All K8 processors have had frequency scaling, most K7s had it too, was just disabled in the desktop parts. The P4s had frequency scaling too.
The problem before hand was that the designs were just inefficient. It took your K6-2 or P2 running at full tilt to keep up with demand. Scaling didn't make too much sense. Now a 500Mhz K8 can cope with most usage, playing mp3s takes less than 1% of the cputime where it used to take more than 80% on a 486...
I wouldn't call the power savings as a "new scam" or trick.
You're actually wrong. Energy goes up with frequency not duration. twice the clock for half the period doesn't require the same energy. Things get less efficient as you scale them.
You're right, I'm not an EE. But I have worked at enough hardware firms to know that raising the clock does more than "raise the work per time period".
It has to do with the capacitance of the traces and the inefficiencies of the transistors themselves.
Raise the clock and the charge time on the traces goes down, means you need a higher voltage. Think of filling a bottle with a small hose. If you want to fill a single bottle faster you have to increase the pressure [voltage]. Also raises the current overall if you keep it up. This is why overclockers often have to raise the voltage of the part they are OC'ing.
Raise the clock and more transistors are switching per second. Switching generates heat because you have two inputs and one output [among other reasons]. The energy can't just disappear and you can't keep increasing the current otherwise the traces melt. Fortunately the energy is turned into heat... which then invariably melts the chip hehehe...
Now, if you ran a circuit at twice the clock but did the same amount of work and shut it off at T=0.5 would you still use more power? [homework question].
Granted I got my cores for free, but even before my current job I owned a 4200+ which cost me about 700 bucks. I used to idle it at 1Ghz too. I'd rather that then overclock a 3800+ and deal with possible problems. Specially given the amount of work I do with them.
Sure maybe if you ALREADY HAVE said box might as well try to get more mileage out of it. I wouldn't buy a lower rated part for that purpose though...
Because they're stupid. Then they bitch at the bank for the 1.50$ "service fee".
Let's see... processor running full steam instead of low power mode when idling probably amounts for a waste time of more than 90% (unless you work/live at the box).
Opteron at full == 95W, at low == 35W, diff 60W. price per KWh is about 7 to 10 cents. Let's say 8.5 to be close to middle. 60W * 24 * 31 * 0.085 = $3.80 per month. Probably double that once you factor in power supply inefficiencies and cooling costs. So you spend ~8$ per month because idling the box is "too hard". But $1.50 at the bank is robbery.... hmmm... Now tact on a bunch of other needless things like gas guzzling cars, retarded cable, etc... Each on their own is trivial to expense, but together you're spending hundreds of month stupidly.../rant...
Besides, multiply your wasted 44.7KWh per month by the millions of other people. That results in higher demand which raises the price. The price goes into other things like the cost of producing things that require electricity. So because people like you are apathetic and think "me being wasteful is ok" you end up paying more at the gas pumps and the stores for everything you touch.
Only if support for the lower power modes came as part of SLES9 released 9 months ago...:-)
Big corps really hate "new" stuff. Despite the fact most boxes are already capable of idling a lot cooler few [that I've seen] actually use it. Nothing like 200 quad processor Opterons running at full speed because enabling a kernel module is "hard".
I'd think both AMD and Intel are well aware of the MIPS/Watt challenge. It's not new. Problem is CUSTOMERS still want a bazillion Ghz attached to the processor because they think it will make it faster or better or something.
I've got two x85 class Opterons sitting here at 1Ghz most of the time. That's ~35W vs. ~95W. AMD seems to care about power. Intel is no worse off with the Pentium M and "core" series (netburst was a mistake).
No offense, but nothing is perfect. This is why we have a thing called "standard deviation".
Me hitting the letter "e" will probably not take the same amount of energy to process twice. But I bet over 1000 e's the standard deviation could be found and would indicate that 66% of the time it's "x J +/- y" and so on...
So you sample something like "building the linux kernel to a ram drive" 100 times, find the deviation and use that. The tighter AND lower the better. The wider and higher the worse.
Comparing K8 to P4 makes sense. They're both eight generation. The P4 was Intels answer to K7 and the Hammer was AMDs answer to the P3. Comparing Conroe to K8 doesn't make sense because Conroe is a 9th generation part. It'd also make more sense once Conroe is readily available. I can go to a store and buy a 285 today. I can't say the same about Conroe. Wait till the 9th gen AMD processors are out if you want to make this comparison on a technical level [or wait until Conroes are in ready supply].
It's hard to tell, they randomly jump from 275 to 880 and back. First off, why didn't they just choose 285s? Failing that, why did they jump between 2 or 3 different AMD cores? Who knows if their results are even accurate.
On the crypto side, the results are hard to read. The graph shows more signatures/sec for AMD but the table lists otherwise. Even still, I find it hard to believe Intel has any lead on that market. AMD has a 5 cycle multiplier and three ALU pipes for bignum math [hint: this is my passion]. Unless Intel has a 3 cycle multiplier or faster L1 (doesn't look like it) it should clock in at about the same pace. Doing bignum mults/sqrs I routinely get an IPC of nearly two on my 885 box.
It could also be that the code in OpenSSL [or whatever they used for SSL] is not tuned well. My TFM math library beats OpenSSL on x86-64 and matches it on x86-32 [both intel/amd] and PPC32 platforms.
Eitheway, I'm not saying it's impossible for Intel to win out on some marks. I'm just questioning the validity of the test because they seem to use random collection of boxes. If they want to make a point they could just pit some 285s against it running more open tests. I'd rather see Intel win by merits alone and not questionable testing practices. If they *are* faster it gives more incentive for AMD to catch up next year.
As for your comment about scaling linearly... If the task fits in the cache, generally it's true. At least for crypto work. AES takes 260 cycles @2.6Ghz... it takes 260 cycles at 2.2Ghz as well...
Where things skew is on the memory. It takes more cycles at a higher clock rate to access system memory. Which means that you may get the same walltime performance but the cycles/operation can go up.
*I* have 885s in my 2-way Tyan board at my house. That's a 400Mhz or 16% boost in CPU performance. I'm sure anandtech could get themselves some 285s for a benchmark.
We deal with crooked benchmarks all the time. The fact that these are Intel maintained boxes comparing next-gen stuff against RETAIL cores is stupid. Even if they release the cores in July it will be months before every corner store picks it up. Those FX-62's they comparing against were designed years ago [though the process/design has changed since] and probably fab'ed many months ago.
It isn't as if AMD is saying "Ok we made Opteron, we're done, let's go make plush bunnies now". If Intel was actually serious they would challenge AMD to show their hand [*]
AMD has challenged Intel to duels [go to their sunnyvale lab they [used to?] have posters up in the public space that say so. I wouldn't say AMD wants to take stuff out of the lab and make it public but I suspect if Intel said "let's set up a contest with current retail parts" they MAY [see above] answer the call.
It's no big secret that AMD wants to challenge Intel [and beat them] on every front.
Intel is comparing next gen stuff to current to say "look our/current/ stuff is so much better" and hope you don't notice. It's pretty lame because Conroe/etc doesn't look like it's bad.
I'd love to see Intel do MP benchmarks in public though. They'd get their asses handed to them.
Not only that but how hard is it to go in the bios and make and AMD64 processor perform sub-optimally? Sure it's DDR400 but CL4-4-4-10, and you need the ECC scrubing turned on, disable the cache and...
If Intel really wanted a benchmark they should ask AMD for engineering samples of next year's cores and they could pit them together.
Postscript has it's place. It was a standard that most commercial printers followed, it was interpreted which allowed the output to have macros and it was type proper. That is, the printed page will look like the viewed page in all respects.
If XPS is anything like Word in terms of layout it's equally useless. XPS has to be something a typesetter could use professionally before it's even remotely useful.
Knowing Microsofts lack of standards and interoperability compliance you can be assured the Vista software for it won't give you this.
To pose the same question to you then, who would want to install Linux and try it out? It's far from easy to use
Nothing worth doing is easy, nothing worth using is dead easy.
Sounds kinda bad, but think about it. What you call "hard" in terms of configuration and options I call flexibility that lets me work around problems when they arise. Is Gentoo perfect? Hardly. But when is the last time you hacked an install script [or the source] for a proprietary program that just won't work on your box?
While I don't spend a lot of time hacking things, it does arise from time to time that I either need to fix something for my platform [like QEMU] or I just want to tweak a feature.
Not only that, but other problems. Try keeping your WinXP kernel modern and recovering from botched kernels. Last I checked Windows only lets you have one Kernel at a time and it's rarely updated to support new features. The 2.6 kernel has brought us a wealth of improvements not only in the form of better drivers but things like the O(1) scheduler, etc. Sure if this requires me to type "make" and go through a text menu to configure a kernel for myself that may be considered hard. And sure, at first it is. But you learn, you learn about your computer and you get more control.
People fear change and work which is why they stay away from OSS. They view having to learn something as a bad thing. Well I tour around doing liason work between two companies, which mostly involves using MS Office tools, attending meetings, and yet I still find time to keep up with the OSS world because it's important to me.
If their motives were truly benevolent they would have just made PDF/PS support more integral inside Vista. I mean to this day XP has no "native" way of viewing PS files. How lame is that? Linux distros have had ggv for years...
Would be cooler if they worked Word [or started something new] to compete with LyX. As much as I like LaTeX I do hate some of it's macros and a WYSIWYG style typesetting editor would be nice.
Vista is not a new Corvette. Vista is your moms Caravan with fins.
Let's see Vista's POSIX compliance or even remote concern with interoperability or efficiency or...
It's an OS that by various accounts installs in 12GB, takes gobs of memory, needs fast processors and doesn't add any end user tools [outside of maintenance] that people can use.
My god, in 12GB I could probably install 80% of the portage packages... A workstation complete with typesetting, graphics tools, multimedia, Gnome, development tools [compilers, glade, gdb, valgrind, etc, etc] fits in 2-3GB. Unlike other distros I'm using the latest stable copies of everything and not what was "out six months ago".
At least XP was better... you can get XP + Word + Cygwin in about 5-6GB or so if you use NTFS compression.
Yeah on Windows it's hard [Miktex == useless] but that's because the support/demand isn't there. tetex in Cygwin is halfway competent though. For reading DVI you can use "xdvi" which comes with teTeX or you can dvi2ps or dvi2pdf or dvi2html or... it and read it another way.
The thing that gets me all roared up is that it's just yet another document format that has no advantage over PDF or even PS. Then you couple that "fact" with the fact that it only is supported in Vista and probably uses binary blobs in the XML makes it totally useless for people like me who avoid MSFT products like the plague.
Net result will probably be in the future all documents are in XPS format because people are too stupid to realize they DO have a choice and that they really don't have to put up with their polite sheep hearding...
Bah... "porting to Vista" what does that even mean? It still has the 15 year old win32 API underneath. Unless you mean taking advtange of WinFS or Aero or one of the many other memory hogging services...
Most end user applications really ought to be based on portable libs like GTK+ or Qt [or ncurses...]. That way "porting to Vista" amounts to making a port of the portable libraries.
If you write applications directly on top of X11 or GDI in this day and age... you're a retard and your business deserves to struggle.
Technically though it's their website and they can put whatever lame duck format on their they want. I don't think they'll get rid of PDF. Look at WMF it's technically a replacement for Postscript yet people still use that.
The XPS format will either get opened up or nobody but MSFT websites will use it. Especially since Vista will still run Adobe...
What you should be questioning is why XPS exists at all. PDF seems to do the job of portable document format just fine being that it renders [or can be rendered] pitch perfect anywhere. Unlike say Word which is a just a crime against professionalism...
Why would anyone outside of ISVs download this? So for the cost of re-imaging my system I get to test an unstable, feature incomplete OS that is likely to further the bane of human existance. Not only does the install expire but I then have to pay full price for a legit copy at the end.
And for all my bug reports I send in I get ???
At least when you beta test an OSS OS you then get rewarded with a stable OS that you can freely install as you choose.../me hopes Vista never materializes and/or flops big.
"supporting" Linux only has to amount to using standard well documented components [wifi, sound, video, etc]. The OSS community will take care of the rest.
Look at most Dell laptops. They usually work fine [my 630m does] in Linux because for the most part they use consistent components which are documented. That may be intentional but they really have no overt "support" for Linux on the home user front.
So all Lenovo has to do is avoid random custom chips for things like sound, wifi, etc and they'll be ok. If they go with the "we saved 30 cents per chip" basement bargain components they'll be screwed.
Slashdot Mirror
8085 was never referred to as x85. I get it's a joke but what else do you call a pair of 885s in a 2-way box.
Tom
All K8 processors have had frequency scaling, most K7s had it too, was just disabled in the desktop parts. The P4s had frequency scaling too.
The problem before hand was that the designs were just inefficient. It took your K6-2 or P2 running at full tilt to keep up with demand. Scaling didn't make too much sense. Now a 500Mhz K8 can cope with most usage, playing mp3s takes less than 1% of the cputime where it used to take more than 80% on a 486...
I wouldn't call the power savings as a "new scam" or trick.
Tom
You're actually wrong. Energy goes up with frequency not duration. twice the clock for half the period doesn't require the same energy. Things get less efficient as you scale them.
You're right, I'm not an EE. But I have worked at enough hardware firms to know that raising the clock does more than "raise the work per time period".
Tom
It has to do with the capacitance of the traces and the inefficiencies of the transistors themselves.
... which then invariably melts the chip hehehe...
Raise the clock and the charge time on the traces goes down, means you need a higher voltage. Think of filling a bottle with a small hose. If you want to fill a single bottle faster you have to increase the pressure [voltage]. Also raises the current overall if you keep it up. This is why overclockers often have to raise the voltage of the part they are OC'ing.
Raise the clock and more transistors are switching per second. Switching generates heat because you have two inputs and one output [among other reasons]. The energy can't just disappear and you can't keep increasing the current otherwise the traces melt. Fortunately the energy is turned into heat
Now, if you ran a circuit at twice the clock but did the same amount of work and shut it off at T=0.5 would you still use more power? [homework question].
Tom
Granted I got my cores for free, but even before my current job I owned a 4200+ which cost me about 700 bucks. I used to idle it at 1Ghz too. I'd rather that then overclock a 3800+ and deal with possible problems. Specially given the amount of work I do with them.
Sure maybe if you ALREADY HAVE said box might as well try to get more mileage out of it. I wouldn't buy a lower rated part for that purpose though...
Tom
Because they're stupid. Then they bitch at the bank for the 1.50$ "service fee".
... hmmm ... Now tact on a bunch of other needless things like gas guzzling cars, retarded cable, etc... Each on their own is trivial to expense, but together you're spending hundreds of month stupidly... /rant...
Let's see... processor running full steam instead of low power mode when idling probably amounts for a waste time of more than 90% (unless you work/live at the box).
Opteron at full == 95W, at low == 35W, diff 60W. price per KWh is about 7 to 10 cents. Let's say 8.5 to be close to middle. 60W * 24 * 31 * 0.085 = $3.80 per month. Probably double that once you factor in power supply inefficiencies and cooling costs. So you spend ~8$ per month because idling the box is "too hard". But $1.50 at the bank is robbery.
Besides, multiply your wasted 44.7KWh per month by the millions of other people. That results in higher demand which raises the price. The price goes into other things like the cost of producing things that require electricity. So because people like you are apathetic and think "me being wasteful is ok" you end up paying more at the gas pumps and the stores for everything you touch.
Tom
Only if support for the lower power modes came as part of SLES9 released 9 months ago ... :-)
Big corps really hate "new" stuff. Despite the fact most boxes are already capable of idling a lot cooler few [that I've seen] actually use it. Nothing like 200 quad processor Opterons running at full speed because enabling a kernel module is "hard".
Tom
I'd think both AMD and Intel are well aware of the MIPS/Watt challenge. It's not new. Problem is CUSTOMERS still want a bazillion Ghz attached to the processor because they think it will make it faster or better or something.
I've got two x85 class Opterons sitting here at 1Ghz most of the time. That's ~35W vs. ~95W. AMD seems to care about power. Intel is no worse off with the Pentium M and "core" series (netburst was a mistake).
Tom
You need a stats class, badly.
No offense, but nothing is perfect. This is why we have a thing called "standard deviation".
Me hitting the letter "e" will probably not take the same amount of energy to process twice. But I bet over 1000 e's the standard deviation could be found and would indicate that 66% of the time it's "x J +/- y" and so on...
So you sample something like "building the linux kernel to a ram drive" 100 times, find the deviation and use that. The tighter AND lower the better. The wider and higher the worse.
Tom
Intel: 8086, 286, 386, 486, p5, p6/pii, piii, piv
AMD : 8086, 286, 386, 486, Am586, K6, K7, K8/Hammer
Comparing K8 to P4 makes sense. They're both eight generation. The P4 was Intels answer to K7 and the Hammer was AMDs answer to the P3. Comparing Conroe to K8 doesn't make sense because Conroe is a 9th generation part. It'd also make more sense once Conroe is readily available. I can go to a store and buy a 285 today. I can't say the same about Conroe. Wait till the 9th gen AMD processors are out if you want to make this comparison on a technical level [or wait until Conroes are in ready supply].
Tom
It's hard to tell, they randomly jump from 275 to 880 and back. First off, why didn't they just choose 285s? Failing that, why did they jump between 2 or 3 different AMD cores? Who knows if their results are even accurate.
... it takes 260 cycles at 2.2Ghz as well ...
On the crypto side, the results are hard to read. The graph shows more signatures/sec for AMD but the table lists otherwise. Even still, I find it hard to believe Intel has any lead on that market. AMD has a 5 cycle multiplier and three ALU pipes for bignum math [hint: this is my passion]. Unless Intel has a 3 cycle multiplier or faster L1 (doesn't look like it) it should clock in at about the same pace. Doing bignum mults/sqrs I routinely get an IPC of nearly two on my 885 box.
It could also be that the code in OpenSSL [or whatever they used for SSL] is not tuned well. My TFM math library beats OpenSSL on x86-64 and matches it on x86-32 [both intel/amd] and PPC32 platforms.
Eitheway, I'm not saying it's impossible for Intel to win out on some marks. I'm just questioning the validity of the test because they seem to use random collection of boxes. If they want to make a point they could just pit some 285s against it running more open tests. I'd rather see Intel win by merits alone and not questionable testing practices. If they *are* faster it gives more incentive for AMD to catch up next year.
As for your comment about scaling linearly... If the task fits in the cache, generally it's true. At least for crypto work. AES takes 260 cycles @2.6Ghz
Where things skew is on the memory. It takes more cycles at a higher clock rate to access system memory. Which means that you may get the same walltime performance but the cycles/operation can go up.
Tom
2.2Ghz Opteron against 3.0Ghz core of the future?
*I* have 885s in my 2-way Tyan board at my house. That's a 400Mhz or 16% boost in CPU performance. I'm sure anandtech could get themselves some 285s for a benchmark.
Tom
Hint: look up my CV and see where I work...
We deal with crooked benchmarks all the time. The fact that these are Intel maintained boxes comparing next-gen stuff against RETAIL cores is stupid. Even if they release the cores in July it will be months before every corner store picks it up. Those FX-62's they comparing against were designed years ago [though the process/design has changed since] and probably fab'ed many months ago.
It isn't as if AMD is saying "Ok we made Opteron, we're done, let's go make plush bunnies now". If Intel was actually serious they would challenge AMD to show their hand [*]
Tom
[*] I won't say what the "hand" is.
[DISCLAIMER: NOT SPEAKING ON BEHALF OF AMD...]
/current/ stuff is so much better" and hope you don't notice. It's pretty lame because Conroe/etc doesn't look like it's bad.
AMD has challenged Intel to duels [go to their sunnyvale lab they [used to?] have posters up in the public space that say so. I wouldn't say AMD wants to take stuff out of the lab and make it public but I suspect if Intel said "let's set up a contest with current retail parts" they MAY [see above] answer the call.
It's no big secret that AMD wants to challenge Intel [and beat them] on every front.
Intel is comparing next gen stuff to current to say "look our
I'd love to see Intel do MP benchmarks in public though. They'd get their asses handed to them.
Tom
DDR2-800 is not generally available to the retail world. So the only benchmark that makes sense is this
...
AMD FX-62 sales volume: LOTS
Intel Core 2 Duo sales volume: Zero.
Not only that but how hard is it to go in the bios and make and AMD64 processor perform sub-optimally? Sure it's DDR400 but CL4-4-4-10, and you need the ECC scrubing turned on, disable the cache and
If Intel really wanted a benchmark they should ask AMD for engineering samples of next year's cores and they could pit them together.
Tom
Postscript has it's place. It was a standard that most commercial printers followed, it was interpreted which allowed the output to have macros and it was type proper. That is, the printed page will look like the viewed page in all respects.
If XPS is anything like Word in terms of layout it's equally useless. XPS has to be something a typesetter could use professionally before it's even remotely useful.
Knowing Microsofts lack of standards and interoperability compliance you can be assured the Vista software for it won't give you this.
Tom
To pose the same question to you then, who would want to install Linux and try it out? It's far from easy to use
Nothing worth doing is easy, nothing worth using is dead easy.
Sounds kinda bad, but think about it. What you call "hard" in terms of configuration and options I call flexibility that lets me work around problems when they arise. Is Gentoo perfect? Hardly. But when is the last time you hacked an install script [or the source] for a proprietary program that just won't work on your box?
While I don't spend a lot of time hacking things, it does arise from time to time that I either need to fix something for my platform [like QEMU] or I just want to tweak a feature.
Not only that, but other problems. Try keeping your WinXP kernel modern and recovering from botched kernels. Last I checked Windows only lets you have one Kernel at a time and it's rarely updated to support new features. The 2.6 kernel has brought us a wealth of improvements not only in the form of better drivers but things like the O(1) scheduler, etc. Sure if this requires me to type "make" and go through a text menu to configure a kernel for myself that may be considered hard. And sure, at first it is. But you learn, you learn about your computer and you get more control.
People fear change and work which is why they stay away from OSS. They view having to learn something as a bad thing. Well I tour around doing liason work between two companies, which mostly involves using MS Office tools, attending meetings, and yet I still find time to keep up with the OSS world because it's important to me.
Tom
Give them time.
If their motives were truly benevolent they would have just made PDF/PS support more integral inside Vista. I mean to this day XP has no "native" way of viewing PS files. How lame is that? Linux distros have had ggv for years...
Would be cooler if they worked Word [or started something new] to compete with LyX. As much as I like LaTeX I do hate some of it's macros and a WYSIWYG style typesetting editor would be nice.
Tom
Vista is not a new Corvette. Vista is your moms Caravan with fins.
...
... A workstation complete with typesetting, graphics tools, multimedia, Gnome, development tools [compilers, glade, gdb, valgrind, etc, etc] fits in 2-3GB. Unlike other distros I'm using the latest stable copies of everything and not what was "out six months ago".
Let's see Vista's POSIX compliance or even remote concern with interoperability or efficiency or
It's an OS that by various accounts installs in 12GB, takes gobs of memory, needs fast processors and doesn't add any end user tools [outside of maintenance] that people can use.
My god, in 12GB I could probably install 80% of the portage packages
At least XP was better... you can get XP + Word + Cygwin in about 5-6GB or so if you use NTFS compression.
Tom
emerge -uD tetex
:-)
... it and read it another way.
What's this about an install nightmare?
Yeah on Windows it's hard [Miktex == useless] but that's because the support/demand isn't there. tetex in Cygwin is halfway competent though. For reading DVI you can use "xdvi" which comes with teTeX or you can dvi2ps or dvi2pdf or dvi2html or
The thing that gets me all roared up is that it's just yet another document format that has no advantage over PDF or even PS. Then you couple that "fact" with the fact that it only is supported in Vista and probably uses binary blobs in the XML makes it totally useless for people like me who avoid MSFT products like the plague.
Net result will probably be in the future all documents are in XPS format because people are too stupid to realize they DO have a choice and that they really don't have to put up with their polite sheep hearding...
Tom
Bah ... "porting to Vista" what does that even mean? It still has the 15 year old win32 API underneath. Unless you mean taking advtange of WinFS or Aero or one of the many other memory hogging services...
... you're a retard and your business deserves to struggle.
Most end user applications really ought to be based on portable libs like GTK+ or Qt [or ncurses...]. That way "porting to Vista" amounts to making a port of the portable libraries.
If you write applications directly on top of X11 or GDI in this day and age
Tom
That and anyone worth their dime would use DVI for a portable format and write shit in TeX or LaTeX...
...}].
... we don't need XPS even if it uses "Advanced XML Rendering Technology (tm)".
PDF is just a presentation really... the document itself should be end format free [e.g. TeX => {html | ps | pdf | dvi |
So combied with 30 years of TeX and 15 years of PDF
Tom
Technically though it's their website and they can put whatever lame duck format on their they want. I don't think they'll get rid of PDF. Look at WMF it's technically a replacement for Postscript yet people still use that.
The XPS format will either get opened up or nobody but MSFT websites will use it. Especially since Vista will still run Adobe...
What you should be questioning is why XPS exists at all. PDF seems to do the job of portable document format just fine being that it renders [or can be rendered] pitch perfect anywhere. Unlike say Word which is a just a crime against professionalism...
Tom
Why would anyone outside of ISVs download this? So for the cost of re-imaging my system I get to test an unstable, feature incomplete OS that is likely to further the bane of human existance. Not only does the install expire but I then have to pay full price for a legit copy at the end.
/me hopes Vista never materializes and/or flops big.
And for all my bug reports I send in I get ???
At least when you beta test an OSS OS you then get rewarded with a stable OS that you can freely install as you choose...
Tom
"supporting" Linux only has to amount to using standard well documented components [wifi, sound, video, etc]. The OSS community will take care of the rest.
Look at most Dell laptops. They usually work fine [my 630m does] in Linux because for the most part they use consistent components which are documented. That may be intentional but they really have no overt "support" for Linux on the home user front.
So all Lenovo has to do is avoid random custom chips for things like sound, wifi, etc and they'll be ok. If they go with the "we saved 30 cents per chip" basement bargain components they'll be screwed.
Tom