of doing this like a recipe with threads and resource locks, I have to come up with some kind of parallel execution plan. That's what it feels like to me at least.
That's complicated. Not just a little bit complicated, but like extremely messy complicated. I just want to hand out a bunch of recipes, set them off doing it and have simple rules which means they can't block like for example "get items in alphabetical order" so if both need a fork and knife it'll never happen that one has a fork and the other a knife so they block each other. I don't have to explicitly lay out the parallelism, just do it in parallel until it hits a blocker. Then solve that blocker based on simple rules that'll have a deterministic answer.
Parallel languages turn this upside down, if I want all the chefs to start in parallel I have to declare that. But then I also have to declare all the exceptions to the rule. That no, there's only four plates on the stove, there's one oven, five kitchen knives and so on. I guess in this case with static recipes it's rather simple. But throw in a lot of branching and function calling and it becomes a complete mess trying to figure out if it's safe to declare something a parallel section or not.
If I lose to a chess program it's not because I'm lazy, it's because the computer can check millions of moves more than me. Resource locks lets threads block on demand as needed. Parallel programming puts the problem in your lap. The more complicated the system gets, the better to let the system deal with it than you. If you haven't experienced it that way, you haven't worked on a system complicated enough to overwhelm you. Massive, simple parallelism? Sure. Complex parallelism? I'd do threads any day.
Looking at forthcoming offerings, AMD especially seems to be assuming that we're all constantly using our CPUs to run handbrake 24/7 or batch encode a couple hundred wavs to mp3 at a time, and thus would love 12 cores.
I think it's quite obvious that AMD didn't have the resources to hit many targets, so they picked two:
1) Laptops/Low-end PCs with Bobcat cores (Fusion/Llano APUs)
2) Servers with Bulldozer cores (Valencia/Interlagos)
Sadly the latter seems to have misfired a bit even in the server arena, but it's no question IMHO that the high-end desktop market was intentionally abandoned. Either that or they've missed their design targets by many miles, they can't have been that off on single core performance. I can sort of understand, Intel was already dominating and the Atom threatened their low end (remember, CPU designs have a 2-3 years lead time) and they couldn't afford to lose their bread and butter machines. So they aimed Bobcat low (power), Bulldozer wide (cores) and left Intel to compete with themselves. Not to be too much of a cynic, but it's better for AMD to win some markets than being a loser in all of them.
Oh, they can go slower. The world market is still expanding both in size and average price they can afford, companies will still buy them for their X years of support, laptops break down and so on. Intel wouldn't drive prices up as such, they'd bring costs down. Sell 22nm processors at same prices as 32nm processors, does that sound massively profitable to you? It does to me. In the end they'll sell you something that costs like an Atom for the price of a 2600K. Or maybe just slow down their tick-tocks, let each generation soak up twice the profits. I doubt Intel would let AMD die though, that'd bring too much anti-trust scrutiny on their total domination of the world's computers. At death's door would be just fine though.
In any case, I find this news unlikely. TSMC has crap record for delivering on time with decent yields, their 32nm process was so bad it got scrapped and the 28nm process is still struggling from what I gather. The only reason they've not been slain in the market for that is that both AMD and nVidia depend on them now so the graphics market just took a timeout. If Intel had a real graphics division they'd be eating them for lunch by now. GlobalFoundries is what used to be AMD proper, if they aren't able to do 28nm then they've got a total of zero reliable production facilities if you ask me. And Intel's already doing volume production on 22nm....
On the desktop, it is different. More of the benchmarks show that the core i5 is faster than the Phenom2 x6 and 8150. But some benchmarks show that the AMD showings can be considerably faster. The choice is really simple. If your workload is dominated by the kind of things that Intel do well, then buy intel, otherwise buy AMD.
The question is, what are they? Take a look at the bench scores at Anandtech. Note that it switches between "higher is better" and "lower is better", a bit annoying. Significant wins (>10%) that I see:
x264 HD encode test - 2nd pass (listed twice)
- though it loses the first pass by 20-25% and the DivX test
3dsmax9 - SPECapc - SinglePipe2
- though it loses the composite CPU test
POV-ray 3.7
Par2 - multithreaded
Cinebench 11.5 multitheaded
- but it lost Cinebench 10 multithreaded
7zip - benchmark
AES-128 Performance -Truecrypt 7.1
And that was it, against the i5. If you go to the 2600K the results are:
(this space intentionally left blank)
That's right, there's not a single benchmark where the FX-8150 outperforms the 2600K by more than 10%, the closest is 6-7% in the 7zip test. Some of the big wins over the 2500K like Cinebench 11.5 is now lost by 14% because of hyperthreading. And both of these absolutely spank the FX-8150 at anything single/few-threaded and use a lot less power. Yes you could find a few niches where the $245 FX-8150 beats the $216 2500K and the $317 2600K isn't worth it, but that it's "too close to call"... heh, it hasn't been this clear to call in years. And I pity AMD when they're fighting Ivy Bridge in a few month's time, Intel has said they started volume production in Q3 so I think March next year is a too kind estimate. My guess is January, just like Sandy Bridge - hopefully with no mobo screwups this time.
A lot of that is due to the die shrink from 45 to 32nm. AMD isn't following Intel's tick-tock principle, this is both a tick and a tock. So people are comparing this to what they'd expect from a die shrunk Magny-Cours. Same on the desktop side, many were wondering why not just die shrink the X6. Unfortunately you don't get the simple side-by-side comparisons on the same die size, but since it's not very clear if Bulldozer is helping or hurting that's bad in itself.
I don't go there for the tech articles, but the part on page 2 where they pull AMDs TPC-C numbers apart is pretty damn good.
AMD claims 1.2 million tpmC for a two-socket Opteron 6282 SE system. The company compares this to a score for a two-socket Opteron 6176 SE system (each socket having 12 cores), (...) AMD also claims that this beats "competing solutions" by "as much as" 18 percent. (...) the reference AMD uses is another official result: dual Xeon X5690s (6 core, 12 thread, 3.46 GHz) with 384GB RAM. (...) looking just at the servers and their storage, and assuming similar discounts, we get prices of around $260,000 for the Opteron 6100 system, $879,000 for the Opteron 6200 system, and $511,000 for the Xeon system.
Basically their figures are doped with a massive SSD storage solution to make a slow CPU look good. And they show that if you wanted to spend $879,000 on a system, there's much faster Intel solutions (even though the CPUs cost more). So they're doing pretty good on the economics end at least.
Or maybe you should have finished that paragraph that explains:
Server workloads, in contrast, typically have to handle multiple users, network connections, and virtual machines concurrently. This makes them a much better fit for processors that support lots of concurrent threads. Some commentators have even suggested that Bulldozer was, first and foremost, a server processor; relatively weak desktop performance was to be expected, but it would all come good in the server room.
You're bashing them for not understanding exactly what the paragraph is meant to show that they do understand. Epic fail.
Recall however that most implementations have a fixed short encryption exponent (e = 65537, for example) requiring a constant number of multiplications. So, one could argue that RSA encryption has superlinear but subquadratic complexity.
I didn't go into that much detail but performance is asymmetric as well. Encryption and verification is cheap, decryption and signing is expensive. I'll just quote from this table: http://www.cryptopp.com/benchmarks.html (time in ms):
RSA 1024 Encryption 0.08
RSA 1024 Decryption 1.46
RSA 2048 Encryption 0.16
RSA 2048 Decryption 6.08
RSA 1024 Signature 1.48
RSA 1024 Verification 0.07
RSA 2048 Signature 6.05
RSA 2048 Verification 0.16
For the most common case of a secure web server, the client encrypts using the server's public key and the server decrypts, so they get the expensive part of the deal. I also realize my last post was a bit imprecise, yes it's a^b mod n but both b and n will be much bigger on decryption/signing, not just n. I just guesstimated the complexity based on it going from 1.5ms to 6ms.
Precisely, ADHD is almost certainly overdiagnosed at this point, but it clearly does exist. (...) Same tends to go for other trendy diagnoses as well. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome was heavily diagnosed in the 90s and mysteriously the rate has plummeted in the last decade or so.
Most of these trends are because we're redefining the boundaries of what's normal and what's an illness. Maybe some kids have ADHD but most unruly kids don't. You see this in adults too, I remember reading one essay from a frustrated GP who said there were rather constantly people asking him for sick leave or medications to deal with what he called the trauma of everyday life. On the one side they don't really get to call the patient on it, the patient is the one with first hand knowledge and they get flak from patients feeling they're not being taken seriously. On the other hand, they wouldn't prescribe morphine if you came in with a paper cut no matter how much agony you claimed to be in.
He was of course not denying that there are people that really do need help and they get it. But that it's normal that it's not all flowers and sunshine at home or at work or with friends and family and that dealing with that is mostly just life. They're asking him to sign papers saying they're in a so bad condition - mostly mental - that they're unfit to work. If your wife and kid got run over by a drunk driver yesterday, that may be true. But not because you and your gf had an argument or any other mundane little thing. What happened if he said no? The patients moved to a different doctor and got what they wanted there. That's true whether it's a private or public doctor, you still get "shopping" until those who want a pushover find a pushover.
That means RSA-1024 is a huge bargain for the user -- significant improvement in short-term security for the user compared to using RSA-512, for only 2x the amount of CPU resources.
Shame on whoever modded this up. The main calculation in RSA is a^b mod n, with n being the 512/1024 bit integer. Most implementations will scale with O(n^2), certainly never O(n). That said, even a 2048 bit key should be done in a few microseconds and there's no real reason not to do it proper. Remember that you generally you make a digest and just do one RSA operation to sign/verify it. When used for SSL you encrypt/decrypt a symmetric key then use AES for bulk encryption, again doing just one RSA operation. Of course if you got hundreds or thousands of connections per second that might be an issue, but normally it should not be.