Comparing old technology to new technology and proclaiming it's better was the whole POINT, sarcastic dumbass.
Higher performance with lower power usage from Intel chips over time - hence "Intel has already come up with solutions for standby & lower power scenarios." It shows that Intel is perfectly capable of adapting to market demand, which with recent Macbooks and Ultrabooks includes power efficiency.
That is as has been, but I'm wondering if this is not a strategic move on their part. Perhaps They are thinking of large clusters of low power ARM cores that kick in as the workload demands with some kind of clever way of sharing resources (Freedom Fabric?).... If that server can idle at less than a Watt and then ramp up in small increments as demand requires, that might also yield an overall advantage.
After 20 years of Wintel I finally caved to try a Mac. The new MBP Retina is insanely fast CPU-wise for the same battery use over my old laptop (not quite as much GPU-wise vs my Windows desktop, but we are not talking GPUs). And when I'm not doing much it uses very little power. That's with a 4-core (hyperthreaded to 8) i7.
Intel has already come up with solutions for standby & lower power scenarios - when doing nothing there isn't much difference. When doing "a little bit" ARM definitely wins, and when loaded the ARM isn't even in the equation since it can't come close to the loads of the high end x86-64 CPUs. And it also depends on the application, as you say. For large data-intensive applications the power draw of the motherboard, RAM, HDDs, etc. surpass the CPU anyway so it's diminishing returns.
Anyway, I do think there is a market for low power servers. But it's currently a really low margin, barely profitable market, and will be until power costs are higher than hardware costs for the advantages it brings. And does anyone really think Intel is not capable of adapting to the market at that point to maximize their profits yet again?
Umm, first, this article and thread are talking about iOS, not a desktop OS. So your points are pointless, this is not about i7s, GPUs, and Aero, compiz, etc.
But if you had cared to be relevant you could have pointed out that a couple of leather and chrome graphics around the edges of a mobile app has almost no impact on performance. IMO, yes, they look like shit and I do hope they go away on the iPhone, but "chew up cycles", not so much.
Who want's to make bets on who is going to win this race? AMD has won all of the previous ones.
I assume you are joking, right? It's not a sprint, it's a marathon. Being first to market means nothing, it's winning the market. And Intel is crushing the 64-bit processor market right now.
Note the article says ARM *server* processors. In that market, GPUs are totally irrelevant, power usage is secondary to performance, and price of the CPU is a distant third.
Any ARM CPU is at least an order of magnitude behind the current x86-64 server CPUs. Not to mention the additional work required to support multiple ARM CPUs on a motherboard, and even convince the major server manufacturers to build an ARM-based server in the first place. Good luck AMD, though you won't need it since even luck won't help you here...
Yes - or if it is, it's SO MUCH LESS BROKEN than most of the rest of the American megacorporate culture.
Seriously, worrying if *Google* and *Facebook* are toxic?
How about Philip Morris, Exxon Mobil, McDonald's, Pfizer, Dow, or Anheuser Busch-InBev? Their products are *literally* toxic.
Or Wal-Mart, Bank of America, GlaxoSmithKline, BP, Halliburton, AIG, etc. They are morally bankrupt to the point of billions of dollars in fines and settlements.
Give me a break... prioritize, people. Go after the murderers and rapists first, then the con-artists and shoplifters.
Plenty of people brag about their legal tax breaks, but I don't know too many people in the US bragging about tax evasion. Even criminals aren't that stupid (see Al Capone, et al.). Probably because in the US willful tax evasion will get you federal prison time if you're caught.
In Greece the issue is people not paying the taxes they legally *owe*, and the government either being pussies who won't enforce it or corrupt so that a few bribes get the collectors to ignore it.
And this is so far from "simplifying an unnecessarily complex tax code." Doctors and lawyers getting paid in cash and stashing it in foreign bank accounts and wealthy homeowners hiding their swimming pools with tarps is not someone who doesn't understand the law, it's someone who understands it well and doesn't care about it.
Well, if your friend told you so, then by all means you're right to be modded "informative"
Oh give me a break, it's not like this is something unheard of, it IS an accepted fact that tax evasion in Greece is a huge problem for the government. And of course it's not just the taxpayers fault, nor is everyone doing it (if you have been following American politics at all "47%" of the US doesn't effectively pay any taxes - "the minority" of people doesn't mean it's a small amount of tax revenue - the wealthy in Greece have higher tax bills, and are doing most of the evading). But blaming "the government" for everything (hello, ALL governments spend money on stupid things and are corrupt to some extent) is such a cop out.
And just in case for some bizarre reason you want to pretend it's something I just "heard from one person", here are a few of the thousands of articles written on the topic:
[Some of my favorite quotes - and I'm pretty sure "only the stupid pay tax" would be considering evasion "as an obligation"...]
* Cash provides a convenient escape route for lawyers, accountants and builders. The government has published the names of almost 70 doctors it says have cheated the taxman and some surgeons are said to be earning €900,000 a year and not declaring tax.
* “Only the stupid pay tax,” one eye surgeon told a Greek state radio.
* Helicopters have been hovering over plush suburbs in northern Athens in the search for swimming pools in the homes of professional people who claim they are living on only €35,000-€43,000 a year.... The swimming pool fraternity are also responding by using nets to cover the pools to avoid detection.
True - if it were up to capitalism the government would not be int the state they are in. A lot of citizens might be homeless, underfed, and sick, and Greeks rioting in the streets, but the government wouldn't be broke.
Then again, apparently Greeks will riot in the streets either way, so in the end it may not have made much of a difference.
You joke, but my Greek friend (who's family has a house in Athens that they probably don't pay taxes one) freely admitted tax evasion is practically a national pastime in Greece. They really do consider it not only a right, but almost an obligation.
And you wonder how the Olympics almost bankrupted the government? Well, that attitude towards taxes makes the statement "oh, all of the tax revenues from increased tourism and business in Greece will more than make up for the expenses" a bit hard to back up...
I wonder how else they're going to distribute 4K type video.
Yes, that is exactly why - along with the fact that human eyesight can't really resolve more than 1920x1080 from average viewing distances on mainstream (= 3840 x 2160, there isn't a point. For reference, 35mm film maxes out at about 1400 useful horizontal lines when digitized, and the most common digital film camera in use (the Arri Alexa) has 2880 x 2160 resolution (which would be cropped/matted to ~1550 lines for 1.85:1 widescreen or ~1220 for 2.35:1).
Selling almost $8B in Alibaba stock isn't an assertion, it's a fact. Look it up. It may end up being the main reason Yahoo is around in 5 years.
Sort of like how Tivo is only around because they have sued Dish Network, Verizon, etc for hundreds of millions, not because they are actually making a profit from their service any more...
But Yahoo isn't anything like AOL in terms of survivability. Yahoo made an insanely good investment in Alibaba so now they can pretty much coast on those profits through years of horrible web apps and intrusive advertising...
Yeah, that was actually my point - passive 3D uses horizontally polarized lines on the screen so technically it's interlaced (540 lines) for each eye - but that's not the reason 3D in general has been such a bust.
The reason is partly as you say because it's not that great an experience at home, partly because wearing silly glasses at home sucks, and partly because most 3D content is just plain awful. I've seen maybe 10 movies in the theater in 3D and only 1, maybe 2 were actually enhanced by the experience.
Yes, H.264 can look good at 9Mbps for 1080p, but it's still noticeably better in some scenes (lots of motion, subtle gradients, etc) at twice that w/ significant VBR range. Thing is, there is not a lot of motivation to bother with 4K at a compromised bitrate when you could do 1080p with no noticeable artifacts, and most people can't tell any difference.
And that's great that HKG has unlimited high bitrates like that, but the studios and consumer electronics countries don't target that market, they target the mainstream markets where they can actually make money...
Well, you are entitled to your opinion, of course, but *live* streaming sports apps will be HUGE for consumers, since they are really the last thing keeping many people on traditional broadcast TV services like cable or satellite.
So if you knew apps like MLB at Bat and ESPN on the Xbox 360 could be the death of Comcast as we know it wouldn't that at least make you begrudgingly admit they have a purpose?;)
But anyway, someone who would actually generalize "people who watch sports are mostly just terrible" has some issues (were you attacked by a college mascot as a child?!) so I think it may take a bit more than a "happy, fun Wii game" to get over that...
Have you seen the Xbox Arcade store? Or the Xbox Media Apps? Between those there are something like 600+ inexpensive/free apps to go along with the ~1000 disc based games. Seems like a pretty decent catalog to me, given it's a game console, not a tablet. Sure, they don't have 50 different types of fart app, and no one really cares.
But speaking of tablet - it will be interesting to see whether MS can make SmartGlass work. Basically use a free app on your existing tablet or phone from any manufacturer rather than buy an expensive custom controller. Having seen it in practice a bit, though, my guess is developers won't make much use of it since it's not going to be nearly as good a control mechanism as the Wii U controller, and I can't even begin to imagine how one holds an Xbox controller and tablet at the same time.
One thing that has me confused about the new controller is that its design goals are completely the OPPOSITE of the Wii's controllers.
With the Wii, the goal was to de-empahasize the technology and make games controlled by natural body motions - you look at the TV and don't focus on the controller. With the Wii U they are now sticking a cumbersome tablet with display in both hands so that you are not only required, but encouraged to look down and treat it as a separate mobile device.
If that's what they think people really want, fine... but I would have expected them to be a bit more consistent. Weirdly, it almost feels like they are trying to capture the same users of the Wii in the Wii U - as in *literally* the same, like the 8-10 year olds who loved the Wii are now teenagers so whatever they do has to involve a mobile device in their hands...
With multiple video cards, maybe.... (this would basically be displaying 4 1920x1080 screens). Possible but seriously not mainstream.
But yes, why bother without the content. A BD averages 25-30Mbps. Multiply by 4 and that's over 100Mbps. That's 90GB for a 2 hour movie. Gets to be pretty large... [also compare with the highest end 1080p streaming from a service like VUDU of up to ~9Mbps or 8GB for 2h. Would be 36Mbps / 32GB for a 4K movie, which is way beyond most people's home Internet connection, or even if it isn't providers like Comcast will throttle them after about 3 movies a month]
Maybe, but IMO I just don't see that happening. Even if Sony supports 4K output on their "PS4", why would game developers bother with it when most customers can't tell (or even display) the difference and the alternative is 4X more pixel processing to improve the display on the millions of 1080p TVs already out there.
It feels a bit like 9.1/11.1 audio (or honestly maybe even 7.1) - it has already hit such a diminishing return the vast majority of consumers just don't care.
There really isn't anything displayable on a TV with available hardware that I know of - probably the closest a consumer could get is something decoded on a PC with mulit-monitor and/or special hardware.
And what's even more telling is that most digital theater projectors in use are still 2K (2048x1080) - and in fact a lot of (new and old) movies are still digitized at 2K, so there may not even be 4K sources for most current movies anyway.
While it's true passive 3D requires 2x horizontal lines to get the same resolution, that is so far from the reason 3D has failed in the home market it's barely even worth mentioning...
Slashdot Mirror
Comparing old technology to new technology and proclaiming it's better was the whole POINT, sarcastic dumbass.
Higher performance with lower power usage from Intel chips over time - hence "Intel has already come up with solutions for standby & lower power scenarios." It shows that Intel is perfectly capable of adapting to market demand, which with recent Macbooks and Ultrabooks includes power efficiency.
That is as has been, but I'm wondering if this is not a strategic move on their part. Perhaps They are thinking of large clusters of low power ARM cores that kick in as the workload demands with some kind of clever way of sharing resources (Freedom Fabric?). ...
If that server can idle at less than a Watt and then ramp up in small increments as demand requires, that might also yield an overall advantage.
After 20 years of Wintel I finally caved to try a Mac. The new MBP Retina is insanely fast CPU-wise for the same battery use over my old laptop (not quite as much GPU-wise vs my Windows desktop, but we are not talking GPUs). And when I'm not doing much it uses very little power. That's with a 4-core (hyperthreaded to 8) i7.
Intel has already come up with solutions for standby & lower power scenarios - when doing nothing there isn't much difference. When doing "a little bit" ARM definitely wins, and when loaded the ARM isn't even in the equation since it can't come close to the loads of the high end x86-64 CPUs. And it also depends on the application, as you say. For large data-intensive applications the power draw of the motherboard, RAM, HDDs, etc. surpass the CPU anyway so it's diminishing returns.
Anyway, I do think there is a market for low power servers. But it's currently a really low margin, barely profitable market, and will be until power costs are higher than hardware costs for the advantages it brings. And does anyone really think Intel is not capable of adapting to the market at that point to maximize their profits yet again?
Umm, first, this article and thread are talking about iOS, not a desktop OS. So your points are pointless, this is not about i7s, GPUs, and Aero, compiz, etc.
But if you had cared to be relevant you could have pointed out that a couple of leather and chrome graphics around the edges of a mobile app has almost no impact on performance. IMO, yes, they look like shit and I do hope they go away on the iPhone, but "chew up cycles", not so much.
What people think looks good is almost entirely determined by what designers and marketers tell them looks good anyway.
Who want's to make bets on who is going to win this race? AMD has won all of the previous ones.
I assume you are joking, right? It's not a sprint, it's a marathon. Being first to market means nothing, it's winning the market. And Intel is crushing the 64-bit processor market right now.
Note the article says ARM *server* processors. In that market, GPUs are totally irrelevant, power usage is secondary to performance, and price of the CPU is a distant third.
Any ARM CPU is at least an order of magnitude behind the current x86-64 server CPUs. Not to mention the additional work required to support multiple ARM CPUs on a motherboard, and even convince the major server manufacturers to build an ARM-based server in the first place. Good luck AMD, though you won't need it since even luck won't help you here...
Yes - or if it is, it's SO MUCH LESS BROKEN than most of the rest of the American megacorporate culture.
Seriously, worrying if *Google* and *Facebook* are toxic?
How about Philip Morris, Exxon Mobil, McDonald's, Pfizer, Dow, or Anheuser Busch-InBev? Their products are *literally* toxic.
Or Wal-Mart, Bank of America, GlaxoSmithKline, BP, Halliburton, AIG, etc. They are morally bankrupt to the point of billions of dollars in fines and settlements.
Give me a break... prioritize, people. Go after the murderers and rapists first, then the con-artists and shoplifters.
Tax evasion != tax breaks.
Plenty of people brag about their legal tax breaks, but I don't know too many people in the US bragging about tax evasion. Even criminals aren't that stupid (see Al Capone, et al.). Probably because in the US willful tax evasion will get you federal prison time if you're caught.
In Greece the issue is people not paying the taxes they legally *owe*, and the government either being pussies who won't enforce it or corrupt so that a few bribes get the collectors to ignore it.
And this is so far from "simplifying an unnecessarily complex tax code." Doctors and lawyers getting paid in cash and stashing it in foreign bank accounts and wealthy homeowners hiding their swimming pools with tarps is not someone who doesn't understand the law, it's someone who understands it well and doesn't care about it.
Well, if your friend told you so, then by all means you're right to be modded "informative"
Oh give me a break, it's not like this is something unheard of, it IS an accepted fact that tax evasion in Greece is a huge problem for the government. And of course it's not just the taxpayers fault, nor is everyone doing it (if you have been following American politics at all "47%" of the US doesn't effectively pay any taxes - "the minority" of people doesn't mean it's a small amount of tax revenue - the wealthy in Greece have higher tax bills, and are doing most of the evading). But blaming "the government" for everything (hello, ALL governments spend money on stupid things and are corrupt to some extent) is such a cop out.
And just in case for some bizarre reason you want to pretend it's something I just "heard from one person", here are a few of the thousands of articles written on the topic:
[Some of my favorite quotes - and I'm pretty sure "only the stupid pay tax" would be considering evasion "as an obligation"...]
* Cash provides a convenient escape route for lawyers, accountants and builders. The government has published the names of almost 70 doctors it says have cheated the taxman and some surgeons are said to be earning €900,000 a year and not declaring tax.
* “Only the stupid pay tax,” one eye surgeon told a Greek state radio.
* Helicopters have been hovering over plush suburbs in northern Athens in the search for swimming pools in the homes of professional people who claim they are living on only €35,000-€43,000 a year. ... The swimming pool fraternity are also responding by using nets to cover the pools to avoid detection.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/8585593/Greece-loses-15bn-a-year-to-tax-evasion.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_evasion_and_corruption_in_Greece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/09/greece-tax-evasion-professional-classes
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/09/how-greek-tax-evasion-sunk-the-global-economy/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/business/global/greece-warns-of-going-broke-as-taxes-dry-up.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/09/tax-evasion-greece
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203937004578076801161935378.html
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2011/07/11/110711ta_talk_surowiecki
Seriously, the wheelhouse looks like the Microsoft store takeoff of an Apple store.
True - if it were up to capitalism the government would not be int the state they are in. A lot of citizens might be homeless, underfed, and sick, and Greeks rioting in the streets, but the government wouldn't be broke.
Then again, apparently Greeks will riot in the streets either way, so in the end it may not have made much of a difference.
You joke, but my Greek friend (who's family has a house in Athens that they probably don't pay taxes one) freely admitted tax evasion is practically a national pastime in Greece. They really do consider it not only a right, but almost an obligation.
And you wonder how the Olympics almost bankrupted the government? Well, that attitude towards taxes makes the statement "oh, all of the tax revenues from increased tourism and business in Greece will more than make up for the expenses" a bit hard to back up...
I wonder how else they're going to distribute 4K type video.
Yes, that is exactly why - along with the fact that human eyesight can't really resolve more than 1920x1080 from average viewing distances on mainstream (= 3840 x 2160, there isn't a point. For reference, 35mm film maxes out at about 1400 useful horizontal lines when digitized, and the most common digital film camera in use (the Arri Alexa) has 2880 x 2160 resolution (which would be cropped/matted to ~1550 lines for 1.85:1 widescreen or ~1220 for 2.35:1).
Selling almost $8B in Alibaba stock isn't an assertion, it's a fact. Look it up. It may end up being the main reason Yahoo is around in 5 years.
Sort of like how Tivo is only around because they have sued Dish Network, Verizon, etc for hundreds of millions, not because they are actually making a profit from their service any more...
But Yahoo isn't anything like AOL in terms of survivability. Yahoo made an insanely good investment in Alibaba so now they can pretty much coast on those profits through years of horrible web apps and intrusive advertising...
Yeah, that was actually my point - passive 3D uses horizontally polarized lines on the screen so technically it's interlaced (540 lines) for each eye - but that's not the reason 3D in general has been such a bust.
The reason is partly as you say because it's not that great an experience at home, partly because wearing silly glasses at home sucks, and partly because most 3D content is just plain awful. I've seen maybe 10 movies in the theater in 3D and only 1, maybe 2 were actually enhanced by the experience.
Yes, H.264 can look good at 9Mbps for 1080p, but it's still noticeably better in some scenes (lots of motion, subtle gradients, etc) at twice that w/ significant VBR range. Thing is, there is not a lot of motivation to bother with 4K at a compromised bitrate when you could do 1080p with no noticeable artifacts, and most people can't tell any difference.
And that's great that HKG has unlimited high bitrates like that, but the studios and consumer electronics countries don't target that market, they target the mainstream markets where they can actually make money...
Well, you are entitled to your opinion, of course, but *live* streaming sports apps will be HUGE for consumers, since they are really the last thing keeping many people on traditional broadcast TV services like cable or satellite.
So if you knew apps like MLB at Bat and ESPN on the Xbox 360 could be the death of Comcast as we know it wouldn't that at least make you begrudgingly admit they have a purpose? ;)
But anyway, someone who would actually generalize "people who watch sports are mostly just terrible" has some issues (were you attacked by a college mascot as a child?!) so I think it may take a bit more than a "happy, fun Wii game" to get over that...
Like Wii Sports?
Have you seen the Xbox Arcade store? Or the Xbox Media Apps? Between those there are something like 600+ inexpensive/free apps to go along with the ~1000 disc based games. Seems like a pretty decent catalog to me, given it's a game console, not a tablet. Sure, they don't have 50 different types of fart app, and no one really cares.
But speaking of tablet - it will be interesting to see whether MS can make SmartGlass work. Basically use a free app on your existing tablet or phone from any manufacturer rather than buy an expensive custom controller. Having seen it in practice a bit, though, my guess is developers won't make much use of it since it's not going to be nearly as good a control mechanism as the Wii U controller, and I can't even begin to imagine how one holds an Xbox controller and tablet at the same time.
One thing that has me confused about the new controller is that its design goals are completely the OPPOSITE of the Wii's controllers.
With the Wii, the goal was to de-empahasize the technology and make games controlled by natural body motions - you look at the TV and don't focus on the controller. With the Wii U they are now sticking a cumbersome tablet with display in both hands so that you are not only required, but encouraged to look down and treat it as a separate mobile device.
If that's what they think people really want, fine... but I would have expected them to be a bit more consistent. Weirdly, it almost feels like they are trying to capture the same users of the Wii in the Wii U - as in *literally* the same, like the 8-10 year olds who loved the Wii are now teenagers so whatever they do has to involve a mobile device in their hands...
With multiple video cards, maybe.... (this would basically be displaying 4 1920x1080 screens). Possible but seriously not mainstream.
But yes, why bother without the content. A BD averages 25-30Mbps. Multiply by 4 and that's over 100Mbps. That's 90GB for a 2 hour movie. Gets to be pretty large... [also compare with the highest end 1080p streaming from a service like VUDU of up to ~9Mbps or 8GB for 2h. Would be 36Mbps / 32GB for a 4K movie, which is way beyond most people's home Internet connection, or even if it isn't providers like Comcast will throttle them after about 3 movies a month]
Maybe, but IMO I just don't see that happening. Even if Sony supports 4K output on their "PS4", why would game developers bother with it when most customers can't tell (or even display) the difference and the alternative is 4X more pixel processing to improve the display on the millions of 1080p TVs already out there.
It feels a bit like 9.1/11.1 audio (or honestly maybe even 7.1) - it has already hit such a diminishing return the vast majority of consumers just don't care.
There really isn't anything displayable on a TV with available hardware that I know of - probably the closest a consumer could get is something decoded on a PC with mulit-monitor and/or special hardware.
And what's even more telling is that most digital theater projectors in use are still 2K (2048x1080) - and in fact a lot of (new and old) movies are still digitized at 2K, so there may not even be 4K sources for most current movies anyway.
While it's true passive 3D requires 2x horizontal lines to get the same resolution, that is so far from the reason 3D has failed in the home market it's barely even worth mentioning...