"People" keep saying Google+ is a ghost town. "People" keep saying Linus is doomed on the UI. "People" kept saying Linux was too hard to use and would never make it outside the server room
Common for all is that they were mostly wrong.
I think you made a very common confusion. People say Linux is doomed on the UI, and that Linus is too hard to use and would never make it outside the server room.
That's not how those things scale, though. In your example, for you device to be borderline useable, you'd have to use about 18 cores, minimum, at most times. Assuming perfectly threaded software, inifnitely scalable. Sleep state is a different beast, but then you can simply put an extra low power core that takes over in such cases, like the Tegra 3. Consider there are tons of ARM clusters around. When power consumption is equal, a system with dozens of cores is incredibly inneficient against an Intel Core for any given workload. You don't even have to look at ARM, look at AMD's Bulldozer, here to prove that scalability isn't a magic bullet. Multiple cores are for big computational demands when frugality isn't that big a deal.
Strongly disagree, and here's why. Any asshole with a book full of tables and instructions can do what a plumber does. Any asshole with a book full of tables and instructions is probably going to kill anyone they try to perform surgery on. "Technologist" doesn't mean anything. Probably anyone can be trained to administer a thing. Probably not everyone can be a successful all-encompassing systems administrator, who is a sort of digital renaissance [wo]man.
You're probably thinking of replacing a leaky pipe in a kitchen sink - the easiest task a plumber will do that actually involves plumbing - and comparing such task with surgery, a massively delicate job that is probably medicine's most delicate part. I could just as easily say that any asshole can write perscriptions for flu medicine for snotty-nosed kids, but try to get a doctor to defeat Bowser and you'll end up with a boring tetris clone that no one likes.
A very valid point. It honestly hadn't occurred to me to look at it from this angle, since I'm already counting on my next CPU's stock cooler being quieter and eliminating the problem. But a better cooler, with heatpipes, is always a plus, and it does linger. I'll check its orientation (my airflow is front to back, not top to bottom) If it works well and quietly, I might just get a 100W Trinity. Thanks.
(Also, your specific suggestion was very helpful. Turns out a TX3 costs about the same as a 101 around here and is quite a bit heftier.)
Approval voting on the first part and then a runoff voting between the top two candidates would be ideal, IMHO. Narrowing down allows for more focused debate and as a sort of check. Given the importance of selecting a president, I'd say it's warranted.
I know it can be fixed and thank you for your suggestions, but there are two complications: a) ambient temperature here goes up to 36 degrees Celsius, which means I need lots of airflow; b) import taxes render aftermarket coolers prohibitive. A $30 cooler is sold here by about $65, which is almost what I paid for the processor itself. I could drop $30 in a Hyper 101, but given it's still an Athlon, an upgrade is just around the corner. So I'll just hang in there for only this summer, then I'm going for a 65W Trinity or 55W Ivy.
You're talking about the low-jitter Linux kernel testing where they didn't test jitter at all, right? I've seen that one, it was embarrassing. However, their often incomplete (and sometimes flawed) testing is still the best we can get for Linux.
Linux already has scheduler fixes for Bulldozer, too, unlike Windows 7. Not a game changer, but it does grant another 1-3% performance, if I remember correctly. not the the Intel compiler doesn't cripple AMD quite a bit - just run Handbrake on Windows on both platforms and compare the delta of the results to the one you'd get on, say, Adobe's Premiére. I wonder if Mozilla uses the ICC for Widnows builds, because they are noticeably slower on my Athlon II.
True. Especially for hotter cities. Here, My undervolted, underclocked 95W Athlon II already manages to annoy me with its 3500+RPM fan (it goes to about 5000RPM at full load and clock, it's madness). Maybe AMD should start putting coolers with 120mm fans on their boxed processors. If they plan on selling such behemoths, that would provide more airflow and less noise at the same time. Fitting that on a motherboard would likely be a problem, though. Water cooling would be good, but it's much too expensive to make sense.
I think Phoronix took Vishera through some GCC tests. They have another article about GCC optimizations for the Bulldozer architecture in general (it seems to improve some workloads by quite a bit).
So true. AMD isn't competitive energetically in any way anymore, but the desktop is probably the only place while it doesn't matter. When you're thinking mobile, saving energy is a priority. On huge server farms, little relative gains can mean a tangible different in absolute numbers. But on desktops, their difference is about a light bulb, at load, and hardly anything when idle. And with PSUs under 350W being incresingly harder to find and an FX-8350-based system only gobbling about 200W at its most intensive, it's probably "low enough" power consumption for most people.
I'm a gamer too, and I'm actually interested, mainly because the FX-4300 seems to be now a fierce competitor to Intel's i3 while costing quite a bit less. The FX-8xxx still sucks, but this is a major improvement for AMD on the mainstrem segment. They were losing to cheaper Pentiums with the FX-4100, it was embarrassing.
Idle power seems pretty competitive with Intel's Core offerings. Anand found little difference and attributed it to their selection of a power-hungry motherboard.
Personally, I'd vote for "assasinate both and start over", but in civilized countries this isn't an option.
I can't see what that has to do with anything. You are in the U.S., aren't you?
There is a slight difference between them, of course. People who say all politicians are the same are akin to people who believe they are completely different. In this particular case, Obama represents a "humanization of the inevitable". The inevitable, as they seem to see, is the unsustainable profiteering march to the increasingly elusive economic growth - the whole of Romney's platform, succintly. Add a few programs to barely help people who are shat on by the system - while taking no action to actually prevent or even slow down said shitting - and you got Obama's.
So yes, both are way more alike than ideally. Voting for Obama is going with the lesser of two evils, while voting for Romney is either greed, lack of information, lunacy or the hope that the country survives him and the Democrats get a grip and come back with better offerings in the next election. Suboptimal, I'd understate.
What if they didn't sell, though? That's a funny thought. Since pretty much all OSs and programs are now 64-bit (even Adobe's suite is almost completely x86-64 by now, if I recall correctly), what would happen if Intel simply couldn't make x86-64 anymore because AMD decided they want to take it to the grave? I don't think it will actually happen ever, but Intel would be in a bit of a picke, wouldn't it?
I don't think Intel can afford that type of strategy anymore, even if AMD was gone. If they started charging $550 for i5s, then gamers and light users will turn to consoles and ARM chips, repectively. Demanding professional users (video editors, programmers etc) would be stuck, but only for a while. I think what Intel is doing now is as far as they can go: artificially disabling advanced features on cheaper chips. They're the top dogs because x86 is the stanrdard for desktops, and it's only still the standard because it's cheap. Why do you think they sell $40 Celerons? It's not because they're charitable, it's because if they lose the low end, the high-end will surely follow in about five years, and all they'll have left the server market. We might all be using ARM or loongson CPUs, but we won't keep paying ridiculous sums for what will probably be unneeded computing power.
As for Bulldozer, besides the Windows 7 scheduler problem, compilers are only now implementing BD-specific optimizations. They seem to improve performance quite a bit in a few tests. I think BD's performance potential has been misjudged (though its power consumption has been correctly assessed and it sucks incredibly).
find some sites with some non-extreme porn (no violence, and even no insults at the women)
Good luck, that's a small niche. You'll probably have to film it yourself. By the wa, if it comes to that, I don't know if trying to disguise or hide your face on camera is worth the hassle, but if you find it isn't, then there's no reason not to do a live show for the kid. Might be alittle awkward, but the opportunity for an improptu Q&A session offsets that.
While I'm not a fan of some of his decisions, I don't think his autonomy is a bad thing. SABDFL's distro is there is you want to use it. If you prefer a more communal approach to software bundles, there's Debian. The whole point of Ubuntu is to take Debian and give it a different focus, and I think it serves a very valid purpose. Its popularity is a testament to that.
Unfortunately, the E-350 ends up costing more than a Celeron G530 around here, which is a bit insane. Processors are exempt from import taxes, but MBs and other components aren't, and the E-350 isn't considered a processor and pays the full tax (on the upside, AMD APUs pay none). So it's either the C-60 or, if I go any higher, I'd be crazy not to get more for my money and get a cheap Intel. Especially considering I plan on running Linux (though I'm taking a look at OpenELEC now, thank you for the tip).
Of course I "proved" your point, I was agreeing with you (the "as you say" part is a huge tell).
To further clarify what I said: I could easily see myself using it, since I already rely on Google Docs and web services for most of my needs. However, it's too expensive to compete with similarly priced C-60s unless you have some sort of utopian internet availability. A C-60 would also have way more processing power, not to mention x86 compatibility. Right now, it's nuts.
Unfortunately (at least when it comes to purchasing technology), I'm not in the US. I've been wanting a C-60 for quite come time, now, but I think I'm going with a desktop version at 1.6GHz. Seems like it would be great as a file server/HTPC and is extremely cheaper than the netbook version.
Come to think of it, maybe that's how Google should have approached the Chromebook: sell it as a uATX board. Desktops don't usually suffer from lack of internet availability and its pricing would then be greatly reduced. Most desktops are now only internet access points for people, anyway, and the Chromebook would be a dream to all geeks who have to support friends and family who only want to access the internet but manage to keep breaking their OSs in the process.
If all you want is web surfing your better off with a Kindle or Galaxy tab
Not if you're counting on using Google Docs. Typing on a tablet sucks unless you have a physical keyboard (which drives the price quite a bit higher), and a touchscreen for editing documents while sitting on a table is very uncomfortable. Also, Chromebooks have screens quite a big bigger than the 7" tablets on its price range. I could easily see myself using one of those if I had to go mobile and knew I'd always have a broadband connection available, though (as you say) I'd probably rather get an AMD C-60 and secure my offlinability as well.
Yes, it's actually quite good for netbooks. My desktop monitor can rotate to work in "document mode", though, which is incredibly handy but would make the vertical dock incredibly funny.
My GF is a happy Unity user as well (it helps that she went straight to 12.04, bypassing the buggy releases). It still doesn't work for me, but it's mainly because of the dock. It really messes up my workflow. I dislike it on the left, especially when using 4:3 monitors. The auto-hide functionality is terrible, it manages to make it both too easy to activate by mistake (like, say, when you want to hit "back" on Firefox) and too hard to activate on purpose (you sort of have to hit the area a bit too hard with your mouse). It's a shame, because I really like the dash. You can search a lot of different things, it integrates with package managers so you see not only you have, but what you can download, lenses are useful and being able to search a given program's menu items is great. Still, I can't bring myself to use that dreaded dock, so I'm using KDE.
I think both you and the parent make some good points. For you, I'd say the 8150 is definitely problematic when it comes to power consumption. I like AMD, but even with the FX-6100 at the same price point as an i3-2120, I see no reason to upgrade my Athlon II X3. It would run slightly hotter, spend slightly more power and perform about the same in most productivity workloads, since they are limited by my HDD, and perform about the same or quite worse in games. So that I'd call a complete failure on AMD's part.
To the parent, I'd say the design is actually quite solid. AMD just stumbled on its first iteration. Trinity A10 is quite competitive with the slightly costlier i3s at x86 performance, finally surpassing Llano. To some surprise, Trinity chips perform much better in single-threaded tasks and its increased power draw is quite justifiable by its massive iGPU, meaning the x86 part of power concerns seem to have been adressed. And those are tests I've seen on Windows 7 with non-optimized programs. GCC has BD optimizations that can really improve performance, anywhere from 0 to 40%. Plus, there are the upcoming scheduler fixes and Vishera, a Trinity with L3 cache (and sans graphics).
I believe AMD launched BD before it was ready, just to break the catch-22 of "no one will write software for it unless we lauch, and if we launch it without optimized software, it will suck". So you launch a beta version and let software integrate with your design, while you refine it to something actually competitive. And just roll with the backlash. Doesn't seem to be working too well.
Slashdot Mirror
Is not always correct.
"People" keep saying Google+ is a ghost town.
"People" keep saying Linus is doomed on the UI.
"People" kept saying Linux was too hard to use and would never make it outside the server room
Common for all is that they were mostly wrong.
I think you made a very common confusion. People say Linux is doomed on the UI, and that Linus is too hard to use and would never make it outside the server room.
That's not how those things scale, though. In your example, for you device to be borderline useable, you'd have to use about 18 cores, minimum, at most times. Assuming perfectly threaded software, inifnitely scalable. Sleep state is a different beast, but then you can simply put an extra low power core that takes over in such cases, like the Tegra 3. Consider there are tons of ARM clusters around. When power consumption is equal, a system with dozens of cores is incredibly inneficient against an Intel Core for any given workload. You don't even have to look at ARM, look at AMD's Bulldozer, here to prove that scalability isn't a magic bullet. Multiple cores are for big computational demands when frugality isn't that big a deal.
Strongly disagree, and here's why. Any asshole with a book full of tables and instructions can do what a plumber does. Any asshole with a book full of tables and instructions is probably going to kill anyone they try to perform surgery on. "Technologist" doesn't mean anything. Probably anyone can be trained to administer a thing. Probably not everyone can be a successful all-encompassing systems administrator, who is a sort of digital renaissance [wo]man.
You're probably thinking of replacing a leaky pipe in a kitchen sink - the easiest task a plumber will do that actually involves plumbing - and comparing such task with surgery, a massively delicate job that is probably medicine's most delicate part. I could just as easily say that any asshole can write perscriptions for flu medicine for snotty-nosed kids, but try to get a doctor to defeat Bowser and you'll end up with a boring tetris clone that no one likes.
A very valid point. It honestly hadn't occurred to me to look at it from this angle, since I'm already counting on my next CPU's stock cooler being quieter and eliminating the problem. But a better cooler, with heatpipes, is always a plus, and it does linger. I'll check its orientation (my airflow is front to back, not top to bottom) If it works well and quietly, I might just get a 100W Trinity. Thanks.
(Also, your specific suggestion was very helpful. Turns out a TX3 costs about the same as a 101 around here and is quite a bit heftier.)
Approval voting on the first part and then a runoff voting between the top two candidates would be ideal, IMHO. Narrowing down allows for more focused debate and as a sort of check. Given the importance of selecting a president, I'd say it's warranted.
I know it can be fixed and thank you for your suggestions, but there are two complications: a) ambient temperature here goes up to 36 degrees Celsius, which means I need lots of airflow; b) import taxes render aftermarket coolers prohibitive. A $30 cooler is sold here by about $65, which is almost what I paid for the processor itself. I could drop $30 in a Hyper 101, but given it's still an Athlon, an upgrade is just around the corner. So I'll just hang in there for only this summer, then I'm going for a 65W Trinity or 55W Ivy.
You're talking about the low-jitter Linux kernel testing where they didn't test jitter at all, right? I've seen that one, it was embarrassing. However, their often incomplete (and sometimes flawed) testing is still the best we can get for Linux.
Linux already has scheduler fixes for Bulldozer, too, unlike Windows 7. Not a game changer, but it does grant another 1-3% performance, if I remember correctly. not the the Intel compiler doesn't cripple AMD quite a bit - just run Handbrake on Windows on both platforms and compare the delta of the results to the one you'd get on, say, Adobe's Premiére. I wonder if Mozilla uses the ICC for Widnows builds, because they are noticeably slower on my Athlon II.
True. Especially for hotter cities. Here, My undervolted, underclocked 95W Athlon II already manages to annoy me with its 3500+RPM fan (it goes to about 5000RPM at full load and clock, it's madness). Maybe AMD should start putting coolers with 120mm fans on their boxed processors. If they plan on selling such behemoths, that would provide more airflow and less noise at the same time. Fitting that on a motherboard would likely be a problem, though. Water cooling would be good, but it's much too expensive to make sense.
I think Phoronix took Vishera through some GCC tests. They have another article about GCC optimizations for the Bulldozer architecture in general (it seems to improve some workloads by quite a bit).
So true. AMD isn't competitive energetically in any way anymore, but the desktop is probably the only place while it doesn't matter. When you're thinking mobile, saving energy is a priority. On huge server farms, little relative gains can mean a tangible different in absolute numbers. But on desktops, their difference is about a light bulb, at load, and hardly anything when idle. And with PSUs under 350W being incresingly harder to find and an FX-8350-based system only gobbling about 200W at its most intensive, it's probably "low enough" power consumption for most people.
I'm a gamer too, and I'm actually interested, mainly because the FX-4300 seems to be now a fierce competitor to Intel's i3 while costing quite a bit less. The FX-8xxx still sucks, but this is a major improvement for AMD on the mainstrem segment. They were losing to cheaper Pentiums with the FX-4100, it was embarrassing.
Idle power seems pretty competitive with Intel's Core offerings. Anand found little difference and attributed it to their selection of a power-hungry motherboard.
Sounds about right. I envision no pleasant way to consume mail.
Personally, I'd vote for "assasinate both and start over", but in civilized countries this isn't an option.
I can't see what that has to do with anything. You are in the U.S., aren't you?
There is a slight difference between them, of course. People who say all politicians are the same are akin to people who believe they are completely different. In this particular case, Obama represents a "humanization of the inevitable". The inevitable, as they seem to see, is the unsustainable profiteering march to the increasingly elusive economic growth - the whole of Romney's platform, succintly. Add a few programs to barely help people who are shat on by the system - while taking no action to actually prevent or even slow down said shitting - and you got Obama's.
So yes, both are way more alike than ideally. Voting for Obama is going with the lesser of two evils, while voting for Romney is either greed, lack of information, lunacy or the hope that the country survives him and the Democrats get a grip and come back with better offerings in the next election. Suboptimal, I'd understate.
What if they didn't sell, though? That's a funny thought. Since pretty much all OSs and programs are now 64-bit (even Adobe's suite is almost completely x86-64 by now, if I recall correctly), what would happen if Intel simply couldn't make x86-64 anymore because AMD decided they want to take it to the grave? I don't think it will actually happen ever, but Intel would be in a bit of a picke, wouldn't it?
I don't think Intel can afford that type of strategy anymore, even if AMD was gone. If they started charging $550 for i5s, then gamers and light users will turn to consoles and ARM chips, repectively. Demanding professional users (video editors, programmers etc) would be stuck, but only for a while. I think what Intel is doing now is as far as they can go: artificially disabling advanced features on cheaper chips. They're the top dogs because x86 is the stanrdard for desktops, and it's only still the standard because it's cheap. Why do you think they sell $40 Celerons? It's not because they're charitable, it's because if they lose the low end, the high-end will surely follow in about five years, and all they'll have left the server market. We might all be using ARM or loongson CPUs, but we won't keep paying ridiculous sums for what will probably be unneeded computing power.
As for Bulldozer, besides the Windows 7 scheduler problem, compilers are only now implementing BD-specific optimizations. They seem to improve performance quite a bit in a few tests. I think BD's performance potential has been misjudged (though its power consumption has been correctly assessed and it sucks incredibly).
find some sites with some non-extreme porn (no violence, and even no insults at the women)
Good luck, that's a small niche. You'll probably have to film it yourself. By the wa, if it comes to that, I don't know if trying to disguise or hide your face on camera is worth the hassle, but if you find it isn't, then there's no reason not to do a live show for the kid. Might be alittle awkward, but the opportunity for an improptu Q&A session offsets that.
While I'm not a fan of some of his decisions, I don't think his autonomy is a bad thing. SABDFL's distro is there is you want to use it. If you prefer a more communal approach to software bundles, there's Debian. The whole point of Ubuntu is to take Debian and give it a different focus, and I think it serves a very valid purpose. Its popularity is a testament to that.
Unfortunately, the E-350 ends up costing more than a Celeron G530 around here, which is a bit insane. Processors are exempt from import taxes, but MBs and other components aren't, and the E-350 isn't considered a processor and pays the full tax (on the upside, AMD APUs pay none). So it's either the C-60 or, if I go any higher, I'd be crazy not to get more for my money and get a cheap Intel. Especially considering I plan on running Linux (though I'm taking a look at OpenELEC now, thank you for the tip).
Of course I "proved" your point, I was agreeing with you (the "as you say" part is a huge tell).
To further clarify what I said: I could easily see myself using it, since I already rely on Google Docs and web services for most of my needs. However, it's too expensive to compete with similarly priced C-60s unless you have some sort of utopian internet availability. A C-60 would also have way more processing power, not to mention x86 compatibility. Right now, it's nuts.
Unfortunately (at least when it comes to purchasing technology), I'm not in the US. I've been wanting a C-60 for quite come time, now, but I think I'm going with a desktop version at 1.6GHz. Seems like it would be great as a file server/HTPC and is extremely cheaper than the netbook version.
Come to think of it, maybe that's how Google should have approached the Chromebook: sell it as a uATX board. Desktops don't usually suffer from lack of internet availability and its pricing would then be greatly reduced. Most desktops are now only internet access points for people, anyway, and the Chromebook would be a dream to all geeks who have to support friends and family who only want to access the internet but manage to keep breaking their OSs in the process.
If all you want is web surfing your better off with a Kindle or Galaxy tab
Not if you're counting on using Google Docs. Typing on a tablet sucks unless you have a physical keyboard (which drives the price quite a bit higher), and a touchscreen for editing documents while sitting on a table is very uncomfortable. Also, Chromebooks have screens quite a big bigger than the 7" tablets on its price range. I could easily see myself using one of those if I had to go mobile and knew I'd always have a broadband connection available, though (as you say) I'd probably rather get an AMD C-60 and secure my offlinability as well.
Yes, it's actually quite good for netbooks. My desktop monitor can rotate to work in "document mode", though, which is incredibly handy but would make the vertical dock incredibly funny.
My GF is a happy Unity user as well (it helps that she went straight to 12.04, bypassing the buggy releases). It still doesn't work for me, but it's mainly because of the dock. It really messes up my workflow. I dislike it on the left, especially when using 4:3 monitors. The auto-hide functionality is terrible, it manages to make it both too easy to activate by mistake (like, say, when you want to hit "back" on Firefox) and too hard to activate on purpose (you sort of have to hit the area a bit too hard with your mouse). It's a shame, because I really like the dash. You can search a lot of different things, it integrates with package managers so you see not only you have, but what you can download, lenses are useful and being able to search a given program's menu items is great. Still, I can't bring myself to use that dreaded dock, so I'm using KDE.
Real nerds run whatever the hell they feel works best for them and don't bother with trends.
I think both you and the parent make some good points. For you, I'd say the 8150 is definitely problematic when it comes to power consumption. I like AMD, but even with the FX-6100 at the same price point as an i3-2120, I see no reason to upgrade my Athlon II X3. It would run slightly hotter, spend slightly more power and perform about the same in most productivity workloads, since they are limited by my HDD, and perform about the same or quite worse in games. So that I'd call a complete failure on AMD's part.
To the parent, I'd say the design is actually quite solid. AMD just stumbled on its first iteration. Trinity A10 is quite competitive with the slightly costlier i3s at x86 performance, finally surpassing Llano. To some surprise, Trinity chips perform much better in single-threaded tasks and its increased power draw is quite justifiable by its massive iGPU, meaning the x86 part of power concerns seem to have been adressed. And those are tests I've seen on Windows 7 with non-optimized programs. GCC has BD optimizations that can really improve performance, anywhere from 0 to 40%. Plus, there are the upcoming scheduler fixes and Vishera, a Trinity with L3 cache (and sans graphics).
I believe AMD launched BD before it was ready, just to break the catch-22 of "no one will write software for it unless we lauch, and if we launch it without optimized software, it will suck". So you launch a beta version and let software integrate with your design, while you refine it to something actually competitive. And just roll with the backlash. Doesn't seem to be working too well.