The 2.3GHz Phenom 9600 benchmarks on average 13.5% lower than Intel's Q6600 quad-core CPU...and the MSRP for the Phenom is about 13.6% less as well.
Yeah, this is just THG trying to please AMD. Newegg, which is not the cheapest around, sells the Retail boxed Q6600 for $279.99. The cheapest X4 9600 I can find is $291.97.
MSRP is not street price. The Q6600 is 13.5% faster and also 4.1% cheaper.
I was giving them the benefit of a doubt. Their multi-GPU design and validation costs for each generation likely stretch beyond $10 million dollars. nVidia doesn't have a fab of its own, so it must contract out samples for post-silicon testing. I think your "not everyone owns steam" is countered by my insanely low estimate of per-GPU validation cost. Remember, that's 1000 multi-GPU steam users across every GPU that has been made. If my $1 million figure is correct, they'd have to get 30x that many people buying the cards to break even. If it is, as I suspect, more like $10 million it would be 300x.
As I said, it is an economic failure and done for purely strategic reasons.
I would agree with you that it is a small segment (only 1000 Steam users), but just how much money is coming from just those 1000 users? A lot of these multi-card gamers are probably buying two relatively expensive, high margin cards. The R&D on NVidia and ATI's side is done, now that second card bought by gamers is just extra dollars in the bank for them.
I'm not sure where your economic theory is coming from, I assume you don't actually work in the semiconductor industry. So let someone who does clue you in:
First, those 1000 cards represent at most $300,000 in gross margin. That is about the cost of 2 engineers for a year (maybe less since they are both bay area companies).
The R&D side is not done. Every new GPU that comes out must go through multi-GPU validation. The cost in people for this alone exceeds that $300,000 figure by several times. Add to that the cost of boards with logical analyzer headers, the cost of the logical analyzers themselves... Suddenly you're paying out at least $1 million per gpu to go through multi-GPU validation (if that is all it is costing them, it would be considered a terrific bargain by the industry).
So it is costing them $1 million to get $300,000 is gross margin. Which is a fancy way of saying they're losing $700,000 per GPU. I have not added the non-engineering costs of multi gpu (sales, marketing, etc.).
Strategically multi GPU is very important. Economically, it is a complete failure.
Um, that is someone talking about writing a GCC backend to target GPUs. Completely dissimilar to the question being asked: can you run GCC on a video card.
There are some nice improvements energy leaks and such, but it's nothing revolutionary.
That's true for sufficiently brain-dead definitions of "revolutionary." Hafnium based High-K transistors are revolutionary. Instruction throughput isn't everything. Manufacturing technology needs breakthroughs too. Or did you see no point in the continuous shrinkage from 100 microns down to where we are now?
The biggest change to transistor fabrication since the creation of the silicon transistor. This is a previously unavailable technology for making integrated circuits that is substantially different than was used before. Isn't there a word in the English language that describes this?
Call me a pessimist, but my two main systems peak at less than that at the wall, and I have yet to find them too slow for any given task (though I admittedly don't do much "twitch" gaming).
You're using a very apples-to-oranges comparison. Hey, I think it is great that the VIA solution works for you (I use it at home for a server as well), but that system is very, very underpowered. For reference the C7 in your system scores about 1,700 Dhrystones and about 300 Whetstones. Last year's Core 2 Duo scored 31,064 Dhrystones and 8,129 Whetstones. The performance difference is an order of magnitude and then some. Even in VIA's sales literature for the C7 shows performance graphs in "performance per watt" because the raw performance is so poor.
If games still work for you at 1/20 the speed of a typical gaming processor, great. Even modest non-twitch modern games however would not be so forgiving. Using some industry reviews, the approximate conversion is a 2GHz C7 ~= 1.3 GHz PIII. I've got a Celeron 750MHz laptop at home that would likely outrun the 1GHz C7 CPU, and my kids have a terrible time playing flash games on it. The oldest is 6. They're not much into "twitch" games either.
The "original sound wave" is the one the recording engineer created and meant to go on the final track. You want an accurate reproduction of that great sound.
Now, there are some disadvantages to Intel's method of approaching CPU innovation, including not looking for other ways to improve system performance.
Ummm... didn't read the article, did you? Tick-Tock was created precisely to address the issue of more aggressive CPU innovation. One ADVANTAGE of Intel's method is CPU innovation. The Nehalem team can look at all sorts of crazy new innovations without wondering if it will fail on actual silicon. The Penryn team will let the Nehalem team know where the trouble spots of 45nm are.
Think about it, AMD was able to do well due to the integrated memory controller and HyperTransport with a much smaller amount of cache. Even with these elements, will Intel come out with anything really NEW that will improve overall system performance?
I dunno, was HyperTransport really all that innovative, or did they license the Alpha EV6 bus and give it a fancy name? Hypertransport rocks, to be sure. The lesson here is: companies need to re-invest in top-flight engineering labs like those that held the Alpha design team.
So, Intel may hold the lead in terms of performance, or the AMD K10 architecture may allow AMD to catch back up. Either of these are possibilities at this point, and AMD is also working on things like adding some GPU functionality to their processors(Fusion being the first example of this). Even if the GPU power on the CPU is limited in terms of performance, it may add to the graphics processing power of an add-in video card to give an edge in terms of performance. Sure, Intel may be the platform for those who run MS Office, but for those who want some graphics power, AMD may end up with a clear advantage.
Now that's some pretty awesome speculative fanboyism there (I counted five "may"s in there). Benchmarks suggest that the best gaming performance comes from an Intel CPU system. I don't think AMD is seriously targeting Fusion at the gamer market unless they are going to replace that onboard memory controller with a GDDR controller and everyone is going to spend 5x as much on memory.
Tick-Tock is just an Intel way of saying they will do the same thing they always have, just pushing out improvements faster. AMD is focused more on figuring out ways to do things better because they can't keep up in a straight MHz competition, or on a straight fab process competition.
Historically, looking at Intel's process, you have absolutely nothing to back up what you're saying. Can you trace alternating process shrinks and architecture improvements since, say PIII? Clock for clock, Intel is doing very well at the moment.
To knee jerk reaction guy who didn't read the links:
1. She talked to a lawyer. 2. That lawyer is the EFF. 3. They're pretty experienced in this matter, and they intend to collect when she does. 4. Seeking a declaratory judgment is a pretty reasonable thing to do. 5. Universal doesn't get to trample over fair use just because they're a big company. 6. A company that knowingly tramples your rights should pay a fine.
Years ago a fellow I knew took to hanging out in graveyards with his camera and film sensitive to Infra Red (pick up the background IR, except where spirits, which apparently suck the energy out of their surroundings when they manifest themselves.)
The IR sensitive film on the market is only sensitive at very near infrared wavelengths. See this spectral sensitivity curve. Note that 500nm is about the bottom end of color the human eye can see and peak sensitivity occurs around 550nm.
"Suck the energy out of their surroundings" sounds like this would make the temperature plummet. If you want to photograph something cold like that, the temperature inside the camera must be lower than what you are photographing and the film would have to have been kept cold since its manufacture. Otherwise the film would just get fogged from the ambient IR given off by the camera body and/or film canister. This is the reason that most forward-looking infrared systems use a super-cooled CCD. It just isn't that practical with regular film.
whether to use my last mod point this round to mod your post overrated or to respond directly.
You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes.
Yeah, clearly I was incorrect. He was, in fact, somehow not saying exactly what he just said.
Well, yeah, Theo apparently mentioned the penchant for programming holes.
Okay, I'll challenge you. Come up with a theoretical attack on AI90. Theo said it was already exploitable in some OSes (though failed to mention which ones or how), this shouldn't be difficult.
So, you have several such bugs on your CPU.
Which bugs? "I don't remember" isn't a CPU bug.
One of your hosted OSses is set up to accept the security risk for some (possibly valid on separate hardware in a separate segment of the LAN) reason. Something core dumps in that hosted OS and some of the garbage in the unallocated areas of the dump contains (!) private keys from some other hosted OS that the admin _thought_ was properly patched.
This doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Explain this one better using the context of Xen, the hypervisor in question. Are you saying one domain can look at the memory of another domain? I'd be curious to hear how. I actually have to write custom qemu code for Xen and had to do some strange bits to get two domains to communicate.
Lots of complaints about hand-waving, but do we have to burlesque?
Is that a fancy way of saying "we don't really know how you'd exploit it or if it is even exploitable, so we're going to attack your asking us to put up" ??
I can't see how that is feasibly possible, without basing it around assumptions or belief.
You mean the belief that radioactive isotopes do not always form surrounded by their decay products, but rather the decay products they are surrounded by form as a consequence of their decay and a long period of time?
I guess you could call that a belief, seems objectively pretty strong to me.
I think TA's point is that the hypervisor itself may not be any more secure than the OSes it virtualizes.
Actually Theo's argument was that software engineers can't write an OS without security holes, therefore they can't write a hypervisor without security holes.
The argument is, of course, full of shit. The hypervisor in question, Xen, is 50,000 lines of code. Compare this to the linux kernel which is about 6 million lines of code or Vista which is said to be 10s of millions. Theo also drags out his favorite attack about page protection. He is known for attacking a "vulnerability" in a C2D code segment limit/page accessed issue (AI90) as being "assuredly exploitable" in OSes other than OpenBSD, even though nobody has been able to propose a way to exploit it.
The problem with Theo attacking things is that he is so well respected in BSD-land that his word is taken for granted. Sometimes he gets it wrong, but unless someone equally high up wants to spend the time to rebut his ranting (a lot of work for no gain) everybody accepts what he says.
GPUs were foremost designed to execute large numbers of linearly-ordered simple matrix/vector operations per clock cycle. When it comes to generating 3D, there isn't much in the way of branching, recursion or conditional execution involved. I haven't checked recently, but it used to be that a "pixel pipeline" referred to a unit that could do a 4x4 * 4x1 operation in a single clock (16 multiplies and 12 adds).
Coincidentally this also helps a large number of scientific applications, such as molecular dynamics, or physics applications that can be converted into vectors and manipulated, such as kinematics (this is what a physics engine often does).
Game tree searches (I've written a few in my time) are usually highly recursive with exponential growth (branching factor). It would be very difficult to transform these into an efficient set of linearly-ordered vector operations. For example the static evaluator on many (older) chess engines consists of a painful set of heuristics and exceptions to heuristics, and exceptions to exceptions to heuristics. It is a very chaotic flow problem.
You not only have the right to do so, but the civic duty.
Much as I hate to split hairs... I'm gonna split hairs.
A right is something granted to you by some entity. Nowhere are you given explicit permission to nullify the law. Jury nullification is an option open to a jury as a side effect of the jury being an unquestioned trier of fact in court. It is almost always a bad option. In rare cases has jury nullification been used to block implementation of an unjust law. More often than not it is used to excuse criminal behavior and deny justice to the victims because the jury is biased.
Jury nullification is a "right" the same way the US has the "right" to launch nukes. They are both options always available to their respective parties, they are nearly always very bad ideas, and calling them "rights" is being a bit liberal with the term.
I am not unsympathetic to your position. I am on record at the local superior court as having stated plainly during jury selection that I _will_ hang a jury if I believe a guilty verdict would lead to an execution because I believe that the death penalty is unjust. I still do not see this as a right. I see it as a very undesirable option.
Yes. every juror has an obligation to understand the concept of "jury nullification".
Says who?
Even if you had a right to jury nullification (which you don't) the jurors didn't much seem interested in finding for the defendant. The evidence of infringement was overwhelming, the defendant repeatedly lied to avoid a judgment. The jury had the option of fixing penalties at $750 per song. They opted for more than 10x that.
while our math teacher taught us the basics of programming
I don't know why but I gotta comment on this one.
When I was in Junior High School, there were two instructors who could teach programming. Both of them were math teachers.
A couple years ago I graduated from college with a degree in Math (actually double major in Math and CS, but let's stick to math). My university produced mostly elementary through high school teachers. About 80% of those in the Mathematics program had a teaching career as their terminal goal. Every one of them were required to take a basic computer programming course.
When the degrees were handed out, none of the teacher-track students had remembered any of that programming course except one (who happened to double major in CS as well). Unfortunately she got a job offer writing software that paid substantially more than teaching so she didn't end up in that career.
Computer science started as a branch of mathematics. Heck, it arguably still is.
So why don't we see middle/high school math teachers teaching computer programming anymore?
Slashdot Mirror
The 2.3GHz Phenom 9600 benchmarks on average 13.5% lower than Intel's Q6600 quad-core CPU...and the MSRP for the Phenom is about 13.6% less as well.
Yeah, this is just THG trying to please AMD. Newegg, which is not the cheapest around, sells the Retail boxed Q6600 for $279.99. The cheapest X4 9600 I can find is $291.97.
MSRP is not street price. The Q6600 is 13.5% faster and also 4.1% cheaper.
I was giving them the benefit of a doubt. Their multi-GPU design and validation costs for each generation likely stretch beyond $10 million dollars. nVidia doesn't have a fab of its own, so it must contract out samples for post-silicon testing. I think your "not everyone owns steam" is countered by my insanely low estimate of per-GPU validation cost. Remember, that's 1000 multi-GPU steam users across every GPU that has been made. If my $1 million figure is correct, they'd have to get 30x that many people buying the cards to break even. If it is, as I suspect, more like $10 million it would be 300x.
As I said, it is an economic failure and done for purely strategic reasons.
I would agree with you that it is a small segment (only 1000 Steam users), but just how much money is coming from just those 1000 users? A lot of these multi-card gamers are probably buying two relatively expensive, high margin cards. The R&D on NVidia and ATI's side is done, now that second card bought by gamers is just extra dollars in the bank for them.
I'm not sure where your economic theory is coming from, I assume you don't actually work in the semiconductor industry. So let someone who does clue you in:
First, those 1000 cards represent at most $300,000 in gross margin. That is about the cost of 2 engineers for a year (maybe less since they are both bay area companies).
The R&D side is not done. Every new GPU that comes out must go through multi-GPU validation. The cost in people for this alone exceeds that $300,000 figure by several times. Add to that the cost of boards with logical analyzer headers, the cost of the logical analyzers themselves... Suddenly you're paying out at least $1 million per gpu to go through multi-GPU validation (if that is all it is costing them, it would be considered a terrific bargain by the industry).
So it is costing them $1 million to get $300,000 is gross margin. Which is a fancy way of saying they're losing $700,000 per GPU. I have not added the non-engineering costs of multi gpu (sales, marketing, etc.).
Strategically multi GPU is very important. Economically, it is a complete failure.
Um, that is someone talking about writing a GCC backend to target GPUs. Completely dissimilar to the question being asked: can you run GCC on a video card.
There are some nice improvements energy leaks and such, but it's nothing revolutionary.
That's true for sufficiently brain-dead definitions of "revolutionary." Hafnium based High-K transistors are revolutionary. Instruction throughput isn't everything. Manufacturing technology needs breakthroughs too. Or did you see no point in the continuous shrinkage from 100 microns down to where we are now?
Yeah, that's great.
So, um, why does it have game controls on the screen? Was the gameboy successful in some market I am not aware of?
The biggest change to transistor fabrication since the creation of the silicon transistor. This is a previously unavailable technology for making integrated circuits that is substantially different than was used before. Isn't there a word in the English language that describes this?
It still strikes me that Intel chips suck more power on idle, cost more, and run hotter when they run at capacity.
It still strikes me that AMD fanboys would repeat the same old line that hasn't been true for about a year.
It still strikes me that Intel chips suck more power on idle, cost more, and run hotter when they run at capacity.
It strikes me even more that the fanboys would trot this out in response to an article on an Intel chip that has an idle power draw less than 4 Watts.
It still strikes me that Intel chips suck more power on idle, cost more, and run hotter when they run at capacity.
So if Intel cut its gross margins down to 41% like AMD has, that would be okay, right? It wouldn't be anti-competitive?
Call me a pessimist, but my two main systems peak at less than that at the wall, and I have yet to find them too slow for any given task (though I admittedly don't do much "twitch" gaming).
You're using a very apples-to-oranges comparison. Hey, I think it is great that the VIA solution works for you (I use it at home for a server as well), but that system is very, very underpowered. For reference the C7 in your system scores about 1,700 Dhrystones and about 300 Whetstones. Last year's Core 2 Duo scored 31,064 Dhrystones and 8,129 Whetstones. The performance difference is an order of magnitude and then some. Even in VIA's sales literature for the C7 shows performance graphs in "performance per watt" because the raw performance is so poor.
If games still work for you at 1/20 the speed of a typical gaming processor, great. Even modest non-twitch modern games however would not be so forgiving. Using some industry reviews, the approximate conversion is a 2GHz C7 ~= 1.3 GHz PIII. I've got a Celeron 750MHz laptop at home that would likely outrun the 1GHz C7 CPU, and my kids have a terrible time playing flash games on it. The oldest is 6. They're not much into "twitch" games either.
Yeah, what is google?
(types google into wikipedia)
Ahh, I see!
The "original sound wave" is the one the recording engineer created and meant to go on the final track. You want an accurate reproduction of that great sound.
Now, there are some disadvantages to Intel's method of approaching CPU innovation, including not looking for other ways to improve system performance.
Ummm... didn't read the article, did you? Tick-Tock was created precisely to address the issue of more aggressive CPU innovation. One ADVANTAGE of Intel's method is CPU innovation. The Nehalem team can look at all sorts of crazy new innovations without wondering if it will fail on actual silicon. The Penryn team will let the Nehalem team know where the trouble spots of 45nm are.
Think about it, AMD was able to do well due to the integrated memory controller and HyperTransport with a much smaller amount of cache. Even with these elements, will Intel come out with anything really NEW that will improve overall system performance?
I dunno, was HyperTransport really all that innovative, or did they license the Alpha EV6 bus and give it a fancy name? Hypertransport rocks, to be sure. The lesson here is: companies need to re-invest in top-flight engineering labs like those that held the Alpha design team.
So, Intel may hold the lead in terms of performance, or the AMD K10 architecture may allow AMD to catch back up. Either of these are possibilities at this point, and AMD is also working on things like adding some GPU functionality to their processors(Fusion being the first example of this). Even if the GPU power on the CPU is limited in terms of performance, it may add to the graphics processing power of an add-in video card to give an edge in terms of performance. Sure, Intel may be the platform for those who run MS Office, but for those who want some graphics power, AMD may end up with a clear advantage.
Now that's some pretty awesome speculative fanboyism there (I counted five "may"s in there). Benchmarks suggest that the best gaming performance comes from an Intel CPU system. I don't think AMD is seriously targeting Fusion at the gamer market unless they are going to replace that onboard memory controller with a GDDR controller and everyone is going to spend 5x as much on memory.
Tick-Tock is just an Intel way of saying they will do the same thing they always have, just pushing out improvements faster. AMD is focused more on figuring out ways to do things better because they can't keep up in a straight MHz competition, or on a straight fab process competition.
Historically, looking at Intel's process, you have absolutely nothing to back up what you're saying. Can you trace alternating process shrinks and architecture improvements since, say PIII? Clock for clock, Intel is doing very well at the moment.
To knee jerk reaction guy who didn't read the links:
1. She talked to a lawyer.
2. That lawyer is the EFF.
3. They're pretty experienced in this matter, and they intend to collect when she does.
4. Seeking a declaratory judgment is a pretty reasonable thing to do.
5. Universal doesn't get to trample over fair use just because they're a big company.
6. A company that knowingly tramples your rights should pay a fine.
you're being ignorant, and we don't particularly feel like spoon feeding you the information you're ignoring.
When you're taking wild guesses, blathering nonsense and I don't bite it doesn't qualify as ignorant. No matter how smart you fancy yourself.
Years ago a fellow I knew took to hanging out in graveyards with his camera and film sensitive to Infra Red (pick up the background IR, except where spirits, which apparently suck the energy out of their surroundings when they manifest themselves.)
The IR sensitive film on the market is only sensitive at very near infrared wavelengths. See this spectral sensitivity curve. Note that 500nm is about the bottom end of color the human eye can see and peak sensitivity occurs around 550nm.
"Suck the energy out of their surroundings" sounds like this would make the temperature plummet. If you want to photograph something cold like that, the temperature inside the camera must be lower than what you are photographing and the film would have to have been kept cold since its manufacture. Otherwise the film would just get fogged from the ambient IR given off by the camera body and/or film canister. This is the reason that most forward-looking infrared systems use a super-cooled CCD. It just isn't that practical with regular film.
Well, yeah, Theo apparently mentioned the penchant for programming holes.
Okay, I'll challenge you. Come up with a theoretical attack on AI90. Theo said it was already exploitable in some OSes (though failed to mention which ones or how), this shouldn't be difficult.
So, you have several such bugs on your CPU.
Which bugs? "I don't remember" isn't a CPU bug.
One of your hosted OSses is set up to accept the security risk for some (possibly valid on separate hardware in a separate segment of the LAN) reason. Something core dumps in that hosted OS and some of the garbage in the unallocated areas of the dump contains (!) private keys from some other hosted OS that the admin _thought_ was properly patched.
This doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Explain this one better using the context of Xen, the hypervisor in question. Are you saying one domain can look at the memory of another domain? I'd be curious to hear how. I actually have to write custom qemu code for Xen and had to do some strange bits to get two domains to communicate.
Lots of complaints about hand-waving, but do we have to burlesque?
Is that a fancy way of saying "we don't really know how you'd exploit it or if it is even exploitable, so we're going to attack your asking us to put up" ??
whoa whoa whoa... careful. The fundies love to jump on that one. Fossils can't be dated with C14. We have other methods to do that.
I can't see how that is feasibly possible, without basing it around assumptions or belief.
You mean the belief that radioactive isotopes do not always form surrounded by their decay products, but rather the decay products they are surrounded by form as a consequence of their decay and a long period of time?
I guess you could call that a belief, seems objectively pretty strong to me.
I think TA's point is that the hypervisor itself may not be any more secure than the OSes it virtualizes.
Actually Theo's argument was that software engineers can't write an OS without security holes, therefore they can't write a hypervisor without security holes.
The argument is, of course, full of shit. The hypervisor in question, Xen, is 50,000 lines of code. Compare this to the linux kernel which is about 6 million lines of code or Vista which is said to be 10s of millions. Theo also drags out his favorite attack about page protection. He is known for attacking a "vulnerability" in a C2D code segment limit/page accessed issue (AI90) as being "assuredly exploitable" in OSes other than OpenBSD, even though nobody has been able to propose a way to exploit it.
The problem with Theo attacking things is that he is so well respected in BSD-land that his word is taken for granted. Sometimes he gets it wrong, but unless someone equally high up wants to spend the time to rebut his ranting (a lot of work for no gain) everybody accepts what he says.
GPUs were foremost designed to execute large numbers of linearly-ordered simple matrix/vector operations per clock cycle. When it comes to generating 3D, there isn't much in the way of branching, recursion or conditional execution involved. I haven't checked recently, but it used to be that a "pixel pipeline" referred to a unit that could do a 4x4 * 4x1 operation in a single clock (16 multiplies and 12 adds).
Coincidentally this also helps a large number of scientific applications, such as molecular dynamics, or physics applications that can be converted into vectors and manipulated, such as kinematics (this is what a physics engine often does).
Game tree searches (I've written a few in my time) are usually highly recursive with exponential growth (branching factor). It would be very difficult to transform these into an efficient set of linearly-ordered vector operations. For example the static evaluator on many (older) chess engines consists of a painful set of heuristics and exceptions to heuristics, and exceptions to exceptions to heuristics. It is a very chaotic flow problem.
I thought you were joking, but PETA and the liberals really are more interested in protecting roaches than people.
/. - you need to add a </sarcasm> tag!
I was going to post a scathing reply to this, but I'm pretty sure after reading the rest of your message that you are just being sarcastic.
This is
why use Intel Clovertowns when they have there own real good chipsets for AMD servers / work station systems?
1) Quad core
2) Fast quad core
3) They didn't build their cluster just last month
You not only have the right to do so, but the civic duty.
Much as I hate to split hairs... I'm gonna split hairs.
A right is something granted to you by some entity. Nowhere are you given explicit permission to nullify the law. Jury nullification is an option open to a jury as a side effect of the jury being an unquestioned trier of fact in court. It is almost always a bad option. In rare cases has jury nullification been used to block implementation of an unjust law. More often than not it is used to excuse criminal behavior and deny justice to the victims because the jury is biased.
Jury nullification is a "right" the same way the US has the "right" to launch nukes. They are both options always available to their respective parties, they are nearly always very bad ideas, and calling them "rights" is being a bit liberal with the term.
I am not unsympathetic to your position. I am on record at the local superior court as having stated plainly during jury selection that I _will_ hang a jury if I believe a guilty verdict would lead to an execution because I believe that the death penalty is unjust. I still do not see this as a right. I see it as a very undesirable option.
Yes. every juror has an obligation to understand the concept of "jury nullification".
Says who?
Even if you had a right to jury nullification (which you don't) the jurors didn't much seem interested in finding for the defendant. The evidence of infringement was overwhelming, the defendant repeatedly lied to avoid a judgment. The jury had the option of fixing penalties at $750 per song. They opted for more than 10x that.
while our math teacher taught us the basics of programming
I don't know why but I gotta comment on this one.
When I was in Junior High School, there were two instructors who could teach programming. Both of them were math teachers.
A couple years ago I graduated from college with a degree in Math (actually double major in Math and CS, but let's stick to math). My university produced mostly elementary through high school teachers. About 80% of those in the Mathematics program had a teaching career as their terminal goal. Every one of them were required to take a basic computer programming course.
When the degrees were handed out, none of the teacher-track students had remembered any of that programming course except one (who happened to double major in CS as well). Unfortunately she got a job offer writing software that paid substantially more than teaching so she didn't end up in that career.
Computer science started as a branch of mathematics. Heck, it arguably still is.
So why don't we see middle/high school math teachers teaching computer programming anymore?