From 1999 to 2003, AMD's Athlon was a moderately superior CPU to Intel's Pentium III competitor. More most of that time I felt that success was limited by AMD's lack of high quality motherboards to place the CPUs in. My memory of the period matches the early history of the Athlon at cpu-info. You can't really evaluate CPUs without the context of the motherboard and system they're placed into. And the Athlon units as integrated into the systems they ran on were still a hard sell, relative to the slightly slower but more reliable Intel options. That situation didn't really change until the nForce2 chipset was released, and now we're up to the middle of 2002 already.
I highlighted the 2003 to 2006 period instead because it was there AMD was indisputably in the lead. 64 bit support, nForce3 with onboard gigabit as the motherboard, the whole package was viable and the obvious market leader if you wanted high performance.
I wasn't clear enough on what I meant by number of cores. AMD's strengths when they did well in the server market (2003 to 2009) included more sockets, more cores per socket, and higher memory bandwidth to each socket. At this point the only one of those leads they maintain is that they still cram more real cores onto a socket than Intel does. Presuming the number of sockets is the same, I was suggesting that AMD's higher core count per socket doesn't give them much of a real-world advantage. As you suggested, the multi-socket situation isn't different enough between AMD and Intel for it to be a competitive advantage for either anymore; that's fairly level now.
An Intel server with 8 cores and the current generation of HyperThreading is not necessarily any slower than these new AMD ones with 16 real cores. There are times you run into memory bandwidth issues at the top end of concurrency, and Intel has been the leader on that since Nehalem in 2009. At the low end of active cores, sometimes there is just one thing you want to run really fast, and there Intel's Turbo approach is still better than AMD's. The middle area where AMD is at least competitive--lots of cores active but not constrained by memory bandwidth--is not that wide of a range of server workloads.
PostgreSQL versions from 8.3 to 9.1 did pretty well using up to 16 cores. 9.2 was the version that targeted scalability up to 64 cores, released this September.
The licensing model of commercial databases is one part of why PostgreSQL is become more viable even for traditional "enterprise" markets. PostgreSQL doesn't use processors quite as efficiently as its commercial competitors. The PostgreSQL code is optimized for clarity, portability, and extensibility as well as performance. Commercial databases rarely include its level of extensibility. This is why PostGIS as an add-on to the database is doing well against competitors like Oracle Spatial. And they're often willing to do terrible things to the clarity of their source code in order to chase after higher benchmark results. Those hacks work, but they cost them in terms of bugs and long-term maintainability.
But if the software license scales per-core, nowadays that means you've lost Moore's Law as your cost savings buddy. What I remind people who aren't happy with PostgreSQL's performance per-core is that adding more cores to hardware is pretty cheap now. Use the software license savings to buy a system with twice as many cores, and PostgreSQL's competitive situation against commercial products looks a lot better.
The official tick-tock strategy goes back to the 2006 Core branding change. But Intel had been using two design teams to research and release alternate forms of optimization for a long time before that. In the mid 90's you could make out that one team focused on new architecture style features (386, Pentium) while the other was more about performance tweaking (486, Pentium Pro). The Itanium work spawned a new team altogether. The Core architecture was birthed from releasing that two of those paths--the one that let to the terrible Pentium 4 and Itanium products--had completely botched things. They pulled out of that tailspin by using the other active architecture at the time, the one that went from Pentium 3 to Celeron to Pentium M, as the basis for the new Core.
In some ways it's kind of a shame that it happened that way, because that was the last gasp for interesting new processor features from that style of design. We used to get major architecture changes: 8 to 16 to 32 to 64 bits, extra processing styles going from 387 to MMX to SSE. Now we get tick-tock, shrink and optimize. It's pretty boring.
AMD had one period in the limelight. When the first good 64-bit x86 systems were Opterons launched in 2003, they had a really competitive product for servers. Intel was busy jerking off with Itanium at that time, was oblivious to power consumption (the Pentium 4 was the desktop processor available), and just generally executing terribly. It was like a textbook classic case where the near monopoly market leader was fat and dumb, and got its ass handed to it by its scrappy competitor.
It took Intel until 2006 to release its first Core microarchitecture chips and start acting right again. By 2009 they had jumped back ahead of AMD in every market again, with the Nehalem server chips. And that was it; Intel has stayed one to two generations ahead of AMD ever since.
These Opteron models are the new server line from AMD. The desktop version based on the same architecture (the Trinity alluded to in the summary) closed some of the gap against Intel. But Intel remains the market leader on single core performance, performance per core, and power utilization. AMD continues to push the number of cores upward more aggressively, but there's not many workloads where that matters enough for their slim advantage to result in a net win. And the lower efficiency means that sometimes even having more cores doesn't aggregate into enough speed to be a useful alternative. That leaves AMD to compete on pricing. And the CPU is a relatively small part of the total budget on larger servers. Load up a Dell 815 for example and you'll find the CPU pricing seems small compared to what filling its RAM capacity up costs. And then there's reliable storage, at a while higher price level altogether.
The rule of thumb I've been using for the last year, based on benchmarking of CPU heavy database work, is that I expect a 32 core AMD server to be about as fast as a 24 core Intel one, while using significantly more power. The 40% performance per watt gain claimed here--from AMD's own hand-picked best case scenario benchmark--is only enough to make the Intel performance and gap decrease in size, not go away. We'll see if these new Opterons benefit from the re-engineering work done recently more than the desktop ones did; so far it doesn't look good.
Yes, Obama has been very clear, you're allowed to see your gay spouse, no problem, unless one of you is considered a terrorist. Then it's off to indefinite detention for them with no trial, as approved by the man himself. The reason to support a third party here is very simple. Obama has trashed the ultimate civil liberty, the right to be a free citizen. The only acceptable platform for Romney would start be "I will eliminate Obama's destruction of civil liberties". Since it's not, a vote for either is agreeing that's acceptable behavior. That's why 3rd-party candidates are needed, to provide some alternative to the madness of both existing major parties. Picking one based on trivia like gay rights is ridiculous when this situation exists.
You should be glad you're not getting the full attention of the federally mandated "civil liberties", like the one to indefinite detention. Once your right to be a free citizen can be taken away without a trial, the rest of your rights are pretty minor, and you'll need more than medical marijuana to make the detention trip fun. If anything I'd like to see more state rebellion against the mandates of the federal government, in hopes our whole government deadlocks rather than keeping up the Change it's been enacting recently.
The presumed first step is that employers require their employees vote while at work. Easy enough to do even with indirect threats right now, when so many people are un- and under-employed. Didn't vote at work? Not gonna look good on your next performance report...
As for when the stupidity will stop, I'll only point out that you just described yourself like a 2012 version of the 2002 Cobol programmer, shortly after they were re-hired/promoted to fix Y2K issues. And there will be certainly be a new incarnation of exactly the same situation 10 years from now, too, just with different technology yet again. "Ask Slashdot 2022: Are Ruby programmers still relevant?"
This might be Nexus One touchscreen sometimes behaves oddly, which has been open for years now and encountered by hundreds of people. If it's a hardware problem, it's a widespread one.
They can barely keep the bugs out of the current hardware. Your problem is similar to the Nexus 7 touchscreen bug, which has hit hundreds of people. Maybe the magic 4.1.2 upgrade mentioned there will help you? (There is a bet I wouldn't take)
Not all T400 models have the Radeon GPU. Some of them just have an Intel GPU chipset. The performance on that generation of Intel GPU is terrible. It makes a huge difference for WoW which graphics chipset is in the model of T400 purchased.
Some Lenovo T400 models only include the Intel 4500MHD chipset for graphics. If that's the case, this particular laptop will be very slow for running WoW, and a desktop with discrete card might be justifiable. But the better T400 models come with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3470 with 256 MB of RAM. That's a completely reasonable GPU for running this game. Warcraft is not the latest and greatest graphics engine requiring large amounts of GPU horsepower.
The Windows license on a Lenovo T400 is going to be for Windows Vista, unless you ordered one of the corporate oriented ones with XP. It will also be a pain in the ass to get that Windows partition working if it ever breaks. You don't get real install media from Lenovo, just their recovery program--which sucks and easily can break.
Just ignoring the whole thing, buying Windows 7, and installing that is absolutely the right thing to do. It's bad enough he's being force to have a Windows laptop in the house; saying he should have a Vista install is going way too far.
Even if Wall Street cared about mom-and pop investors (they don't), the idea that retail investors can leave the market is an idle threat. There's nowhere else for them to go. It's not like Joe Sixpack can switch from trading stocks to investing in commodities or currency markets instead. There's no easy retail outlet for them to do that, the lack of taxation breaks makes real profits harder to earn, and the volatility is higher; it's a mess. And rates on things like savings have been driven to below inflation, by the same influential big players who make sure the stock market is organized to benefit them most.
And guess what? The same rich people who are messing with the stock equities market will move to wherever mom-and-pop go, and keep beating on them the same way. Retail traders are sheep to be shorn as far as the bigger firms are concerns, and that's what they will always be.
There's a fun game I like to play when this topic comes up with people. Break out some cards and chips play a card game like poker. Give one player 10X as many chips as everyone else. Unless they're a complete idiot, they will always end up with all the money in the end. Once you more money to risk than any other player by a good margin, you can just keep escalating bets until you wipe your small opponents out. Just keep risking as much as the little players can afford, over and over, until the one bad break that wipes them out.
Letting just the profit on a position ride can be troublesome on three fronts. First, unless you get a rare monster win, the profit left after selling what you originally invested will only be a small fraction of the investment. Selling a position because it went up 20% after purchase is an excellent trade...but closing the original amount will only leave you with 1/5 of the original position size. That doesn't really dull the feeling that you missed an opportunity if the stock keeps climbing.
Second, even if you're risking only earlier profits, it's still money that's tied up in a position. Let's say you entered a trade, made a profit, and closed most of the position at your target. There's a lost opportunity cost if you keep that profit in the original stock, rather than moving it to a better one.
The third messy part around selling at a target and letting the profit ride is the tax implications. For more serious traders everything is going to show up as a short-term capital gain. Investors who might otherwise be in the long-term bracket are essentially penalized if they close profitable positions early.
There is nothing to prevent trading on a stock from becoming so irrational that it goes outside of the fundamentals floor, crashing below the book value of the company, particularly in a panic. Stocks whose price drops enough to start tripping stop loss orders can easily accelerate right below that for some amount of time, with fun stuff like margin calls joining the party too. Value investing based on fundamentals can work very well. But the idea that it must bound the movement of a stock's price, which are driven by all sorts of other things, is not a riskless one. It assumes you can always wait out irrational market behavior, and that's hard to guarantee.
This is sort of off-topic for Google though, given the company's P/E ratio history. It's still pretty far from being a book value driven investment.
Panic selling always overshoots down past where the price will eventually settle.
This word "always", it doesn't mean what you think it does. It's very common for moderate panic to be just the first stage of a major drop in a stock's price, in which case the price will accelerate downward instead of settling back again. There's a popular phrase for the idea of "oh, it dropped a bunch, that must have gone too far; let me buy some and profit when it corrects": catching a falling knife. If you do it right, you get some small profit as the price returns to the mean from its extreme point. But if you're wrong, you can lose a giant amount of money. The odds of a trade played against panic are reasonable, but the risk/reward ratio is terrible. You can correctly play short-term panics a dozen times successfully but lose all that profit with one serious loss, when the initial panic turns into only more panic.
That depends on implementation. Software RAID on Linux for example can certainly still issue TRIM through a pair of devices.
The TRIM command was a cheap hack back when SSD firmware wasn't very smart. Nowadays good units will do wear-leveling to use up all of the flash. You don't have to tell the drive what data isn't relevant anymore for them to figure that out.
It's still possible to construct synthetic benchmarks where TRIM makes a difference in performance. I don't feel that any of those simulations are relevant to real-world use patterns though.
OCZ is worthless to the commercial market not due to their failure rates, but to their product line thrashing always in search of the next big thing. I waited around some time to get them to ship their Vertex 2 Pro, the only drive they had with a battery cache (supercapacitor or similar) to make them more rugged against power failures. Can't reliably do database work at high speed without one of those. Once available, they were never easy to get in quantity. And then they announced the Vertex 3 Pro, followed by retailers flushing inventory on the 2 Pro. And I don't think the 3 Pro even ever shipped.
Companies putting valuable data on SSD will not stand for the non-stop enthusiast upgrade train like that. They want a drive that's stable and with predictable availability for a few years (focusing on ironing out obscure bugs) after it ships. OCZ is not that sort of company; Intel is.
There are more bad electrolytic capacitors out there than ever before. Problem is they don't blow in an exciting way anymore. The stupid things just bow out at the top, with the case completely able to contain the explosion. So lame.
The FusionIO devices are provisioned with a fair amount of redundancy at the storage cell level. But if a part in the main controller goes boom, so does the whole device. I've seen that once so far, wasn't fun since the most critical parts of the data were stored there--trying to get the most out of the device's expense. Some of these units are just expensive enough that I've seen a depressing number of people buy just one (rather than a mirrored pair) after buying the sales pitch on the cell redundancy. If you're going to do that, make sure you have some sort of real-time replication over to a cheaper server going on, too.
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From 1999 to 2003, AMD's Athlon was a moderately superior CPU to Intel's Pentium III competitor. More most of that time I felt that success was limited by AMD's lack of high quality motherboards to place the CPUs in. My memory of the period matches the early history of the Athlon at cpu-info. You can't really evaluate CPUs without the context of the motherboard and system they're placed into. And the Athlon units as integrated into the systems they ran on were still a hard sell, relative to the slightly slower but more reliable Intel options. That situation didn't really change until the nForce2 chipset was released, and now we're up to the middle of 2002 already.
I highlighted the 2003 to 2006 period instead because it was there AMD was indisputably in the lead. 64 bit support, nForce3 with onboard gigabit as the motherboard, the whole package was viable and the obvious market leader if you wanted high performance.
I wasn't clear enough on what I meant by number of cores. AMD's strengths when they did well in the server market (2003 to 2009) included more sockets, more cores per socket, and higher memory bandwidth to each socket. At this point the only one of those leads they maintain is that they still cram more real cores onto a socket than Intel does. Presuming the number of sockets is the same, I was suggesting that AMD's higher core count per socket doesn't give them much of a real-world advantage. As you suggested, the multi-socket situation isn't different enough between AMD and Intel for it to be a competitive advantage for either anymore; that's fairly level now.
An Intel server with 8 cores and the current generation of HyperThreading is not necessarily any slower than these new AMD ones with 16 real cores. There are times you run into memory bandwidth issues at the top end of concurrency, and Intel has been the leader on that since Nehalem in 2009. At the low end of active cores, sometimes there is just one thing you want to run really fast, and there Intel's Turbo approach is still better than AMD's. The middle area where AMD is at least competitive--lots of cores active but not constrained by memory bandwidth--is not that wide of a range of server workloads.
PostgreSQL versions from 8.3 to 9.1 did pretty well using up to 16 cores. 9.2 was the version that targeted scalability up to 64 cores, released this September.
The licensing model of commercial databases is one part of why PostgreSQL is become more viable even for traditional "enterprise" markets. PostgreSQL doesn't use processors quite as efficiently as its commercial competitors. The PostgreSQL code is optimized for clarity, portability, and extensibility as well as performance. Commercial databases rarely include its level of extensibility. This is why PostGIS as an add-on to the database is doing well against competitors like Oracle Spatial. And they're often willing to do terrible things to the clarity of their source code in order to chase after higher benchmark results. Those hacks work, but they cost them in terms of bugs and long-term maintainability.
But if the software license scales per-core, nowadays that means you've lost Moore's Law as your cost savings buddy. What I remind people who aren't happy with PostgreSQL's performance per-core is that adding more cores to hardware is pretty cheap now. Use the software license savings to buy a system with twice as many cores, and PostgreSQL's competitive situation against commercial products looks a lot better.
The official tick-tock strategy goes back to the 2006 Core branding change. But Intel had been using two design teams to research and release alternate forms of optimization for a long time before that. In the mid 90's you could make out that one team focused on new architecture style features (386, Pentium) while the other was more about performance tweaking (486, Pentium Pro). The Itanium work spawned a new team altogether. The Core architecture was birthed from releasing that two of those paths--the one that let to the terrible Pentium 4 and Itanium products--had completely botched things. They pulled out of that tailspin by using the other active architecture at the time, the one that went from Pentium 3 to Celeron to Pentium M, as the basis for the new Core.
In some ways it's kind of a shame that it happened that way, because that was the last gasp for interesting new processor features from that style of design. We used to get major architecture changes: 8 to 16 to 32 to 64 bits, extra processing styles going from 387 to MMX to SSE. Now we get tick-tock, shrink and optimize. It's pretty boring.
AMD had one period in the limelight. When the first good 64-bit x86 systems were Opterons launched in 2003, they had a really competitive product for servers. Intel was busy jerking off with Itanium at that time, was oblivious to power consumption (the Pentium 4 was the desktop processor available), and just generally executing terribly. It was like a textbook classic case where the near monopoly market leader was fat and dumb, and got its ass handed to it by its scrappy competitor.
It took Intel until 2006 to release its first Core microarchitecture chips and start acting right again. By 2009 they had jumped back ahead of AMD in every market again, with the Nehalem server chips. And that was it; Intel has stayed one to two generations ahead of AMD ever since.
These Opteron models are the new server line from AMD. The desktop version based on the same architecture (the Trinity alluded to in the summary) closed some of the gap against Intel. But Intel remains the market leader on single core performance, performance per core, and power utilization. AMD continues to push the number of cores upward more aggressively, but there's not many workloads where that matters enough for their slim advantage to result in a net win. And the lower efficiency means that sometimes even having more cores doesn't aggregate into enough speed to be a useful alternative. That leaves AMD to compete on pricing. And the CPU is a relatively small part of the total budget on larger servers. Load up a Dell 815 for example and you'll find the CPU pricing seems small compared to what filling its RAM capacity up costs. And then there's reliable storage, at a while higher price level altogether.
The rule of thumb I've been using for the last year, based on benchmarking of CPU heavy database work, is that I expect a 32 core AMD server to be about as fast as a 24 core Intel one, while using significantly more power. The 40% performance per watt gain claimed here--from AMD's own hand-picked best case scenario benchmark--is only enough to make the Intel performance and gap decrease in size, not go away. We'll see if these new Opterons benefit from the re-engineering work done recently more than the desktop ones did; so far it doesn't look good.
Yes, Obama has been very clear, you're allowed to see your gay spouse, no problem, unless one of you is considered a terrorist. Then it's off to indefinite detention for them with no trial, as approved by the man himself. The reason to support a third party here is very simple. Obama has trashed the ultimate civil liberty, the right to be a free citizen. The only acceptable platform for Romney would start be "I will eliminate Obama's destruction of civil liberties". Since it's not, a vote for either is agreeing that's acceptable behavior. That's why 3rd-party candidates are needed, to provide some alternative to the madness of both existing major parties. Picking one based on trivia like gay rights is ridiculous when this situation exists.
You should be glad you're not getting the full attention of the federally mandated "civil liberties", like the one to indefinite detention. Once your right to be a free citizen can be taken away without a trial, the rest of your rights are pretty minor, and you'll need more than medical marijuana to make the detention trip fun. If anything I'd like to see more state rebellion against the mandates of the federal government, in hopes our whole government deadlocks rather than keeping up the Change it's been enacting recently.
A Plutocracy? That's a government run by Disney, right? A lot of recent events suddenly make more sense if that's what we have in the US.
The presumed first step is that employers require their employees vote while at work. Easy enough to do even with indirect threats right now, when so many people are un- and under-employed. Didn't vote at work? Not gonna look good on your next performance report...
As for when the stupidity will stop, I'll only point out that you just described yourself like a 2012 version of the 2002 Cobol programmer, shortly after they were re-hired/promoted to fix Y2K issues. And there will be certainly be a new incarnation of exactly the same situation 10 years from now, too, just with different technology yet again. "Ask Slashdot 2022: Are Ruby programmers still relevant?"
This might be Nexus One touchscreen sometimes behaves oddly, which has been open for years now and encountered by hundreds of people. If it's a hardware problem, it's a widespread one.
They can barely keep the bugs out of the current hardware. Your problem is similar to the Nexus 7 touchscreen bug, which has hit hundreds of people. Maybe the magic 4.1.2 upgrade mentioned there will help you? (There is a bet I wouldn't take)
Typically, these people get computers that have been in the school system for a couple years and are physically abused
A problem my new charity, People for Ethical Treatment of Poor Old Obsolete PCs, intends to address. Case modding is murder!
Not all T400 models have the Radeon GPU. Some of them just have an Intel GPU chipset. The performance on that generation of Intel GPU is terrible. It makes a huge difference for WoW which graphics chipset is in the model of T400 purchased.
Some Lenovo T400 models only include the Intel 4500MHD chipset for graphics. If that's the case, this particular laptop will be very slow for running WoW, and a desktop with discrete card might be justifiable. But the better T400 models come with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3470 with 256 MB of RAM. That's a completely reasonable GPU for running this game. Warcraft is not the latest and greatest graphics engine requiring large amounts of GPU horsepower.
The Windows license on a Lenovo T400 is going to be for Windows Vista, unless you ordered one of the corporate oriented ones with XP. It will also be a pain in the ass to get that Windows partition working if it ever breaks. You don't get real install media from Lenovo, just their recovery program--which sucks and easily can break.
Just ignoring the whole thing, buying Windows 7, and installing that is absolutely the right thing to do. It's bad enough he's being force to have a Windows laptop in the house; saying he should have a Vista install is going way too far.
Even if Wall Street cared about mom-and pop investors (they don't), the idea that retail investors can leave the market is an idle threat. There's nowhere else for them to go. It's not like Joe Sixpack can switch from trading stocks to investing in commodities or currency markets instead. There's no easy retail outlet for them to do that, the lack of taxation breaks makes real profits harder to earn, and the volatility is higher; it's a mess. And rates on things like savings have been driven to below inflation, by the same influential big players who make sure the stock market is organized to benefit them most.
And guess what? The same rich people who are messing with the stock equities market will move to wherever mom-and-pop go, and keep beating on them the same way. Retail traders are sheep to be shorn as far as the bigger firms are concerns, and that's what they will always be.
There's a fun game I like to play when this topic comes up with people. Break out some cards and chips play a card game like poker. Give one player 10X as many chips as everyone else. Unless they're a complete idiot, they will always end up with all the money in the end. Once you more money to risk than any other player by a good margin, you can just keep escalating bets until you wipe your small opponents out. Just keep risking as much as the little players can afford, over and over, until the one bad break that wipes them out.
Letting just the profit on a position ride can be troublesome on three fronts. First, unless you get a rare monster win, the profit left after selling what you originally invested will only be a small fraction of the investment. Selling a position because it went up 20% after purchase is an excellent trade...but closing the original amount will only leave you with 1/5 of the original position size. That doesn't really dull the feeling that you missed an opportunity if the stock keeps climbing.
Second, even if you're risking only earlier profits, it's still money that's tied up in a position. Let's say you entered a trade, made a profit, and closed most of the position at your target. There's a lost opportunity cost if you keep that profit in the original stock, rather than moving it to a better one.
The third messy part around selling at a target and letting the profit ride is the tax implications. For more serious traders everything is going to show up as a short-term capital gain. Investors who might otherwise be in the long-term bracket are essentially penalized if they close profitable positions early.
There is nothing to prevent trading on a stock from becoming so irrational that it goes outside of the fundamentals floor, crashing below the book value of the company, particularly in a panic. Stocks whose price drops enough to start tripping stop loss orders can easily accelerate right below that for some amount of time, with fun stuff like margin calls joining the party too. Value investing based on fundamentals can work very well. But the idea that it must bound the movement of a stock's price, which are driven by all sorts of other things, is not a riskless one. It assumes you can always wait out irrational market behavior, and that's hard to guarantee.
This is sort of off-topic for Google though, given the company's P/E ratio history. It's still pretty far from being a book value driven investment.
Panic selling always overshoots down past where the price will eventually settle.
This word "always", it doesn't mean what you think it does. It's very common for moderate panic to be just the first stage of a major drop in a stock's price, in which case the price will accelerate downward instead of settling back again. There's a popular phrase for the idea of "oh, it dropped a bunch, that must have gone too far; let me buy some and profit when it corrects": catching a falling knife. If you do it right, you get some small profit as the price returns to the mean from its extreme point. But if you're wrong, you can lose a giant amount of money. The odds of a trade played against panic are reasonable, but the risk/reward ratio is terrible. You can correctly play short-term panics a dozen times successfully but lose all that profit with one serious loss, when the initial panic turns into only more panic.
That depends on implementation. Software RAID on Linux for example can certainly still issue TRIM through a pair of devices.
The TRIM command was a cheap hack back when SSD firmware wasn't very smart. Nowadays good units will do wear-leveling to use up all of the flash. You don't have to tell the drive what data isn't relevant anymore for them to figure that out.
It's still possible to construct synthetic benchmarks where TRIM makes a difference in performance. I don't feel that any of those simulations are relevant to real-world use patterns though.
OCZ is worthless to the commercial market not due to their failure rates, but to their product line thrashing always in search of the next big thing. I waited around some time to get them to ship their Vertex 2 Pro, the only drive they had with a battery cache (supercapacitor or similar) to make them more rugged against power failures. Can't reliably do database work at high speed without one of those. Once available, they were never easy to get in quantity. And then they announced the Vertex 3 Pro, followed by retailers flushing inventory on the 2 Pro. And I don't think the 3 Pro even ever shipped.
Companies putting valuable data on SSD will not stand for the non-stop enthusiast upgrade train like that. They want a drive that's stable and with predictable availability for a few years (focusing on ironing out obscure bugs) after it ships. OCZ is not that sort of company; Intel is.
There are more bad electrolytic capacitors out there than ever before. Problem is they don't blow in an exciting way anymore. The stupid things just bow out at the top, with the case completely able to contain the explosion. So lame.
The FusionIO devices are provisioned with a fair amount of redundancy at the storage cell level. But if a part in the main controller goes boom, so does the whole device. I've seen that once so far, wasn't fun since the most critical parts of the data were stored there--trying to get the most out of the device's expense. Some of these units are just expensive enough that I've seen a depressing number of people buy just one (rather than a mirrored pair) after buying the sales pitch on the cell redundancy. If you're going to do that, make sure you have some sort of real-time replication over to a cheaper server going on, too.