"fastest growing" is relative. If I jump from 0$ in sales to 1$ in sales I've increased... well an infinite amount I guess...I go from 1$ to 100$ and that's a 10000% increase!
That said... the reason windows revenues are going down is essentially a combo of
1. People are either pirating windows
or
2. Learning to use *bsd or linux.
Getting a cheap PC isn't that hard. If I was naive I'd go to Dell and buy their 399$ box... So Apple doesn't really win there [and them moving to Intel... is another story for another day].
The actual source of the problem is vendor lockin. You know the sort where Apples have their very own boot layout, bios, etc and make it hard [re: mac mini] to install other OSes.
Sure apple doesn't do this... but that's not because they can't. Certainly their stranglehold on the Mac is strong enough.
A better solution would be open standards and a open OS/distro.
My experience with openfirmware hasn't been that good. Or at least if the MacOS does use OF it sucks. I couldn't get into the OF prompt no matter what magic key combo I hit.
To me the BIOS "just works".
And the thing is you don't usually use most of the interrupts in the bios anyways. I seriously doubt Linux switches to real mode to call int 13h to write to disk. I'm certain it just issues IDE commands directly.
So yeah you have some code you're not using but no sense on sinking the ship if it's just painted the wrong colour.
And the thing is there are still things that use BIOS interrupts (hint: boot loaders) so scrapping it alltogether is not trivial [it's not impossible, you can always replace your bootloader].
Computers cost a lot because there isn't a free market.
When is the last time you could order a pre-built computer and actually have a choice in processor, motherboard, ram, video card, monitor, etc..?
The large retails feed monopolies such as Intel and MSFT and as a result the smaller companies such as ARM, MIPS and AMD (to name a few) end up trying to feed off anything else (embedded stuff for ARM/MIPS).
Yeah you'd rather put money in the hands of Lockheed or Northrop so they can bomb innocent civilians all over the world!
That's SOOOOO much better.
Tom
(I already feel dirty enough that all large defense contractors in the US use my crypto/math libraries. This includes Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop and Lockheed...)
Why doesn't apple work with multiple vendors and just let the market decide what they want?
You don't think AMD wouldn't invest time and money to get Tiger working on their platforms? Apple wouldn't have to play the role of porting the software if they just made it accessible.
And of course out of the 41TB of storage you used there is probably one or two shows a week you really wanted to see anyways... so... maybe you need a GB of space;-)
This seems like yet another "we can do it so we must". Eventually we're just going to run out of natural resources to make that a useful argument...
Why not spend the time and energy on better codecs? Oh wait, because that would be hard work and useful...
An alternative would be to not have the monopolies on the rest of the airwaves.
Why should companies be able to dominate what is essentially a fixed resource.
Would it be fair if Pepsi bought lake michigan and emptied it for it's own use?
Would it be fair if Shell set up solar cells that blocked out all of the sunlight for an entire city?
etc, etc, etc...
There are only so many FM "channels" in the given band. When you have companies like Chum, Clearchannel, etc... buying them all up you're left with the mess we have now.
Radio is no longer about entertainment or education but simply endorsements and making more cash....
In reality radio is not really the best medium to make money off since the users don't pay for it. Hence the advertisements. Now we do pay for it... but indirectly through hiked up prices on same-quality crap.
Why not pull a WBAI for all radio stations? They're still on the air even after years of fundraising on and off.
So why not make radio stations non-profit and donation driven. That would mean the actual *SHOCK* listeners could decide with their money where to "invest" in the public airwaves.
That, sirs, would be a free market solution.
Of course it'll never happen because "real world capitalism" is not about free market but essentially dictatorships.
yeah the 50v is a sweet ride. My friend bought one shortly after I bought my iPaq. He paid 100$ more but imho it was worth it and I've been kicking myself ever since...
I'll show him up though... oh wait I did... dual-core amd... mauahahahhaha
Die space cost. It costs big. Why do you think processors don't have 2GB of cache?
Cooling processors costs [in laptops] in terms of power, weight, space and build time.
Now imagine you could power your desktop with a handful of ARM or MIPS processors that cost a couple dollars each, require no heatsink or fan, etc.
You can replace your 200M transistor graphics chip with a small SMP array of ARM or MIPS processors that take a fraction of the power and die space. The ARMv6 SIMD extensions give you DSP+MMX like functionality in the existing ARM instruction set which is handy I'd imagine. Now your 100$ graphics board costs 15$ and gets enough performance to play 3D shooters.
So there is more than just "power savings" reasons to go with different processors. Your computers would cost less and potentially be smaller as well.
You can throw an ARM into a board with a PCI/AGP bus.
The reason you have "a million and one drivers" is that people don't make anything to any sort of standard.
Also there is no reason why a given vendor couldn't make ARM or x86 or PPC or... optimized drivers so your point is moot.
Also you underestimate the free time programs have in Windows. If you're not loading spyware or tons of other threads your program will get >95% of the cpu time each second. Even at that 5% loss you still consume way too much power for the task.
And also... what's wrong with that? Programs are poorly engineered today as it is. Maybe if people learned to use resources properly we'd have more efficient program and less half-ass solutions.
I left out the other equipment because I was only counting things like the processors and GPU which are usually the biggest power wastes. Of course most people don't need the 3.5" drives in their computers either. They can get away with the performance of a 2.5".
But to your GFX question.
Assuming a 500Mhz SIMD enabled ARM processor takes 1Wh to run, you could hook up 32 of these and STILL TAKE LESS POWER THAN A P4!!!
If you can't make your video game pretty with nearly 17000MIPS at your disposal... then I don't know what will
Note I'm fully aware you won't see anywhere near the full MIPS unless you have dedicated ram for each. Which is what the PS2, PS3 and PSP do.
Point is you can get 1024x768x32bpp graphics with way less than a 100Wh GPU.
I'm sure a 500Mhz SIMD enabled ARM could do DivX encoding maybe not 1080p but certainly you could encode a DVD quick enough.
I'm sure it could DECODE a divx or DVD in realtime as decoding is usually not that bogged. Keep in mind tha 500Mhz of ARM does not equal 500Mhz of x86.
Again, how many of the millions of computer owners do HD encoding? Hell how many do DVD encoding?
Keep in mind that the PSP can decode movies in a 480x272 screen in realtime [obviously].
To hit 720x480 is only 2.64 times more pixels to decode. So assuming things scaled linearly... that 4Wh [with the DVD drive running] PSP would need probably on the order of 15Wh to decode a DVD in real time on a 720x480 screen.
Again the trick isn't "one super fast processor" but multiple efficient processors.
For example, [I don't know the internals to death] but you could have four ARM processors [at 0.5Wh each] decoding four different parts of each frame [or four different frames] and still use less power than a P4 or AMD64 would use to decode the same frames.
A typical ARM processor is also 1/40th the size of a P4 or AMD64 [at roughly 3.2mm^2] so you could pack four of them into one ASIC without significant trouble.
etc, etc, etc.
Once you stop thinking in terms of "one cpu, many jobs" and in terms of "many cpus, many jobs" you'll see how things can scale more efficiently.
I call it stupid. You can run Linux on the ARM and to me that's mainstream.
The problem is they don't give alternatives a fair chance. How do you know an ARM laptop wouldn't sell? Where have you EVER seen one offered?
We don't live in a free market.
For companies like Dell it makes sense to lock into a monopoly combo like Intel + Windows because it means your customers are likely to come back for fear of losing backwards compatibility.
Personally I find there are more than enough OSS tools out there to get PROFESSIONAL work done let alone hobby stuff and personal stuff.
That's one approach. The other is to realize that the average user of this equipment doesn't need much over 500MIPS out of a single processor let alone the 2-3GIPS that Intel and AMD are offering.
Don't get me wrong, I think they should keep offering it. I just think that the retailers should take an interest in selling [and promoting] alternatives.
If you're a student in school would you rather have the expensive $1000 USD laptop that runs for 3 hours on a battery and makes noise and heat/etc.
Or would you rather have the $400 USD laptop that still runs your sort of applications just fine, lasts twice if not more longer on battery, no noise, etc...
Where a Pentium M costs hundreds of dollars a suite of ARM processors could cost you less than $50 USD to install...
ARM is a reduce-instruction set processor designed from the ground up to be small, powerful [in terms of instructions executed per second] and lower power [in terms of Watts].
It is a 32-bit processor with plenty of registers and a flexible instruction set that makes quite a few operations more efficient then on the x86 desktops.
The later generations have introduced SIMD instructions to handle things like video and sound. They also have quite capable debugging assist hardware and memory management units (MMU) to handle virtualization.
In short, what you are doing with your desktop processor could be done with an ARM processor at a fraction of the cost.
The biggest problem with this [in the eyes of the uneducated] is that it doesn't run x86 instructions. So you assume you can't run anything on it. When in fact Linux and *BSD have been ported to it and you can run essentially any portable souce based application on it.
The other reason is the MIPS rating [millions of instructions per second] doesn't scale as much as the P4 or Athlon64. The fastest ARM processor clocks in around 500Mhz which is about 550MIPS while the fastest AMD64 clocks in a 2.8Ghz which is about 3920MIPS [assuming IPC of 1.4].
So for the number crunchers out there, ARM is not an option.
However, look at things like a Gameboy or PSP. They use multiple low power processors to get the performance required for say 3D video games.
An AMD64 at 2.8Ghz can take upto 100Wh of power [but newer cores are like 60Wh]. A 500Mhz ARM processor consumes 0.5Wh.
Put it this way, the average desktop idles at ~130Wh and peaks ~250Wh or so... but let's assume idle. That's 3120W per day, 93Kw per month. At four cents per kilowatt that's 3.72$ per month.
Now if you're like me and have 3-4 computers in the house that's 15$ per month. Just to have computers idling.
That for 0.04$/KWh. That's relatively cheap. A quick google shows 6.91 cents/KWh for california which amounts to 25.7 dollars per month [before tax and other surcharges].
Now imagine if your computer PEAKED at 20Wh using multiple ARM cores (one for main processing, one or two for graphics, one for sound, etc). That's a whopping 480W per day, 14.4KW per month or $3.98 for four ARM based computers at 6.91 cents/KWh.
And what could you do with these ARM [or other RISC based] designs?
1. Well all your office type applications [e.g. OpenOffice] 2. Web browsing and email 3. IM chatting 4.... other trivial desktop things 5. Video games [hint: what do you think runs the PSP] 6. Video and Music playback etc, etc, etc.
The hysteria that you need more processing power than God to play a video game or watch a DVD is just the sort of things they want to hang you on to net sales.
Once you realize you can get away with MUCH LESS and still have quality in the end... you'd be better off.
BTW why not just head to http://www.arm.com/ and check out there stuff. Not a lot of consumer info there but if you're curious about the company it's worth a look.
Slashdot Mirror
No it's 758 Million USD.
But yea, that's like 42$. But really, what is 42$ USD? Like 13 eurocents?
HAHAHA TURNABOUT IS FAIR GAME!
Tom
"fastest growing" is relative. If I jump from 0$ in sales to 1$ in sales I've increased ... well an infinite amount I guess...I go from 1$ to 100$ and that's a 10000% increase!
That said... the reason windows revenues are going down is essentially a combo of
1. People are either pirating windows
or
2. Learning to use *bsd or linux.
Getting a cheap PC isn't that hard. If I was naive I'd go to Dell and buy their 399$ box... So Apple doesn't really win there [and them moving to Intel... is another story for another day].
Tom
The actual source of the problem is vendor lockin. You know the sort where Apples have their very own boot layout, bios, etc and make it hard [re: mac mini] to install other OSes.
Sure apple doesn't do this... but that's not because they can't. Certainly their stranglehold on the Mac is strong enough.
A better solution would be open standards and a open OS/distro.
Tom
No I'm quite capable of seeing that point of view. My experience has been though that people often say one thing and do the other.
People hate the exploitation of labour but still shop at Walmart.
People hate the regurgiation of bullshit music generation after generation yet they still buy their children m'bop!
People hate the cost of gas yet buy SUVs
People hate being fat or sick yet eat MacDo and others...
Point of fact is people who say "don't want to fund evil government X" are likely proudly sponsoring evil government Y, Z and ?.
Tom
My experience with openfirmware hasn't been that good. Or at least if the MacOS does use OF it sucks. I couldn't get into the OF prompt no matter what magic key combo I hit.
To me the BIOS "just works".
And the thing is you don't usually use most of the interrupts in the bios anyways. I seriously doubt Linux switches to real mode to call int 13h to write to disk. I'm certain it just issues IDE commands directly.
So yeah you have some code you're not using but no sense on sinking the ship if it's just painted the wrong colour.
And the thing is there are still things that use BIOS interrupts (hint: boot loaders) so scrapping it alltogether is not trivial [it's not impossible, you can always replace your bootloader].
Tom
Computers cost a lot because there isn't a free market.
When is the last time you could order a pre-built computer and actually have a choice in processor, motherboard, ram, video card, monitor, etc..?
The large retails feed monopolies such as Intel and MSFT and as a result the smaller companies such as ARM, MIPS and AMD (to name a few) end up trying to feed off anything else (embedded stuff for ARM/MIPS).
Tom
Yeah you'd rather put money in the hands of Lockheed or Northrop so they can bomb innocent civilians all over the world!
That's SOOOOO much better.
Tom
(I already feel dirty enough that all large defense contractors in the US use my crypto/math libraries. This includes Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop and Lockheed...)
Want scripting? Want drivers?
Why not just add those to the BIOS?
I mean the interrupts are a standard but the interface you see when you hit F2 or DEL or whatever is not.
Nothing is stopping AMI from putting a tiny busybox linux image in the BIOS other than available space [perhaps?] and the will to do it.
If you goto the uefi website you'll cleverly see "members only" on all the specification pages... interesting...
Tom
Why doesn't apple work with multiple vendors and just let the market decide what they want?
You don't think AMD wouldn't invest time and money to get Tiger working on their platforms? Apple wouldn't have to play the role of porting the software if they just made it accessible.
Again silly me... free market...
Tom
And of course out of the 41TB of storage you used there is probably one or two shows a week you really wanted to see anyways... so ... maybe you need a GB of space ;-)
This seems like yet another "we can do it so we must". Eventually we're just going to run out of natural resources to make that a useful argument...
Why not spend the time and energy on better codecs? Oh wait, because that would be hard work and useful...
Tom
This is like paying Dell to put Intel processors in there...
;-)
oops... they do that.
Interesting how monopolies work isn't it?
Tom
An alternative would be to not have the monopolies on the rest of the airwaves.
Why should companies be able to dominate what is essentially a fixed resource.
Would it be fair if Pepsi bought lake michigan and emptied it for it's own use?
Would it be fair if Shell set up solar cells that blocked out all of the sunlight for an entire city?
etc, etc, etc...
There are only so many FM "channels" in the given band. When you have companies like Chum, Clearchannel, etc... buying them all up you're left with the mess we have now.
Radio is no longer about entertainment or education but simply endorsements and making more cash....
In reality radio is not really the best medium to make money off since the users don't pay for it. Hence the advertisements. Now we do pay for it... but indirectly through hiked up prices on same-quality crap.
Why not pull a WBAI for all radio stations? They're still on the air even after years of fundraising on and off.
So why not make radio stations non-profit and donation driven. That would mean the actual *SHOCK* listeners could decide with their money where to "invest" in the public airwaves.
That, sirs, would be a free market solution.
Of course it'll never happen because "real world capitalism" is not about free market but essentially dictatorships.
Tom
No see that would at least make sense...
... the perfect choice for your nextgen desktop and laptops...
You know, go with the Pentium4
The fact that any sane person rather see a PentiumM over a 4 doesn't stop Apple from their random rampage into techtown...
If I wanted a p4 box I'd buy a p4 box and throw Gentoo on it and avoid the whole "pay Steve money" issue... oh wait, that's what I did...
Tom
yeah the 50v is a sweet ride. My friend bought one shortly after I bought my iPaq. He paid 100$ more but imho it was worth it and I've been kicking myself ever since...
I'll show him up though... oh wait I did... dual-core amd... mauahahahhaha
Tom
No it doesn't. It's just in suspend mode.
Hit the little reset button [usually at the bottom]. Mu iPaq takes ~30 seconds to fully boot.
Tom
Let me break some news down to you sparky.
Die space cost. It costs big. Why do you think processors don't have 2GB of cache?
Cooling processors costs [in laptops] in terms of power, weight, space and build time.
Now imagine you could power your desktop with a handful of ARM or MIPS processors that cost a couple dollars each, require no heatsink or fan, etc.
You can replace your 200M transistor graphics chip with a small SMP array of ARM or MIPS processors that take a fraction of the power and die space. The ARMv6 SIMD extensions give you DSP+MMX like functionality in the existing ARM instruction set which is handy I'd imagine. Now your 100$ graphics board costs 15$ and gets enough performance to play 3D shooters.
So there is more than just "power savings" reasons to go with different processors. Your computers would cost less and potentially be smaller as well.
Tom
I'm not an EE [but I don't think that fault invalidates my support of ARM in this discussion] but usually / is dropped in written english... e.g.
...
100kmh == 100 km per hour.
mpg? mph?
Tom
You can throw an ARM into a board with a PCI/AGP bus.
... optimized drivers so your point is moot.
... what's wrong with that? Programs are poorly engineered today as it is. Maybe if people learned to use resources properly we'd have more efficient program and less half-ass solutions.
The reason you have "a million and one drivers" is that people don't make anything to any sort of standard.
Also there is no reason why a given vendor couldn't make ARM or x86 or PPC or
Also you underestimate the free time programs have in Windows. If you're not loading spyware or tons of other threads your program will get >95% of the cpu time each second. Even at that 5% loss you still consume way too much power for the task.
And also
tom
If something consumes 300mA per hour, at 3.6 volts ... that's 1080mW per hour ... or 1080mWh
more so... 300mAh * 3.6V == 1080mAVh since IV == W we have 1080mWh
Is it not?
Tom
N.B. I think the 300mA is a bit off and is probably more like 500mA or so... but the point is the same.
With all the hardware and other goodness in the P4 it still doesn't really get an IPC higher than an ARM.
There are things the P4 or AMD64 are better suited for... but in the context of the average desktop user who revolves around
1. MS IE
2. MS outlook
3. MSN Messenger
4. Latest stupid FPS game
You don't need GIPS performance....
Tom
I left out the other equipment because I was only counting things like the processors and GPU which are usually the biggest power wastes. Of course most people don't need the 3.5" drives in their computers either. They can get away with the performance of a 2.5".
... then I don't know what will
But to your GFX question.
Assuming a 500Mhz SIMD enabled ARM processor takes 1Wh to run, you could hook up 32 of these and STILL TAKE LESS POWER THAN A P4!!!
If you can't make your video game pretty with nearly 17000MIPS at your disposal
Note I'm fully aware you won't see anywhere near the full MIPS unless you have dedicated ram for each. Which is what the PS2, PS3 and PSP do.
Point is you can get 1024x768x32bpp graphics with way less than a 100Wh GPU.
Tom
I'm sure a 500Mhz SIMD enabled ARM could do DivX encoding maybe not 1080p but certainly you could encode a DVD quick enough.
I'm sure it could DECODE a divx or DVD in realtime as decoding is usually not that bogged. Keep in mind tha 500Mhz of ARM does not equal 500Mhz of x86.
Again, how many of the millions of computer owners do HD encoding? Hell how many do DVD encoding?
Keep in mind that the PSP can decode movies in a 480x272 screen in realtime [obviously].
To hit 720x480 is only 2.64 times more pixels to decode. So assuming things scaled linearly... that 4Wh [with the DVD drive running] PSP would need probably on the order of 15Wh to decode a DVD in real time on a 720x480 screen.
Again the trick isn't "one super fast processor" but multiple efficient processors.
For example, [I don't know the internals to death] but you could have four ARM processors [at 0.5Wh each] decoding four different parts of each frame [or four different frames] and still use less power than a P4 or AMD64 would use to decode the same frames.
A typical ARM processor is also 1/40th the size of a P4 or AMD64 [at roughly 3.2mm^2] so you could pack four of them into one ASIC without significant trouble.
etc, etc, etc.
Once you stop thinking in terms of "one cpu, many jobs" and in terms of "many cpus, many jobs" you'll see how things can scale more efficiently.
Tom
I call it stupid. You can run Linux on the ARM and to me that's mainstream.
The problem is they don't give alternatives a fair chance. How do you know an ARM laptop wouldn't sell? Where have you EVER seen one offered?
We don't live in a free market.
For companies like Dell it makes sense to lock into a monopoly combo like Intel + Windows because it means your customers are likely to come back for fear of losing backwards compatibility.
Personally I find there are more than enough OSS tools out there to get PROFESSIONAL work done let alone hobby stuff and personal stuff.
Tom
That's one approach. The other is to realize that the average user of this equipment doesn't need much over 500MIPS out of a single processor let alone the 2-3GIPS that Intel and AMD are offering.
Don't get me wrong, I think they should keep offering it. I just think that the retailers should take an interest in selling [and promoting] alternatives.
If you're a student in school would you rather have the expensive $1000 USD laptop that runs for 3 hours on a battery and makes noise and heat/etc.
Or would you rather have the $400 USD laptop that still runs your sort of applications just fine, lasts twice if not more longer on battery, no noise, etc...
Where a Pentium M costs hundreds of dollars a suite of ARM processors could cost you less than $50 USD to install...
Tom
ARM is a reduce-instruction set processor designed from the ground up to be small, powerful [in terms of instructions executed per second] and lower power [in terms of Watts].
... other trivial desktop things
... you'd be better off.
It is a 32-bit processor with plenty of registers and a flexible instruction set that makes quite a few operations more efficient then on the x86 desktops.
The later generations have introduced SIMD instructions to handle things like video and sound. They also have quite capable debugging assist hardware and memory management units (MMU) to handle virtualization.
In short, what you are doing with your desktop processor could be done with an ARM processor at a fraction of the cost.
The biggest problem with this [in the eyes of the uneducated] is that it doesn't run x86 instructions. So you assume you can't run anything on it. When in fact Linux and *BSD have been ported to it and you can run essentially any portable souce based application on it.
The other reason is the MIPS rating [millions of instructions per second] doesn't scale as much as the P4 or Athlon64. The fastest ARM processor clocks in around 500Mhz which is about 550MIPS while the fastest AMD64 clocks in a 2.8Ghz which is about 3920MIPS [assuming IPC of 1.4].
So for the number crunchers out there, ARM is not an option.
However, look at things like a Gameboy or PSP. They use multiple low power processors to get the performance required for say 3D video games.
An AMD64 at 2.8Ghz can take upto 100Wh of power [but newer cores are like 60Wh]. A 500Mhz ARM processor consumes 0.5Wh.
Put it this way, the average desktop idles at ~130Wh and peaks ~250Wh or so... but let's assume idle. That's 3120W per day, 93Kw per month. At four cents per kilowatt that's 3.72$ per month.
Now if you're like me and have 3-4 computers in the house that's 15$ per month. Just to have computers idling.
That for 0.04$/KWh. That's relatively cheap. A quick google shows 6.91 cents/KWh for california which amounts to 25.7 dollars per month [before tax and other surcharges].
Now imagine if your computer PEAKED at 20Wh using multiple ARM cores (one for main processing, one or two for graphics, one for sound, etc). That's a whopping 480W per day, 14.4KW per month or $3.98 for four ARM based computers at 6.91 cents/KWh.
And what could you do with these ARM [or other RISC based] designs?
1. Well all your office type applications [e.g. OpenOffice]
2. Web browsing and email
3. IM chatting
4.
5. Video games [hint: what do you think runs the PSP]
6. Video and Music playback
etc, etc, etc.
The hysteria that you need more processing power than God to play a video game or watch a DVD is just the sort of things they want to hang you on to net sales.
Once you realize you can get away with MUCH LESS and still have quality in the end
BTW why not just head to http://www.arm.com/ and check out there stuff. Not a lot of consumer info there but if you're curious about the company it's worth a look.
Tom