With organisations like the StaSi and GeStaPo in more recent German history, the protection of the individual's privacy is a serious issue in Germany.
Now and then politicians try to create another surveillance state for example to fight "child pornography", but fortunately they haven't succeeded to enact their crazy laws so far.
Yeah it's curious how AMD advertises their Vishera processors as high performance 8-core gaming processors. Most operations games do on the CPU are floating point based geometry calculations.
For my last hardware upgrade I've chosen an i5-3570k over an FX-8350. Because I often use my PC for gaming I didn't see that much advantages of AMD over Intel on this topic. I did see the higher power consumption of the FX-8350 under full load, which would have made the 20€ I would have saved by buying the AMD appear on my energy bill after about 8 months at today's energy prices in Germany (I pay 0.28€ per kW/h).
Before that I used a Phenom II x955 because it seemed to be the more sensible choice over the Core 2 CPUs back then. I'm more of an opportunist here than loyal to some companies philosophies, which are often circumstantial. So I picked the i5-3570k and ignored how useless its Intel HD 4000 graphics are in comparison to the Radeon HD 7870 that I also bought. I would have bought an i5-3570k equivalent without the IGP, but Intel offer those for a reasonable price.
So yeah, I totally agree that Intel is dumping their APUs where they don't belong simply to justify higher prices.
Yeah, no argument there when it comes to desktop performance and high performance tasks. Here users want performance and they get performance with advanced discrete hardware. I would neither choose an APU over discrete hardware in my desktop machine nor recommend it to other people who use their computers for similar task, because here I prefer modularity.
And sure it won't take game devs very long to find the boundaries of APUs, that's a problem for any system where hardware is difficult to upgrade or cannot be upgraded, like in gaming consoles. Discrete hardware won't do much for these devices since those are not meant to be upgraded by the consumer, because that might be too inconvenient to have the user worry about these 'highly complex' problems. And this is where such solutions are used, because of the price, price of the hardware, price of the space required for hardware and cooling system and the simplicity of not having to deal with additional hardware manufacturers.
Enough reasons to justify the use of an APU from an economical perspective.
What I don't get is the hate companies like Intel or AMD receive in this 'war'. I as a user choose whatever is best to complete the task in and for a set time frame, I see no reasons to be a loyal customer to any of those hardware companies, whether it is Intel, AMD or nVidia.
Bottom line: The worst thing about this is that Intel will use their IGP to justify higher prices of their products and dump them on everyone, no matter what tasks their product is going to perform, like high performance gaming where discrete GPUs are common. Currently they don't leave you a choice like AMD does.
I would have thought that was over by now, especially after releasing Trinity, Zambezi, and Vishera. Those 3 really are better than Intel in almost every way.
Gaming would be the exception according to various benchmarks. The currently best Vishera the FX-8350 is barely on par with Intels i5-3570k and requires almost twice as much power under load. The $30 you might safe when buying a Vishera over an i5-3570k will appear on your energy bill after about a year, depending on your CPU usage of course.
But yeah, Intel is playing catch-up, especially since Sony announced to use an AMD APU for their new Playstation.
I'm well aware of this and it only addresses the power consumption of the system and not the additional space discrete hardware requires. I wasn't talking about the noise cooling systems will generate.
Where space is limited, like in most hand held mobile devices, APUs have advantages over discrete CPUs and GPUs, despite their lower raw performance. Also the new gaming console from Sony, the PS4 will use an IGP from AMD, based on their A10 APU.
Of course, when it comes down to raw performance comparison for high performance applications integrated solutions won't be able to keep up with current discrete solutions.
But when you take other criteria into account like the volume that is used by discrete hardware in a casing, the energy consumption and subsequently the need of a cooling systems, then integrated solutions become a lot more attractive.
I realize this is a pretty late reply to your post. But from my experience I've encountered just as much zealous atheists as religious people in my life, of which all of them were Christians, Muslims and various sects of these mainstream religions. I haven't met a single intolerant Jew, Hindu or Buddhist so far, although I strongly assume that those exist since it doesn't require education or intelligence or lack of thereof to believe anything.
But when it comes to arguments about the existence of something, beyond mere faith, the burden of proof doesn't lie upon the non-believer. -> Russell's teapot. This is not only a scientific dogma but a fundamental principle of philosophy, which may also be considered a dogma, but is so far our only way to set a standard without letting everyone create their own reality.
Another thing where I can't blame the more educated atheist is when it comes to Creationism. When people really think that the world was created in such a short time and everything was engineered for a purpose and completely ignore all the evidence we have collected to support evolution, then I can't help myself but to think that my education was indeed superior.
If you're playing EVE without a spreadsheet you're probably not afraid of socializing. Plotting out every step may be necessary if you want to be successful within the game when you're alone or you're managing stuff for a corporation or alliance, but as a part of such a corporation you don't need to see the matrix. Similar to the real world you don't need to do everything yourself, but if you want to, you will encounter some obstacles.
I quit EVE because it got to time consuming for my taste and didn't offer enough options for shorter gaming sessions. You can't do many things if you can't play for an hour or more straight, which is a huge downside of this game. But during my time I had been part of a communistic organized PvP corporation. All I did was to participate in their PvP efforts, they provided everything I needed, my job was to fight and to coordinate within fights, which was possible without the use of any spreadsheets. It 'only' required a potent CPU and GPU for stable performance in large battles. Reimbursing losses after a fight or a war and logistics was not my job, we had players do it who liked to do this. Essentially division of labour.
But this requires cooperation and some trust in other players, at least trust so far you can afford to be betrayed.
Slashdot Mirror
With organisations like the StaSi and GeStaPo in more recent German history, the protection of the individual's privacy is a serious issue in Germany.
Now and then politicians try to create another surveillance state for example to fight "child pornography", but fortunately they haven't succeeded to enact their crazy laws so far.
Yeah it's curious how AMD advertises their Vishera processors as high performance 8-core gaming processors. Most operations games do on the CPU are floating point based geometry calculations.
For my last hardware upgrade I've chosen an i5-3570k over an FX-8350. Because I often use my PC for gaming I didn't see that much advantages of AMD over Intel on this topic. I did see the higher power consumption of the FX-8350 under full load, which would have made the 20€ I would have saved by buying the AMD appear on my energy bill after about 8 months at today's energy prices in Germany (I pay 0.28€ per kW/h).
Before that I used a Phenom II x955 because it seemed to be the more sensible choice over the Core 2 CPUs back then. I'm more of an opportunist here than loyal to some companies philosophies, which are often circumstantial. So I picked the i5-3570k and ignored how useless its Intel HD 4000 graphics are in comparison to the Radeon HD 7870 that I also bought. I would have bought an i5-3570k equivalent without the IGP, but Intel offer those for a reasonable price.
So yeah, I totally agree that Intel is dumping their APUs where they don't belong simply to justify higher prices.
And the best part of it, those don't make you look dorky at all!
Yeah, no argument there when it comes to desktop performance and high performance tasks. Here users want performance and they get performance with advanced discrete hardware. I would neither choose an APU over discrete hardware in my desktop machine nor recommend it to other people who use their computers for similar task, because here I prefer modularity.
And sure it won't take game devs very long to find the boundaries of APUs, that's a problem for any system where hardware is difficult to upgrade or cannot be upgraded, like in gaming consoles. Discrete hardware won't do much for these devices since those are not meant to be upgraded by the consumer, because that might be too inconvenient to have the user worry about these 'highly complex' problems. And this is where such solutions are used, because of the price, price of the hardware, price of the space required for hardware and cooling system and the simplicity of not having to deal with additional hardware manufacturers.
Enough reasons to justify the use of an APU from an economical perspective.
What I don't get is the hate companies like Intel or AMD receive in this 'war'. I as a user choose whatever is best to complete the task in and for a set time frame, I see no reasons to be a loyal customer to any of those hardware companies, whether it is Intel, AMD or nVidia.
Bottom line: The worst thing about this is that Intel will use their IGP to justify higher prices of their products and dump them on everyone, no matter what tasks their product is going to perform, like high performance gaming where discrete GPUs are common. Currently they don't leave you a choice like AMD does.
I would have thought that was over by now, especially after releasing Trinity, Zambezi, and Vishera. Those 3 really are better than Intel in almost every way.
Gaming would be the exception according to various benchmarks. The currently best Vishera the FX-8350 is barely on par with Intels i5-3570k and requires almost twice as much power under load. The $30 you might safe when buying a Vishera over an i5-3570k will appear on your energy bill after about a year, depending on your CPU usage of course.
But yeah, Intel is playing catch-up, especially since Sony announced to use an AMD APU for their new Playstation.
I'm well aware of this and it only addresses the power consumption of the system and not the additional space discrete hardware requires. I wasn't talking about the noise cooling systems will generate.
Where space is limited, like in most hand held mobile devices, APUs have advantages over discrete CPUs and GPUs, despite their lower raw performance. Also the new gaming console from Sony, the PS4 will use an IGP from AMD, based on their A10 APU.
Of course, when it comes down to raw performance comparison for high performance applications integrated solutions won't be able to keep up with current discrete solutions.
But when you take other criteria into account like the volume that is used by discrete hardware in a casing, the energy consumption and subsequently the need of a cooling systems, then integrated solutions become a lot more attractive.
I realize this is a pretty late reply to your post.
But from my experience I've encountered just as much zealous atheists as religious people in my life, of which all of them were Christians, Muslims and various sects of these mainstream religions. I haven't met a single intolerant Jew, Hindu or Buddhist so far, although I strongly assume that those exist since it doesn't require education or intelligence or lack of thereof to believe anything.
But when it comes to arguments about the existence of something, beyond mere faith, the burden of proof doesn't lie upon the non-believer. -> Russell's teapot. This is not only a scientific dogma but a fundamental principle of philosophy, which may also be considered a dogma, but is so far our only way to set a standard without letting everyone create their own reality.
Another thing where I can't blame the more educated atheist is when it comes to Creationism. When people really think that the world was created in such a short time and everything was engineered for a purpose and completely ignore all the evidence we have collected to support evolution, then I can't help myself but to think that my education was indeed superior.
If you're playing EVE without a spreadsheet you're probably not afraid of socializing. Plotting out every step may be necessary if you want to be successful within the game when you're alone or you're managing stuff for a corporation or alliance, but as a part of such a corporation you don't need to see the matrix. Similar to the real world you don't need to do everything yourself, but if you want to, you will encounter some obstacles. I quit EVE because it got to time consuming for my taste and didn't offer enough options for shorter gaming sessions. You can't do many things if you can't play for an hour or more straight, which is a huge downside of this game. But during my time I had been part of a communistic organized PvP corporation. All I did was to participate in their PvP efforts, they provided everything I needed, my job was to fight and to coordinate within fights, which was possible without the use of any spreadsheets. It 'only' required a potent CPU and GPU for stable performance in large battles. Reimbursing losses after a fight or a war and logistics was not my job, we had players do it who liked to do this. Essentially division of labour. But this requires cooperation and some trust in other players, at least trust so far you can afford to be betrayed.