Sheesh! First Sun is criticised for producting overpriced machines, then criticised for cutting the prices!
Actually, this sums up the problems at Sun very nicely.
They can't sell their high end machines for the prices they used to charge in the 90s because of a number of factors - Cheap linux clusters, high performance PC workstations, strong IBM and HP enterprise competition etc...
On the other hand, they can't go with cheap computers because they don't have the economy of scale to make that profitable. Also they need to invest in OS R&D, Microprocessor R&D, Systems R&D etc... Whereas a company like Dell has 0 R&D and just slaps a system together with screwdrivers and gets extremely low pricing from component vendors like Intel.
In short - their business model is broken. I have no idea how they can fix it. They will become increasingly irrelevant and die a long slow death due - like SGI.
Since Intel has always been shaky in floating point and probably doesn't really know the meaning of vector I'm wondering how those kinds of apps will fare on the Mactel boxes.
Give me a break. Some of the fastest FP computers on the planet come from Intel and AMD. IBM doesn't publish SPECfp scores for the G5. Ever wonder why?
Arm yourself with an Intel compiler and compile some numeric codes on a high end P4 or Athlon and you will more often than not smoke a G5.
Intel has autovectorization in their compiler, so yes, I believe they do understand it. If you can effectively block your code to fit your kernels in the cache then the P4 should be faster than anything since you won't get branch mispredictions in your loop-heavy code and your floating point is completely pipelined which means you get all of the benfits of the higher frequency and none of the penalty.
The smartest way to build new technologies is to offer some sort of financial reward that exceeds the costs and effort for coming up with such technologies. By definition, it must be "economical" because you need to see a reward that is greater than your investment.
Oh wait - we have that already. It's called CAPITALISM.
Go to Soviet Russia for communist technology "contests" and see how far that sort of "innovation" takes you.
Sun was implementing the classic "trojan horse" strategy. Implement something in a half assed way and say - "look how shitty this is" - Come to Solaris!
Kind of like x86 on Solaris. Look at how shitty this is...come to SPARC. When really, there is no fundamental reason that x86 solaris should be shitty.
Unfortunately, Linux had and is gaining too much momentum in the marketplace for this strategy to work. Sun is as good as dead. They get more irrelevant with each passing day.
It's not a zero sum game. If you bought some stock, you'd also benefit as the total pie gets larger.
In fact, many middle class people have stock in retirement accounts. Wealth is created through accumulation of income-producing-assets and the compounding of growth of those assets.
A share of stock entitles you to a share of all future earnings. Increased earnings implies increased shareholder value.
Also, I don't know where you get your 86% number. Most stock is owned by mutual funds (just look up the "major holders" of any stock on yahoo finance - Fidelity and Vanguard usually top most lists). Mutual funds manage money for the middle class.
Hyperthreading is Intel's marketing name for something people in research and academia call SMT (simultaneous multithreading). It is not a kludge - it's actually a good idea that lets applications use the processor more efficiently.
Out-of-order execution processors do not make efficient use of resources. For example a peak instruction throughput of 3 on a typical Opteron is not acheived on average. It's more like 1.5 instructions per clock. Half of the resources go unused on average. If you could allow another thread to execute "simultaneously" in the pipeline then you could make use of the idle resources.
It's pretty complicated to implement because now the hardware has to track the state and arbitrate resources for 2 threads of execution throughout the entire pipeline. AMD probably doesn't have the engineering resources (engineering time/schedule) to do it, but they would if they could. Intel had some partially functional SMT hardware disabled on the first incarnations of the P4 (Willamette). They used Willamette to debug it and finally make it work on Northwood.
Multi-core can be looked at as an EXTREME example of SMT. All of the resources (except for the L2 cache) are duplicated to allow 2 threads to run simultaneously on the same piece of silicon. It is far less complicated because you've just duplicated everything and there is no arbitration logic for things that are shared with the exception of the L2 cache of course.
There are many degrees of SMT having to do with what resources are shared and what are duplicated.
Benchmarks of Prescott over Northwood say the older design is the better buy at the same clock speed.
That is true but Prescotts have 64 bits and Northwoods do not. Prescott is also on a 90nm process which makes it cheaper for Intel to manufacture and can lower prices to consumers. Prescott also has better SMT (hyperthreading) performance than Northwood.
The fact that Intel made 30 billion dollars last year tells me that people are still buying Intel either as new computers or to replace older ones or both. Therefore, they must see value in Prescott since it represents a large proportion of Intel's profits.
It comes down to managers that don't know a damned thing about the tech, but making all the decisions on it. These other architectures had more growth potential, higher performance, and better overall design than any Intel chip released in the x86 line. The downside was mostly in channel cost. Since they weren't already abundant, they were expensive. If they were mass produced, they wouldn't be any different in cost than the x86 market is.
I hope you're not the CEO of some company. If you are, let me know what your company is so I can short your stock on Monday morning. It seems that those managers know more about tech and finance than you.
What did you expect managers to do? Increase costs to get a processor that runs only 1% of the world's software? How do you suppose x86 became abundant whereas other architectures did not? It's all about the software... Tech savvy people know that. IBM, HP, Digital, Sun should have all forseen the tremendous potential in x86 software and started competing with Intel by making their own x86 parts.
The ISA is such a red herring. I am paid to design x86 microprocessors and I can tell you that there's an internal instruction set that is optimized for the hardware. Intel/AMD do a translation in hardware, Transmeta does it in software. In any case, x86 is just a thin layer around what is really going on inside. That layer amounts to a tiny amount of the chip power and area budgets. A small price to pay for the privelege of being able to run 99% of the world's software.
I will agree with you on one thing. Itanium is the dumbest thing Intel has ever done. No software - no market...
This is a fairly sad state of affairs... the processor family really has some legs left to it, but it was killed by HP for mostly political reasons
If by "political", you mean "save a ton of money and increase profitability" then yes.
Computer manufacturers are in the business of making money. The ONLY reason to build a computer is to make money.
In case you hadn't noticed yet -- designing microprocessors is astronomically expensive. Because PA-RISC is such a low volume product, it makes little financial sense to pour billions of dollars into it when your return on investment is negative. It's the same reason that HP doesn't design and fab their own DRAM.
Off-the-shelf Pentiums or Opterons can't really compete with POWER or Fujitsu's next gen SPARC designs. x86 Unix systems have largely been also-rans... Data General, Sequent(Now IBM xSeries), even Sun's new Opteron boxes are largely a side show to their SPARC business.
I guess you haven't seen any SPEC or TPC benchmarks lately. You must by using 1990s technology. x86 is very competitive with SPARC and POWER. In fact, it isn't even a contest if you were to equip the x86es with the same sized caches of their POWER and SPARC counterparts.
IBM microelectronics loses money every single year. Sun has a negative return on investment for SPARC. 10 years from now, you won't have have SPARC or POWER machines built anymore.
Sun's Opteron boxes were necessary to hide the abyssmal performance of SPARC.
These aren't market or competitive pressures ('cuz IBM's doing just fine with bespoke silicon at the high end), but political mangement dictates that turned some premier computer science powerhouses into shambling wrecks.
Look up the latest Edgar financial filings on IBM and read about their microelectronics division. They lose money every single year. If one of the largest computer companies in the world can't make money with their own semiconductor division, what does that say? Obviously they are not competitive.
This "mass extinction" of competing hardware architectures is not good for innovation. The Wintel PC is not the pinnical of hardware architectures, it's pretty bass-ackward and stone age compared to what used to be out there
x86 has the most innovative microarchitectures on the planet. How you do you think they compete performance-wise with more elegant ISAs? It isn't just Wintel anymore. It's Apple-Intel, Win-AMD, Win-tel, Linux-tel, Linux-AMD.
There will still be competition. AMD competes with Intel pretty well which keeps the trend of innovation going. Even Intel must compete with Intel. Who is going to buy a new computer if all Intel does is release something that does not have value over the previous generation?
Now, what I want to know is... if these machines have EVERYTHING any other PC does, why is it not possible to run a copy of MacOSX on a normal white box PC.
I'm sure there will be people that will be able to make this possible. Even if Apple did use some custom firmware, there's going to be someone around to reverse engineer it just like the BIOS/clone companies did to IBM back in the 80s. I can see a market for "mod chips" developing.
Well, you'd search for words close to the link and then get to the link. It's still more efficient for a competent typist. But of course this won't work very well for image based links, but one could conceive of ways around this too.
The problem with purely keyboard based interfaces is that they aren't as easy to learn because you have to map keystrokes to do certain things (like search) which gets in the way of user-friendliness. I'd love it if we could have both.
I think you're confused. Stock is not debt. Debt is debt. If google issued bonds, then you could make a case for google's debt.
A share of stock entitles you to a share of all future earning of the company. Stocks are valued based on how much the investor thinks the company can earn from today until the end of time with future earnings discounted to the present value (which is why stock prices are a function of real interest rates and inflation).
If google quadruples earnings next year and the stock price remains flat, then the P/E goes from 113 or so to 28.25. People are very optimistic about GOOG increasing the "E" in the P/E at a very fast and sustainable rate.
TWX grows earnings as a function of how many subscribers it has - TWX has saturated the cable market already and is trying to diversify into telco services. It's hard for TWX to grow, so the value of future earnings is limited.
GOOG is growing much faster than TWX. It is an infant in the media industry. Last year there were 600 billion dollars spent on advertising. How many of those dollars do you think GOOG can catch?
3 is nowhere near 600. Investors are betting that GOOG gets a much larger share of that advertising market.
Why do advertisers prefer GOOG? Directed audiences... Cheaper production costs... higher hit rates... the list goes on and on.
How much time do you spend getting your news from cable-tv vs. the internet? How much time do you spend reading magazines vs. articles on the net? Once Hollywood starts getting a clue and builds out an online content distribution model, how much are you going to be willing pay for cable-tv, when you'll be able to stream at your convenience to your HDTV wirelessly?
The stock market is always looking forward. Investors can see the giant potential here. GOOG may be cheap at this price, but it is obviously not without risks - I am not an investor, since I think that Yahoo and Microsoft will throw up some big speed bumps to GOOG's earnings growth.
In fact, Google and their customers can track exactly how many times the link was clicked. Google makes real money. Their earning are growing at a tremendous rate.
When the company went public last year nobody knew how much it could earn. Given the numbers it's putting up today, it had an IPO P/E lower than Gillette or Coca-Cola (2 companies that are hardly monster growth stocks).
Investors are assigning a high value to google because they believe that earning can continue to grow at that fantastic pace, so that by this time next year, the P/E will have shrunk again because the E is growing so freaking fast.
The E is growing fast because boatloads of people are clicking on those non-descript non-intrusive ads. Frankly, I hope google annihilates the traditional media companies and sucks out all of their ad dollars so we won't have to put up with ridiculous commercials on TV, in magazines and on billboards anymore.
tab 30 times till the correct hyperlink is selected in my browser
This is a function of an inferior keyboard interface. You'd really want to be able to incrementally search for the link by typing in the letters of the link's name.
Argumentum ad populum; marketshare of $product doesn't say anything about quality of $product
But in this case "populum" = quality
It depends on how you define "quality". Computer makers define quality by how much money they can make with a given product.
The only reason to build a computer is to make money. If a computer fails to make money, you will have less money to make another one. If your computer does not make money, it is by this defintion - low quality.
The laptop market has many requirements, but is primarily governed by power, performance and cost. Obviously AMD is failing to meet these requirements given their low marketshare. Computer makers are overwhelmingly choosing Intel based on their criteria of maximizing profit - which as said earlier is a function of power, performance and cost. Customers of computer makers prefer to have an Intel product otherwise there would be more AMD laptops given the computer maker's desire to maximize profits.
IBM has 2 design teams AMD has 2 design teams Sun has 1 design team Intel has the rest - far far greater than 2
Intel has marshalled the majority of the CPU engineering talent
- The Oregon Pentium (P6 and P4) design team is intact. - The Pentium-M design team is intact - Motorola/IBM talent went to work for Intel in Texas. - The Alpha design team works for Intel now - The HP PA-RISC design team works for Intel now
How much software exists for Cell? Uh-huh, I thought so. How much software will be written for Cell in the future given that it has non-coherent memory and a wacky implementation-dependent programming model? And you thought parallel programming for coherent memory was hard...
We'll be running x86 100 years after I'm dead. IBM and Sun will be the last ones to figure that out.
I think Steve Jobs knows more about Intel's , AMD's and IBM's roadmap than you do. He's responsible for leading a multi-billion dollar corporation and is likely advised by experts that know 1000x more than you do. He knows what he is doing as evidenced by the stock price since he took charge.
How do you know where Intel vs. AMD is in 2006? Do you have processor samples? What is the probability that AMD will maintain a lead over Intel in the future? What is the probability that AMD will even be able to supply Apple 2-3 years out?
You're extrapolating performance from chips that are sold today - the chips on the market were designed 3-4 years ago, sometimes longer. Future chips are being designed now and big customers are advised of their progress and future performance.
Jobs is not making a smart decision? Get real. If AMD is so power efficient, why are they only in 5% of laptops?
If any of this is true, which I'm not at all sure it is, why does everyone think it's going to be an x86 chip?
Because it makes no financial sense for Intel to build a PPC. Apple has a relatively small market share (3%). Intel is limited by design engineers and fab capacity. To dedicate an entire design team for PPC to increase revenue by 3% is a ridiculously stupid tradeoff.
Add to the fact that it is trivial to add big endian support to x86 and there exist binary translators, and the rumor has substance. IBM is obviously not competitive going forward (2006+) which is forcing apple into this corner.
Slashdot Mirror
Sheesh! First Sun is criticised for producting overpriced machines, then criticised for cutting the prices!
Actually, this sums up the problems at Sun very nicely.
They can't sell their high end machines for the prices they used to charge in the 90s because of a number of factors - Cheap linux clusters, high performance PC workstations, strong IBM and HP enterprise competition etc...
On the other hand, they can't go with cheap computers because they don't have the economy of scale to make that profitable. Also they need to invest in OS R&D, Microprocessor R&D, Systems R&D etc... Whereas a company like Dell has 0 R&D and just slaps a system together with screwdrivers and gets extremely low pricing from component vendors like Intel.
In short - their business model is broken. I have no idea how they can fix it. They will become increasingly irrelevant and die a long slow death due - like SGI.
Since Intel has always been shaky in floating point and probably doesn't really know the meaning of vector I'm wondering how those kinds of apps will fare on the Mactel boxes.
Give me a break. Some of the fastest FP computers on the planet come from Intel and AMD. IBM doesn't publish SPECfp scores for the G5. Ever wonder why?
Arm yourself with an Intel compiler and compile some numeric codes on a high end P4 or Athlon and you will more often than not smoke a G5.
Intel has autovectorization in their compiler, so yes, I believe they do understand it. If you can effectively block your code to fit your kernels in the cache then the P4 should be faster than anything since you won't get branch mispredictions in your loop-heavy code and your floating point is completely pipelined which means you get all of the benfits of the higher frequency and none of the penalty.
I guess you still don't understand capitalism?
You're comparing 2 goverment programs (Soviets vs. NASA). This is not capitalism. There is no profit motive.
How about our vastly superior quality of life due to technology brought forward in the free market? THIS is capitalism.
You're bitter aren't you? :)
The smartest way to build new technologies is to offer some sort of financial reward that exceeds the costs and effort for coming up with such technologies. By definition, it must be "economical" because you need to see a reward that is greater than your investment.
Oh wait - we have that already. It's called CAPITALISM.
Go to Soviet Russia for communist technology "contests" and see how far that sort of "innovation" takes you.
Sun was implementing the classic "trojan horse" strategy. Implement something in a half assed way and say - "look how shitty this is" - Come to Solaris!
Kind of like x86 on Solaris. Look at how shitty this is...come to SPARC. When really, there is no fundamental reason that x86 solaris should be shitty.
Unfortunately, Linux had and is gaining too much momentum in the marketplace for this strategy to work. Sun is as good as dead. They get more irrelevant with each passing day.
It's not a zero sum game. If you bought some stock, you'd also benefit as the total pie gets larger.
In fact, many middle class people have stock in retirement accounts. Wealth is created through accumulation of income-producing-assets and the compounding of growth of those assets.
A share of stock entitles you to a share of all future earnings. Increased earnings implies increased shareholder value.
Also, I don't know where you get your 86% number. Most stock is owned by mutual funds (just look up the "major holders" of any stock on yahoo finance - Fidelity and Vanguard usually top most lists). Mutual funds manage money for the middle class.
Rich people use hedge funds.
Our private property is already forcibly taken away from us every single year in the form of income tax.
Where is the outrage against wreckless government spending? This has a far larger negative economic impact than a few houses in Connecticut.
People confuse its and it's for another reason. There is an inconsistent usage.
Tom's hardware - uses an apostrophe to denote possession.
It's hardware - would be consistent with that rule but there's a special case which says you must use its.
Hyperthreading is Intel's marketing name for something people in research and academia call SMT (simultaneous multithreading). It is not a kludge - it's actually a good idea that lets applications use the processor more efficiently.
Out-of-order execution processors do not make efficient use of resources. For example a peak instruction throughput of 3 on a typical Opteron is not acheived on average. It's more like 1.5 instructions per clock. Half of the resources go unused on average. If you could allow another thread to execute "simultaneously" in the pipeline then you could make use of the idle resources.
It's pretty complicated to implement because now the hardware has to track the state and arbitrate resources for 2 threads of execution throughout the entire pipeline. AMD probably doesn't have the engineering resources (engineering time/schedule) to do it, but they would if they could. Intel had some partially functional SMT hardware disabled on the first incarnations of the P4 (Willamette). They used Willamette to debug it and finally make it work on Northwood.
Multi-core can be looked at as an EXTREME example of SMT. All of the resources (except for the L2 cache) are duplicated to allow 2 threads to run simultaneously on the same piece of silicon. It is far less complicated because you've just duplicated everything and there is no arbitration logic for things that are shared with the exception of the L2 cache of course.
There are many degrees of SMT having to do with what resources are shared and what are duplicated.
Benchmarks of Prescott over Northwood say the older design is the better buy at the same clock speed.
That is true but Prescotts have 64 bits and Northwoods do not. Prescott is also on a 90nm process which makes it cheaper for Intel to manufacture and can lower prices to consumers. Prescott also has better SMT (hyperthreading) performance than Northwood.
The fact that Intel made 30 billion dollars last year tells me that people are still buying Intel either as new computers or to replace older ones or both. Therefore, they must see value in Prescott since it represents a large proportion of Intel's profits.
I meant to say that x86 implementations have the most innovative microarchitectures on the planet.
The reasons for this are as you stated - economies of scale.
It comes down to managers that don't know a damned thing about the tech, but making all the decisions on it. These other architectures had more growth potential, higher performance, and better overall design than any Intel chip released in the x86 line. The downside was mostly in channel cost. Since they weren't already abundant, they were expensive. If they were mass produced, they wouldn't be any different in cost than the x86 market is.
I hope you're not the CEO of some company. If you are, let me know what your company is so I can short your stock on Monday morning. It seems that those managers know more about tech and finance than you.
What did you expect managers to do? Increase costs to get a processor that runs only 1% of the world's software? How do you suppose x86 became abundant whereas other architectures did not? It's all about the software... Tech savvy people know that. IBM, HP, Digital, Sun should have all forseen the tremendous potential in x86 software and started competing with Intel by making their own x86 parts.
The ISA is such a red herring. I am paid to design x86 microprocessors and I can tell you that there's an internal instruction set that is optimized for the hardware. Intel/AMD do a translation in hardware, Transmeta does it in software. In any case, x86 is just a thin layer around what is really going on inside. That layer amounts to a tiny amount of the chip power and area budgets. A small price to pay for the privelege of being able to run 99% of the world's software.
I will agree with you on one thing. Itanium is the dumbest thing Intel has ever done. No software - no market...
This is a fairly sad state of affairs... the processor family really has some legs left to it, but it was killed by HP for mostly political reasons
If by "political", you mean "save a ton of money and increase profitability" then yes.
Computer manufacturers are in the business of making money. The ONLY reason to build a computer is to make money.
In case you hadn't noticed yet -- designing microprocessors is astronomically expensive. Because PA-RISC is such a low volume product, it makes little financial sense to pour billions of dollars into it when your return on investment is negative. It's the same reason that HP doesn't design and fab their own DRAM.
Off-the-shelf Pentiums or Opterons can't really compete with POWER or Fujitsu's next gen SPARC designs. x86 Unix systems have largely been also-rans... Data General, Sequent(Now IBM xSeries), even Sun's new Opteron boxes are largely a side show to their SPARC business.
I guess you haven't seen any SPEC or TPC benchmarks lately. You must by using 1990s technology. x86 is very competitive with SPARC and POWER. In fact, it isn't even a contest if you were to equip the x86es with the same sized caches of their POWER and SPARC counterparts.
IBM microelectronics loses money every single year. Sun has a negative return on investment for SPARC. 10 years from now, you won't have have SPARC or POWER machines built anymore.
Sun's Opteron boxes were necessary to hide the abyssmal performance of SPARC.
These aren't market or competitive pressures ('cuz IBM's doing just fine with bespoke silicon at the high end), but political mangement dictates that turned some premier computer science powerhouses into shambling wrecks.
Look up the latest Edgar financial filings on IBM and read about their microelectronics division. They lose money every single year. If one of the largest computer companies in the world can't make money with their own semiconductor division, what does that say? Obviously they are not competitive.
This "mass extinction" of competing hardware architectures is not good for innovation. The Wintel PC is not the pinnical of hardware architectures, it's pretty bass-ackward and stone age compared to what used to be out there
x86 has the most innovative microarchitectures on the planet. How you do you think they compete performance-wise with more elegant ISAs? It isn't just Wintel anymore. It's Apple-Intel, Win-AMD, Win-tel, Linux-tel, Linux-AMD.
There will still be competition. AMD competes with Intel pretty well which keeps the trend of innovation going. Even Intel must compete with Intel. Who is going to buy a new computer if all Intel does is release something that does not have value over the previous generation?
Now, what I want to know is... if these machines have EVERYTHING any other PC does, why is it not possible to run a copy of MacOSX on a normal white box PC.
I'm sure there will be people that will be able to make this possible. Even if Apple did use some custom firmware, there's going to be someone around to reverse engineer it just like the BIOS/clone companies did to IBM back in the 80s. I can see a market for "mod chips" developing.
Well, you'd search for words close to the link and then get to the link. It's still more efficient for a competent typist. But of course this won't work very well for image based links, but one could conceive of ways around this too.
The problem with purely keyboard based interfaces is that they aren't as easy to learn because you have to map keystrokes to do certain things (like search) which gets in the way of user-friendliness. I'd love it if we could have both.
I think you're confused. Stock is not debt. Debt is debt. If google issued bonds, then you could make a case for google's debt.
A share of stock entitles you to a share of all future earning of the company. Stocks are valued based on how much the investor thinks the company can earn from today until the end of time with future earnings discounted to the present value (which is why stock prices are a function of real interest rates and inflation).
If google quadruples earnings next year and the stock price remains flat, then the P/E goes from 113 or so to 28.25. People are very optimistic about GOOG increasing the "E" in the P/E at a very fast and sustainable rate.
TWX grows earnings as a function of how many subscribers it has - TWX has saturated the cable market already and is trying to diversify into telco services. It's hard for TWX to grow, so the value of future earnings is limited.
GOOG is growing much faster than TWX. It is an infant in the media industry. Last year there were 600 billion dollars spent on advertising. How many of those dollars do you think GOOG can catch?
Google's revenue:
2002 $0.439 Billion
2003 $1.465 Billion
2004 $3.189 Billion
Do you see a trend here?
3 is nowhere near 600. Investors are betting that GOOG gets a much larger share of that advertising market.
Why do advertisers prefer GOOG? Directed audiences... Cheaper production costs... higher hit rates... the list goes on and on.
How much time do you spend getting your news from cable-tv vs. the internet? How much time do you spend reading magazines vs. articles on the net? Once Hollywood starts getting a clue and builds out an online content distribution model, how much are you going to be willing pay for cable-tv, when you'll be able to stream at your convenience to your HDTV wirelessly?
The stock market is always looking forward. Investors can see the giant potential here. GOOG may be cheap at this price, but it is obviously not without risks - I am not an investor, since I think that Yahoo and Microsoft will throw up some big speed bumps to GOOG's earnings growth.
Well maybe you're not representative.
In fact, Google and their customers can track exactly how many times the link was clicked. Google makes real money. Their earning are growing at a tremendous rate.
When the company went public last year nobody knew how much it could earn. Given the numbers it's putting up today, it had an IPO P/E lower than Gillette or Coca-Cola (2 companies that are hardly monster growth stocks).
Investors are assigning a high value to google because they believe that earning can continue to grow at that fantastic pace, so that by this time next year, the P/E will have shrunk again because the E is growing so freaking fast.
The E is growing fast because boatloads of people are clicking on those non-descript non-intrusive ads. Frankly, I hope google annihilates the traditional media companies and sucks out all of their ad dollars so we won't have to put up with ridiculous commercials on TV, in magazines and on billboards anymore.
Go google!
tab 30 times till the correct hyperlink is selected in my browser
This is a function of an inferior keyboard interface. You'd really want to be able to incrementally search for the link by typing in the letters of the link's name.
Tom's Hardware has some interesting benchmarks with a Dothan in a desktop system with a halfway decent memory system.
- 21.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050525/pentium4
Argumentum ad populum; marketshare of $product doesn't say anything about quality of $product
:= quality = profit = F(power, performance, cost)
But in this case "populum" = quality
It depends on how you define "quality". Computer makers define quality by how much money they can make with a given product.
The only reason to build a computer is to make money. If a computer fails to make money, you will have less money to make another one. If your computer does not make money, it is by this defintion - low quality.
The laptop market has many requirements, but is primarily governed by power, performance and cost. Obviously AMD is failing to meet these requirements given their low marketshare. Computer makers are overwhelmingly choosing Intel based on their criteria of maximizing profit - which as said earlier is a function of power, performance and cost. Customers of computer makers prefer to have an Intel product otherwise there would be more AMD laptops given the computer maker's desire to maximize profits.
Populum = customer_demand
Given:
Profit_Intel > Profit_Amd
Therefore:
F_Intel() > F_Amd() implies quality_intel > quality_Amd
QED.
IBM has 2 design teams
AMD has 2 design teams
Sun has 1 design team
Intel has the rest - far far greater than 2
Intel has marshalled the majority of the CPU engineering talent
- The Oregon Pentium (P6 and P4) design team is intact.
- The Pentium-M design team is intact
- Motorola/IBM talent went to work for Intel in Texas.
- The Alpha design team works for Intel now
- The HP PA-RISC design team works for Intel now
How much software exists for Cell? Uh-huh, I thought so. How much software will be written for Cell in the future given that it has non-coherent memory and a wacky implementation-dependent programming model? And you thought parallel programming for coherent memory was hard...
We'll be running x86 100 years after I'm dead. IBM and Sun will be the last ones to figure that out.
I think Steve Jobs knows more about Intel's , AMD's and IBM's roadmap than you do. He's responsible for leading a multi-billion dollar corporation and is likely advised by experts that know 1000x more than you do. He knows what he is doing as evidenced by the stock price since he took charge.
How do you know where Intel vs. AMD is in 2006? Do you have processor samples? What is the probability that AMD will maintain a lead over Intel in the future? What is the probability that AMD will even be able to supply Apple 2-3 years out?
You're extrapolating performance from chips that are sold today - the chips on the market were designed 3-4 years ago, sometimes longer. Future chips are being designed now and big customers are advised of their progress and future performance.
Jobs is not making a smart decision? Get real. If AMD is so power efficient, why are they only in 5% of laptops?
If any of this is true, which I'm not at all sure it is, why does everyone think it's going to be an x86 chip?
Because it makes no financial sense for Intel to build a PPC. Apple has a relatively small market share (3%). Intel is limited by design engineers and fab capacity. To dedicate an entire design team for PPC to increase revenue by 3% is a ridiculously stupid tradeoff.
Add to the fact that it is trivial to add big endian support to x86 and there exist binary translators, and the rumor has substance. IBM is obviously not competitive going forward (2006+) which is forcing apple into this corner.
Via was able to enter the "market" because that "market" has no money in it.
Intel is interested in making money as evidenced by the 30 billion they made last year.
Getting back to financials. Apple has a 2% global PC dollar market share. The most expensive resources at Intel are
a) engineering design time.
b) fab capacity
Hmm... So to increase our revenue by 2% let's invest 15% of our resources to build a PPC?
Put the crack pipe down.
>> I predict that Intel will either manufacture a Cell derivative or a big-endian, possibly non-x86 propreitary CPU and chipset.
And monkeys will fly out of my ass.
Why would Intel devote an entire design team to build something for Apple with it's meagre 2% PC market share? It makes no financial sense.