The Opterons in the new series have a TDP of 65W or 95W for the 8-core models. At the expense of being clocked lower than a FX-8350, but the performance per watt is still better than for the FX-8350.
Looking at the 4 core models, the 3350HE may be a worthy replacement for the Athlon II X4 910e I have in my current desktop: Four cores like the Athlon, 2.8 GHz clock speed where the Athlon had 2.6 GHz and only 45W TDP versus the 65W of the Athlon. In terms of pricing, the 3350HE seems to be similar to where the old Athlon was (right now, price comparisons in the EU come up blank for both).
With most proprietary software, you won't get the source code at all. You get a binary compiled by the vendor. With a completely new architecture, most software vendors won't bother to support it (that might change if you get to ARM or x86 levels of popularity).
Being compatible with proprietary licenses would be the least of your problems;-)
Even if the switching costs were certain to be amortized within a year you might not be able to switch e.g. because there is no money for a steep short-term investment
If that is the case, the company is either barely staying afloat or it has a management problem. Because an investment that amortizes itself within a year is an extermely good one. Most investments yield much lower interests.
For the older farts among us, Akira Kurosawa and Stanley Kubrick are still relevant. Both of them WAY greater artists than George Lucas.
Even if you strictly limit the comparison to living artists, I'd rate Ridley Scott a bit higher. Sure he made some weak films too, but his better ones beat Star Wars IMHO.
A physical reset button that restores the factory settings is OK. While there is some abuse potential, an attacker has to get to the printer first which rules out purely remote hacks.
But a hardcoded admin account that cannot be switched off? Baaad idea.
But I have no desire to get stuck on some locked down ARM wannabe playing Angry Birds, I want AAA gaming, I want to be able to transcode, I want to be able to build up my system as time goes on, and if this is true that just means Intel won't be coming near any of my computers, the loss of choice won't be worth the increased IPC.
I'm a bit worried about the "locked down" myself, but I think performance will eventually sort itself out. The latest ARMs (Cortex A15) seem to have a performance per core similar to an old Pentium 4. "Seem" because the comparison is based on a Javascript benchmark only, but for the purpose of this discussion its good enough. ARM is now getting into the performace levels of older desktop machines.
So give it a few more years and we might see ARMs that match our current AMD Phenoms. Which are quite sufficient to play today's games. If I get to keep that quality in graphics and frame rates, that's good enough for me. The latest Broadwell may run games in 4k resolution by then, but that is a "nice to have" for me, not a "must have".
They would have to drop PCIExpress and any comparable multipurpose, high speed bus systems. Otherwise others (NVidia, AMD) can build a graphics card for that bus. If they do that and AMD still exists at the time, they would practically hand over the enthusuiast market to them.
X3 fan here, but I agree that some things need improvement. In particular building of factory complexes and fleet command. Factory complexes look more like a crude hack than a carefully designed feature, and fleet command was obviously never meant to be a central part of the game. Yet you can own lots of ships, which makes the lack of a good fleet command interface a letdown.
Now Egosoft, the developers of X3, are actually rebooting the X series with X-Rebirth (in development). From what has been announced so far, there are promising things (modular building of stations and capships, both of which can get really massive) and not so promising things (you are stuck to one relatively small ship throughout the game).
In case of EVE, changing the NPC equipment and behavior to be more like players' could help. Such as
-Make NPCs try to run or warp away, when they see themselves outgunned. Now you need warp and engine scramblers like in PvP, to keep the opponent from simply running away.
-Less but more dangerous NPC opponents to make electronic warfare worthwhile in PvE. Right now, jamming one in a dozen NPC enemies does not help much, 90% of the enemy firepower will still be on you. Against two or three, successfully jamming one would take away a significant part of the threat.
Linux drivers tend to stay around longer. Compare the release notes for Mesa 8.0, where some drivers were deprecated - but those were for hardware released in the 1990s. Now some of those were described as unsupported anyway, so the actual "support" may have been of dubious quality. But I still get the impression that the Windows world is faster to drop support for old hardware,
In the Windows world, you can usually stick to the old drivers as long as you keep the old OS. For instance, I've recently reinstalled my sister's PC from ~2006 with XP. The old XP drivers for the ATI GPU (R600 series) were still available for download and worked fine.
But problems may arise if you want to install a newer Windows version. AMD/ATI tends to drop older models from new drivers after a few years. In case of the PC above, it happened this summer with Catalyst 12.6. So I guess it would be still possible to use this PC with Catalyst 12.6 and Windows 7, but Windows 8 might be out.
And she's a judge who knows that her job isn't to generate bargaining chips in commercial contracts negotiations.
I think the courts's verdict would have been a bit more than a bargaining chip. It would have been binding unless overruled on appeal. Which would require the appealing party to convince another court that the verdict was faulty.
This said, should such negotiations be handled by the courts at all? In general, I think no. But if a patent holder promises FRAND licensing and then demands extortionate license fees, an exception may be reasonable. So Apple could have a case here, but I also think the burden of proof should be on them.
It wiped the floor with the Pentium 4. But not much later, the Core2Duo from Intel showed up. Since that time, Intel has dominated the high end on desktop x86. The Phenom II was not bad, but it could never quite catch the best Intel CPUs.
In theory, yes (I'll take your word for it). But in practice, something went wrong. In actual benchmarks, the four-module/8-core FX8150 could barely beat the fastest Phenom II X6 "Thuban" 1100T, despite being made in 32nm instead of 40nm like the Phenom II. Using your metric of "75% more performance - in the worst case", the FX8150 should have performed like a 7-core Thuban, not counting any advantages from the improved manufacturing process. As it is, it did perform much like a 7-core Thuban. Except that in some benchmarks the Thuban actually won.
A Thuban 6-core in in 32nm would probably perform on the level of the FX8150. A Thuban 8-core in in 32nm might even beat the "Piledriver" FX8350.
In my experience, old RAM types stay available. Not necessarily from the same company, but at least you still get stuff that matches the standard. Looking at the offers on Alternate.de (for instance), they still sell SDRAM and the original DDR. There are only two caveats: 1) "Exotic" stuff like ECC RAM may be hard to get. For instance, I've searched for 2) The prices tend to be similar to the original market rate (but IMHO not worse). At some point, those old RAM standards go from "actively developed" to "we'll just keep a production line running and charge the same prices, until no one buys that stuff anymore".
Of course, original market rate looks rather bad compared to the current prices for DDR3. I can't remember the exact prices, but I think I payed more for the 128 MByte in my first self-built PC (around the year 2000) than for the 4 GByte in my last upgrade 2011.
I'm sure there will be some initial problems. Such as some drivers not being very good.
But with GPUs in particular, I guess Valve can get away with a few "recommended configurations". Such as NVidia cards with binary drivers. While those are not exactly in the spirit of FOSS, they may be a pragmatic way to get things started.
I'll be optimistic and say that some good things may come from Steam games running well on a few selected graphics cards. It would increase the pressure on other vendors to put some more effort in upgrading their Linux drivers.
GP here. I have talked to the top project manager and told him that we would only be able to do a inferior version in that timeframe. My impression was that he understands the problem, but can't do much because the deadline is set from even higher up in the hierarchy. Overall, it looks like top management pulled the date for the deadline out of their collective ass, instead of doing an estimate first:-(
Now having said all that, a lot of the coding work out there is mop up work. It would be nice if everything I worked on was original code but that's just not the case.
To me it is more important if I get the time to do it right. Refactoring existing code and making it more robust can be rewarding too.
Maybe the guy just did the best he could with the time he had
Eek yeah. On my current project, the release date is so tight that we have to do it the quick and dirty way. Instead of porting everything to C# (for which there is not sufficient time), we have to keep a lot of the old Delphi code and stick it into the new application as DLL. I'm sure it will do wonders for maintainability;-)
It also depends on the type of the project..Net is nice for applications that consist mostly of "business logic", but if you have to do a lot of low-level programming or use a lot of legacy DLLs, it becomes a PITA. Because in these cases, you have to put in extra effort to create data structures with guaranteed memory layouts, keep the garbage collector from killing them at the wrong time etc... Now all of that is doable, but at some point you're IMHO better off sticking to C or C++ .
Compared to the Phenom II in 40 nm, I guess that Piledriver is finally faster. There were a few benchmarks where a Phenom II X6 could beat a Bulldozer, but IIRC only by a few percent. Which is not enough to beat the Piledriver in the same tests.
Now I still wonder how a Phenom II in 32 nm would have performed. That hypothetical chip might still embarass the Piledriver;-)
CFLs and LEDs are still better in terms of efficiency than halogen bulbs.
Now I had mixed results with CFLs myself, depending on brand (I'm living and buying the things in Germany). Osram are quite OK so far, I had only one die on me and that after several years. Megaman have truly disappointed, 3 out of 4 broken within a few months.
Gonna try LED next, even if they are a bit more expensive. I've seen a 60W equivalent with a pleasant semi-warm white light, and at 18 Euros it is not excessively expensive:-)
I also like the UI better than that of Firefox - the latter is a bit too eager to hide everything in drop-down menus. While that does save some screen real estate, I prefer the Seamonkey approach that leaves some more controls in plain sight.
Slashdot Mirror
The Opterons in the new series have a TDP of 65W or 95W for the 8-core models. At the expense of being clocked lower than a FX-8350, but the performance per watt is still better than for the FX-8350.
Looking at the 4 core models, the 3350HE may be a worthy replacement for the Athlon II X4 910e I have in my current desktop:
Four cores like the Athlon, 2.8 GHz clock speed where the Athlon had 2.6 GHz and only 45W TDP versus the 65W of the Athlon. In terms of pricing, the 3350HE seems to be similar to where the old Athlon was (right now, price comparisons in the EU come up blank for both).
The price and the quality generally correlate.
Unfortunately, that is only half true. There is generally a minimum price for decent quality, but you can also pay lots of money for crap ;-)
With most proprietary software, you won't get the source code at all. You get a binary compiled by the vendor. With a completely new architecture, most software vendors won't bother to support it (that might change if you get to ARM or x86 levels of popularity).
Being compatible with proprietary licenses would be the least of your problems ;-)
Only that it is not dead. It is called "Sea Monkey" these days, and I still use it :)
Even if the switching costs were certain to be amortized within a year you might not be able to switch e.g. because there is no money for a steep short-term investment
If that is the case, the company is either barely staying afloat or it has a management problem. Because an investment that amortizes itself within a year is an extermely good one. Most investments yield much lower interests.
For the older farts among us, Akira Kurosawa and Stanley Kubrick are still relevant. Both of them WAY greater artists than George Lucas.
Even if you strictly limit the comparison to living artists, I'd rate Ridley Scott a bit higher. Sure he made some weak films too, but his better ones beat Star Wars IMHO.
A physical reset button that restores the factory settings is OK. While there is some abuse potential, an attacker has to get to the printer first which rules out purely remote hacks.
But a hardcoded admin account that cannot be switched off? Baaad idea.
But I have no desire to get stuck on some locked down ARM wannabe playing Angry Birds, I want AAA gaming, I want to be able to transcode, I want to be able to build up my system as time goes on, and if this is true that just means Intel won't be coming near any of my computers, the loss of choice won't be worth the increased IPC.
I'm a bit worried about the "locked down" myself, but I think performance will eventually sort itself out. The latest ARMs (Cortex A15) seem to have a performance per core similar to an old Pentium 4. "Seem" because the comparison is based on a Javascript benchmark only, but for the purpose of this discussion its good enough. ARM is now getting into the performace levels of older desktop machines.
So give it a few more years and we might see ARMs that match our current AMD Phenoms. Which are quite sufficient to play today's games. If I get to keep that quality in graphics and frame rates, that's good enough for me. The latest Broadwell may run games in 4k resolution by then, but that is a "nice to have" for me, not a "must have".
They would have to drop PCIExpress and any comparable multipurpose, high speed bus systems. Otherwise others (NVidia, AMD) can build a graphics card for that bus. If they do that and AMD still exists at the time, they would practically hand over the enthusuiast market to them.
X3 fan here, but I agree that some things need improvement. In particular building of factory complexes and fleet command. Factory complexes look more like a crude hack than a carefully designed feature, and fleet command was obviously never meant to be a central part of the game. Yet you can own lots of ships, which makes the lack of a good fleet command interface a letdown.
Now Egosoft, the developers of X3, are actually rebooting the X series with X-Rebirth (in development). From what has been announced so far, there are promising things (modular building of stations and capships, both of which can get really massive) and not so promising things (you are stuck to one relatively small ship throughout the game).
Not sure yet if I'll buy it...
In case of EVE, changing the NPC equipment and behavior to be more like players' could help. Such as
-Make NPCs try to run or warp away, when they see themselves outgunned. Now you need warp and engine scramblers like in PvP, to keep the opponent from simply running away.
-Less but more dangerous NPC opponents to make electronic warfare worthwhile in PvE. Right now, jamming one in a dozen NPC enemies does not help much, 90% of the enemy firepower will still be on you. Against two or three, successfully jamming one would take away a significant part of the threat.
Linux drivers tend to stay around longer. Compare the release notes for Mesa 8.0, where some drivers were deprecated - but those were for hardware released in the 1990s.
Now some of those were described as unsupported anyway, so the actual "support" may have been of dubious quality. But I still get the impression that the Windows world is faster to drop support for old hardware,
Typically if you have Linux, old drivers aren't deprecated ever.
Sometimes they are. See http://www.mesa3d.org/relnotes-8.0.html. But those tend to be for really old GPUs, in this case mostly from the 1990s.
In the Windows world, you can usually stick to the old drivers as long as you keep the old OS. For instance, I've recently reinstalled my sister's PC from ~2006 with XP. The old XP drivers for the ATI GPU (R600 series) were still available for download and worked fine.
But problems may arise if you want to install a newer Windows version. AMD/ATI tends to drop older models from new drivers after a few years. In case of the PC above, it happened this summer with Catalyst 12.6. So I guess it would be still possible to use this PC with Catalyst 12.6 and Windows 7, but Windows 8 might be out.
And she's a judge who knows that her job isn't to generate bargaining chips in commercial contracts negotiations.
I think the courts's verdict would have been a bit more than a bargaining chip. It would have been binding unless overruled on appeal. Which would require the appealing party to convince another court that the verdict was faulty.
This said, should such negotiations be handled by the courts at all?
In general, I think no. But if a patent holder promises FRAND licensing and then demands extortionate license fees, an exception may be reasonable. So Apple could have a case here, but I also think the burden of proof should be on them.
It wiped the floor with the Pentium 4. But not much later, the Core2Duo from Intel showed up. Since that time, Intel has dominated the high end on desktop x86. The Phenom II was not bad, but it could never quite catch the best Intel CPUs.
In theory, yes (I'll take your word for it). But in practice, something went wrong. In actual benchmarks, the four-module/8-core FX8150 could barely beat the fastest Phenom II X6 "Thuban" 1100T, despite being made in 32nm instead of 40nm like the Phenom II.
Using your metric of "75% more performance - in the worst case", the FX8150 should have performed like a 7-core Thuban, not counting any advantages from the improved manufacturing process. As it is, it did perform much like a 7-core Thuban. Except that in some benchmarks the Thuban actually won.
A Thuban 6-core in in 32nm would probably perform on the level of the FX8150. A Thuban 8-core in in 32nm might even beat the "Piledriver" FX8350.
So one really has to wonder what happened at AMD. Maybe the anonymous AMD ex-employee told the truth about a premature switch to automated design. (see http://www.insideris.com/amd-spreads-propaganda-ex-employee-speaks-out/)
I was going to write "For instance, I've searched for ECC SDRAM, and found only a handful of offers at all".
Slashdot could use an edit function...
In my experience, old RAM types stay available. Not necessarily from the same company, but at least you still get stuff that matches the standard. Looking at the offers on Alternate.de (for instance), they still sell SDRAM and the original DDR. There are only two caveats:
1) "Exotic" stuff like ECC RAM may be hard to get. For instance, I've searched for
2) The prices tend to be similar to the original market rate (but IMHO not worse). At some point, those old RAM standards go from "actively developed" to "we'll just keep a production line running and charge the same prices, until no one buys that stuff anymore".
Of course, original market rate looks rather bad compared to the current prices for DDR3. I can't remember the exact prices, but I think I payed more for the 128 MByte in my first self-built PC (around the year 2000) than for the 4 GByte in my last upgrade 2011.
I'm sure there will be some initial problems. Such as some drivers not being very good.
But with GPUs in particular, I guess Valve can get away with a few "recommended configurations". Such as NVidia cards with binary drivers. While those are not exactly in the spirit of FOSS, they may be a pragmatic way to get things started.
I'll be optimistic and say that some good things may come from Steam games running well on a few selected graphics cards. It would increase the pressure on other vendors to put some more effort in upgrading their Linux drivers.
GP here. :-(
I have talked to the top project manager and told him that we would only be able to do a inferior version in that timeframe. My impression was that he understands the problem, but can't do much because the deadline is set from even higher up in the hierarchy.
Overall, it looks like top management pulled the date for the deadline out of their collective ass, instead of doing an estimate first
Now having said all that, a lot of the coding work out there is mop up work. It would be nice if everything I worked on was original code but that's just not the case.
To me it is more important if I get the time to do it right. Refactoring existing code and making it more robust can be rewarding too.
Maybe the guy just did the best he could with the time he had
Eek yeah. On my current project, the release date is so tight that we have to do it the quick and dirty way. Instead of porting everything to C# (for which there is not sufficient time), we have to keep a lot of the old Delphi code and stick it into the new application as DLL. I'm sure it will do wonders for maintainability ;-)
It also depends on the type of the project. .Net is nice for applications that consist mostly of "business logic", but if you have to do a lot of low-level programming or use a lot of legacy DLLs, it becomes a PITA. Because in these cases, you have to put in extra effort to create data structures with guaranteed memory layouts, keep the garbage collector from killing them at the wrong time etc...
Now all of that is doable, but at some point you're IMHO better off sticking to C or C++ .
Compared to the Phenom II in 40 nm, I guess that Piledriver is finally faster. There were a few benchmarks where a Phenom II X6 could beat a Bulldozer, but IIRC only by a few percent. Which is not enough to beat the Piledriver in the same tests.
Now I still wonder how a Phenom II in 32 nm would have performed. That hypothetical chip might still embarass the Piledriver ;-)
CFLs and LEDs are still better in terms of efficiency than halogen bulbs.
Now I had mixed results with CFLs myself, depending on brand (I'm living and buying the things in Germany). Osram are quite OK so far, I had only one die on me and that after several years. Megaman have truly disappointed, 3 out of 4 broken within a few months.
Gonna try LED next, even if they are a bit more expensive. I've seen a 60W equivalent with a pleasant semi-warm white light, and at 18 Euros it is not excessively expensive :-)
Seconded.
I also like the UI better than that of Firefox - the latter is a bit too eager to hide everything in drop-down menus. While that does save some screen real estate, I prefer the Seamonkey approach that leaves some more controls in plain sight.