and they also don't overheat as much, leading to a more reliable product
Really? Your P4 overheated?
What's that, you never owned a P4? Just read about how bad Intel was on/.?
Q: Why was AMD forced to install a thermal throttle? A: Because Athlon overheated and FROZE, where intel worked just fine.
Tom's Hardware did a great demo where he took the heatsink off of a P4 and an Opteron while running Doom 3: the opteron froze and the P4 kept running fine, just a little slower.
No doubt intel has released some of the hottest processors ever in the past. Where did you hear about reliability problems? It's AMD who started spec'ing a higher case Tambient to make their power numbers look better.
However, there are several key obstacles to making this happen.
a) fab capacity and validation infrastructure b) component suppliers c) chipset support d) software support
If you make it x86 compatible and it can slap into an AMD or Intel socket, you can drop c and d. If you don't do anything to extreme with die size or requirements, you can drop b.
The hard part is the billions of dollars in fab capacity required to be profitable. ASPs are very thin, and cost to build a fab is very big. Even fabbing out to TSMC or IBM still means very limited capacity. AMD's Germany fab puts it at a solid #2 in the world for CPU fab capacity, way above TSMC, but way below Intel.
Someone would need to invent a super fast x86 core on an older process to leverage backend infrastructure.
Or they would have to displace Linux/Windows and create an entire software/compiler support model to climb the ladder microsoft and Linux are fighting on.
Cyrix is the closest threat from your angle: they are dominating China, but only because China has insane import laws to protect their own businesses.
We'll see. The only hope for a competitor to the AmTel stranglehold (hey, if MacTel and Wintel work...;) is a PC paradigm shift to a TiVo or PDA gadget that makes PCs obsolete. Even then, AmTel are both avidly trying to predict this shift. Which has its own obstacles...
Very strange times we are in: limitless freedom to push technology and cripplying obstacles to pushign technology. It's a paradox.
The OP implied intel deliberately held off the 1GHz to "squeeze" more profit.
First, that is incorrect. Intel lost the race to 1GHz fair and square.
Second, both AMD and Intel hold off releasing products and play all kinds of pricing games to squeeze their customers without killing them (because without a customer, you make zero dollars). Holding products in the wings to meet billing goals is not uncommon. To imply it is illegal, especially in this context, is wrong on both charges.
However, given the intense competition, it is unlikely either company would deliberately sit on a product unless it could possibly cannibalize their own line, e.g. Intel holding off on x86_64 because it would hurt ia64. Again, still legal.
Intel generally sells a chipset with every CPU. A holding in chipset shipping halts the majority of CPU billing. If anyone has been following this market, Intel hit a shipment problem at the end of the fourth quarter of 2005 and was not able to meet it's CPU/chipset shipments. Nothing about the quality, just poor planning at the chipset fab.
IIRC, you cannot do a bit-for-bit copy of a DRM'd disk: DVD copiers cannot write certain "tracks" due to slight physical perturbations that border on "errors", but these perturbations are within the threshold of DVD readers. The DVD's are burned in a two step process: content, then DRM, the latter done by special hardware.
Of course, I'll be fah-shnickered if I can remember where I read this...
I applaud the amount of effort the author(s) put into this research. I especially found their summary of warrantees a useful bullet.
However, I think they approached this as if they were grading the marketing propaganda. What I mean is this: they zeroed in on specifics, marketing specifics: 64 vs 32 bit, Vista, video cards for games, memory upgrades. Asking these sorts of questions is testing to see how well the salespeople know the marketing icons, and if they are gamers.
This is useless: no human being can explain how this marketing BS translates to real-world usage to a newbie in a 30 minute sales session, and no non-newbie is going to ask these questions.
I worked in retail for about a decade and went to many sales conferences. One thing I learned is: it's all about price point. Everyone has a threshold they are willing to spend, and the sales/marketing force tries to push them as high as possible. In my experience in bicycle retail, ~80% of the customers would be more than satisfied with anything at their price point. Pushing them to the next price point serves no one but the salesperson (my commission!).
In my recent experience recommending a computer to a seriously NON TECHIE people, I've found the same is true. Most of these folk were ready to fork over up to $1,000 (thinking there were no machines $1000). I've recommended this approach for 7 or 8 people, two were relatives. Basically, pick the best warantee and buy the machine at your price point.
100% were happy (3/4 bought a DELLs, 1/4 bought an candy-colored iMac;-). Yes, this is very anecdotal, but I tell this story to illustrate that nitpicking the salesforce at a B&M store is useless. In fact, unless you go to a specialty store, ANY GENERIC RETAIL SALESFORCE IS CLUELESS! This holds for kitchen appliances (Target), or power tools (Home Depot), bicycles, televisions, etc. I re-realized this when I was shopping for a table saw: The Home Depot doesn't know shit, they sell volume; but the Contracter Tool Supply store spent two hours with two staff members teaching me everything, in explicit detail.
If you really want to be educated, go to a store that specializes in only what you want to buy. Don't rely on generic high-volume retail malls to give you any real information.
I think that is the real conclusion of this B&M research.
Since we're now delving into the realm of personal opinion and subjectivity, I disagree completely.
The tactile component of the maps and notes are very important. They allow the player to transcend the exegesis in a physically immersive way that computer-assisted gameplay simply cannot provide. In fact, I would argue that having a computer keep track of this information spoils the suspension of disbelief by introducing -- in most cases, and with the exception of the teletype itself -- anachronistic elements of game play. Furthermore, many puzzles I have encountered were only revealed throught discoveries made via mapping, and would have been immediately reveald had the computer provided an automap (from the first maze in Zork one, to the catacombs in Christminster 30 years later).
Perhaps automapping should be provided for people who can't be bothered to immerse themselves, like "Easy" levels in today's FPS: where you can skim the surface to get a feel for the game without a commitment. But a dimension of the richness is clearly lost.
However, I find that your not-so-subtle horn-blowing claims of being an older IF veteran stand in stark contrast to your words, and so I question the former.
What does my personality have to do with my ability to perform in a job?
Um, only everything.
I know people dream of sitting in a closet writing code all day, not having to go to meetings, interact with others, solve problems as a team, or learn to negotiate, but in the real world, your behavior can make or break a project.
Where I work, we use behavioral to (a) disqualify a candidate, and (b) when technical skill is a tie, behavioral response is the tie-breaker.
We look at it this way: You can teach tecnical skills to anyone, but behavioral skills are permanent.
Get this through your heads folks: ANYONE CAN LEARN TECHNICAL SKILLS. It is not a myth or an elite skill you and you alone posses, makeing ubernerds some super race. It's just a matter of discipline.
Communication, maturity, experience, all sorts of things that are far from technical have a huge impact.
A few paragraphs of vague details, then a sophomoric rehash of the last 30 years of semiconductor design. Did New Scientist need some filler material to meet a publishing page quota or something?
You're only looking at the immediate reactionary argument. I felt this way too a long time ago.
The question should not be: "Who cares about a redwood forest", the question should be: when is enough, enough?
When there ARE no forests?
When all of the water in undrinkable due to pollution?
When there IS no water? (Just ask the SoCal farmers fucked by Mulholland when he diverted the watershed to LA; or the sprawling McMansion suburbs in NorCal that are running out of water).
Where do you personally draw then line? When there are no trees left, every inch of land is covered with beige houses, and every human being has exactly 1 square yard of space left? Obviously not: but you must ask yourself: when is enough enough?
Then you will see that the Endangered Species Act is far more powerful than it appears on the surface. Each little insignificant critter on there is nothing more than a proxy, or a negotiable "line" that represents the "enough" I am referring to above.
Who says the system management ram is accessible by MSRs?
Seems like there isn't enough on-die space to save the entire state of the O/S, and MSR writing is painfully slow, so it wouldn't have time to dump everything INSIDE the core before triggering thermal protection.
Slashdot Mirror
Please, no more myths about Intel power hungry designs. Core Duo fixes this for good:
e _papers_and_tech_docs/30430.pdf
3 0922102.pdf
AMD Athlon64
Freq: 2.0 GHz
Tcase: 70 degC
TDP: 89 W
http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/whit
Intel Core Duo Destkop (Yonah)
Freq: 2.16 GHz
Tcase: 100 degC
TDP: 31 W (scale to 70deC like AMD puts you at about 20W).
http://download.intel.com/design/mobile/datashts/
and they also don't overheat as much, leading to a more reliable product
/.?
Really? Your P4 overheated?
What's that, you never owned a P4? Just read about how bad Intel was on
Q: Why was AMD forced to install a thermal throttle?
A: Because Athlon overheated and FROZE, where intel worked just fine.
Tom's Hardware did a great demo where he took the heatsink off of a P4 and an Opteron while running Doom 3: the opteron froze and the P4 kept running fine, just a little slower.
No doubt intel has released some of the hottest processors ever in the past. Where did you hear about reliability problems? It's AMD who started spec'ing a higher case Tambient to make their power numbers look better.
That's a damned good point.
;) is a PC paradigm shift to a TiVo or PDA gadget that makes PCs obsolete. Even then, AmTel are both avidly trying to predict this shift. Which has its own obstacles...
However, there are several key obstacles to making this happen.
a) fab capacity and validation infrastructure
b) component suppliers
c) chipset support
d) software support
If you make it x86 compatible and it can slap into an AMD or Intel socket, you can drop c and d. If you don't do anything to extreme with die size or requirements, you can drop b.
The hard part is the billions of dollars in fab capacity required to be profitable. ASPs are very thin, and cost to build a fab is very big. Even fabbing out to TSMC or IBM still means very limited capacity. AMD's Germany fab puts it at a solid #2 in the world for CPU fab capacity, way above TSMC, but way below Intel.
Someone would need to invent a super fast x86 core on an older process to leverage backend infrastructure.
Or they would have to displace Linux/Windows and create an entire software/compiler support model to climb the ladder microsoft and Linux are fighting on.
Cyrix is the closest threat from your angle: they are dominating China, but only because China has insane import laws to protect their own businesses.
We'll see. The only hope for a competitor to the AmTel stranglehold (hey, if MacTel and Wintel work...
Very strange times we are in: limitless freedom to push technology and cripplying obstacles to pushign technology. It's a paradox.
The OP implied intel deliberately held off the 1GHz to "squeeze" more profit.
First, that is incorrect. Intel lost the race to 1GHz fair and square.
Second, both AMD and Intel hold off releasing products and play all kinds of pricing games to squeeze their customers without killing them (because without a customer, you make zero dollars). Holding products in the wings to meet billing goals is not uncommon. To imply it is illegal, especially in this context, is wrong on both charges.
However, given the intense competition, it is unlikely either company would deliberately sit on a product unless it could possibly cannibalize their own line, e.g. Intel holding off on x86_64 because it would hurt ia64. Again, still legal.
1) yes
2) yes
3) yes
But let's not let facts interfere with the debate!
I assume your reasoning is based on performance.
If so, I suspect you'll be buying a Conroe from Intel later this year.
Right?
You aren't just blindly loyal to a brand, are you? Gosh, I hope you're smarter than that.
Intel generally sells a chipset with every CPU. A holding in chipset shipping halts the majority of CPU billing. If anyone has been following this market, Intel hit a shipment problem at the end of the fourth quarter of 2005 and was not able to meet it's CPU/chipset shipments. Nothing about the quality, just poor planning at the chipset fab.
and they will as AMD pulls away technologically and pricewise
Not likely. AMD slipped ONE YEAR on AM2, and has nothing on the horizion for 2 more years.
Intel has three fabs ramping to 65 then 45 nm, and two years worth of products that handily defeat anything from AMD.
Pfff...
With stuff like the spying serial number, tpa, etc,
Which is why AMD implemented the exact same thing, right up to virtualization "secure" computing.
intel was holding back their own 1GHz chip to squeeze more profit.
Shame on a corporation for making a profit. AMD is so pure and virginal white, they'd never do something this dastardly.
My god, the spin is breathtaking:
80% market share != Falling Behind
50% market share == Falling Behind
IIRC, you cannot do a bit-for-bit copy of a DRM'd disk: DVD copiers cannot write certain "tracks" due to slight physical perturbations that border on "errors", but these perturbations are within the threshold of DVD readers. The DVD's are burned in a two step process: content, then DRM, the latter done by special hardware.
Of course, I'll be fah-shnickered if I can remember where I read this...
RTFA: Brick and Mortar.
Although I like #2. I'd definitely shop more at fry's...
I applaud the amount of effort the author(s) put into this research. I especially found their summary of warrantees a useful bullet.
;-). Yes, this is very anecdotal, but I tell this story to illustrate that nitpicking the salesforce at a B&M store is useless. In fact, unless you go to a specialty store, ANY GENERIC RETAIL SALESFORCE IS CLUELESS! This holds for kitchen appliances (Target), or power tools (Home Depot), bicycles, televisions, etc. I re-realized this when I was shopping for a table saw: The Home Depot doesn't know shit, they sell volume; but the Contracter Tool Supply store spent two hours with two staff members teaching me everything, in explicit detail.
However, I think they approached this as if they were grading the marketing propaganda. What I mean is this: they zeroed in on specifics, marketing specifics: 64 vs 32 bit, Vista, video cards for games, memory upgrades. Asking these sorts of questions is testing to see how well the salespeople know the marketing icons, and if they are gamers.
This is useless: no human being can explain how this marketing BS translates to real-world usage to a newbie in a 30 minute sales session, and no non-newbie is going to ask these questions.
I worked in retail for about a decade and went to many sales conferences. One thing I learned is: it's all about price point. Everyone has a threshold they are willing to spend, and the sales/marketing force tries to push them as high as possible. In my experience in bicycle retail, ~80% of the customers would be more than satisfied with anything at their price point. Pushing them to the next price point serves no one but the salesperson (my commission!).
In my recent experience recommending a computer to a seriously NON TECHIE people, I've found the same is true. Most of these folk were ready to fork over up to $1,000 (thinking there were no machines $1000). I've recommended this approach for 7 or 8 people, two were relatives. Basically, pick the best warantee and buy the machine at your price point.
100% were happy (3/4 bought a DELLs, 1/4 bought an candy-colored iMac
If you really want to be educated, go to a store that specializes in only what you want to buy. Don't rely on generic high-volume retail malls to give you any real information.
I think that is the real conclusion of this B&M research.
Since we're now delving into the realm of personal opinion and subjectivity, I disagree completely.
The tactile component of the maps and notes are very important. They allow the player to transcend the exegesis in a physically immersive way that computer-assisted gameplay simply cannot provide. In fact, I would argue that having a computer keep track of this information spoils the suspension of disbelief by introducing -- in most cases, and with the exception of the teletype itself -- anachronistic elements of game play. Furthermore, many puzzles I have encountered were only revealed throught discoveries made via mapping, and would have been immediately reveald had the computer provided an automap (from the first maze in Zork one, to the catacombs in Christminster 30 years later).
Perhaps automapping should be provided for people who can't be bothered to immerse themselves, like "Easy" levels in today's FPS: where you can skim the surface to get a feel for the game without a commitment. But a dimension of the richness is clearly lost.
However, I find that your not-so-subtle horn-blowing claims of being an older IF veteran stand in stark contrast to your words, and so I question the former.
Younger generation, say hello to older generation.
Older generation, meet younger generation.
You don't want to have to write things down, take notes, or make alternate representative models of a surrounding to solve a puzzle?
Either the younger generation is far more intelligent than the older generation, or far more lazy.
Survey says??
What does my personality have to do with my ability to perform in a job?
Um, only everything.
I know people dream of sitting in a closet writing code all day, not having to go to meetings, interact with others, solve problems as a team, or learn to negotiate, but in the real world, your behavior can make or break a project.
Where I work, we use behavioral to (a) disqualify a candidate, and (b) when technical skill is a tie, behavioral response is the tie-breaker.
We look at it this way: You can teach tecnical skills to anyone, but behavioral skills are permanent.
Get this through your heads folks: ANYONE CAN LEARN TECHNICAL SKILLS. It is not a myth or an elite skill you and you alone posses, makeing ubernerds some super race. It's just a matter of discipline.
Communication, maturity, experience, all sorts of things that are far from technical have a huge impact.
A few paragraphs of vague details, then a sophomoric rehash of the last 30 years of semiconductor design. Did New Scientist need some filler material to meet a publishing page quota or something?
Ah...
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29605
Looks like the mobile version will slip, but the desktop (Conroe) is still on target.
The MRM link is broken, do you have another link? I can't seem to confirm this.
Wow, dude. Just let go. AMD isn't your girlfriend. It is a company.
But let's not pretend that Intel is winning the benchmarks with this quite yet.
'Yet' is now.
Merom/Conroe defeats AMD-AM2 hands down, and AMD has nothin' on the roadmap for the next two years, because AM2 slipped a full 12 months.
Go surf around Anandtech.com
AMD is in deep doo doo.
You're only looking at the immediate reactionary argument. I felt this way too a long time ago.
The question should not be: "Who cares about a redwood forest", the question should be: when is enough, enough?
When there ARE no forests?
When all of the water in undrinkable due to pollution?
When there IS no water? (Just ask the SoCal farmers fucked by Mulholland when he diverted the watershed to LA; or the sprawling McMansion suburbs in NorCal that are running out of water).
Where do you personally draw then line? When there are no trees left, every inch of land is covered with beige houses, and every human being has exactly 1 square yard of space left? Obviously not: but you must ask yourself: when is enough enough?
Then you will see that the Endangered Species Act is far more powerful than it appears on the surface. Each little insignificant critter on there is nothing more than a proxy, or a negotiable "line" that represents the "enough" I am referring to above.
Should every medical plan have to cover the expensive option?
Yes. That's the point of a medical plan.
Otherwise you die because you aren't rich.
That's not how a society is suppsoed to work, nor is healthcare.
...Buckaroo Banzai:
Wasn't every alien named "John berry?"
Who says the system management ram is accessible by MSRs?
Seems like there isn't enough on-die space to save the entire state of the O/S, and MSR writing is painfully slow, so it wouldn't have time to dump everything INSIDE the core before triggering thermal protection.
More details? Anyone? Anyone?