What a great idea. I'm not a hardcore classical music fan, but I have been listening to more of it these days. I've been futzing around with naming schemes, but I've never been satisfied. This looks more feasable than anything I've come up with.
Because Intel and AMD already do it for them, as best they can.
AMD offers the Turion 35w max TDP (1.45v load) and Turion 25w max TDP (1.2v load), and both chips scale back to VERY LOW voltages and speeds when idle.
Intel offers the Pentium M LV and ULV (Low Voltage and Ultra-Low Voltage) parts.
These parts are binned within a few voltage grades. This simplifies testing, because instead of dozens, perhaps hundreds of voltages to test, you only have a few.
With dynamic clock and voltage scaling, these processors automatically run at their lowest settings when you're doing something casual, like reading a webpage or document, or are watching a standard-defintion movie.
Sure, you can get a tiny bit more out of undervolting, but manufacturers leave that for enthusiasts because it is not worth it in their bottom line. As I mentioened before, testing parts with such fine granularity would only make all processors more expensive, and on the retail end, selling dozens of parts with different voltages would only make the marketplace more confusing.
Right, I think it is stupid as well, but here is the reason why my company prohibits USB thumbdrives:
According to them, Windows with logging enabled will log all disk transactions, including floppy, CD, Zip. Anytime you copy a file to the disk, it will be logged. But they claim that for USB devices such as flash drives, transactions are not logged.
Is this correct? I'm not certain. Is this overkill, considering that they have to trust the employees anyway? Sure. But if it is correct, I can understand why USB devices would be such a great concern.
It is hard to justify completely turning off USB or hot-gluing the ports closed now that vendors are starting to support USB exclusively. This is probably the best solution available to them.
I believe you meant to compare AMD's TURION to the Pentium M.
While the Turion MT was a good match for the Pentium M, the Turion ML was far more common, and used more power.
It seems the real thing holding the Turion back is that Via and ATI have not built power-optimized chipsets for it yet. However, I expect this to happen in 2006. The chipset makers know how critical power consumption is to compete with Intel, plus DDR2 will reduce the power required for memory by a lot (much lower voltage).
The only question is: will Turion dual-core be able to compete with Yonah? AMD has a lot of work to do if they want to be taken seriously in the mobile world. More along those lines: how is AMD going to sell themselves on the desktop once Intel catches up on the power consumption and performance front later this year with Conroe?
HL2 is over a year old, and was intended to be released 2.5 years ago. It can "run" on a GeForce 2 MX, and was designed to run optimally on the Radeon 9500 / 9600 / 9700 / 9800 series.
In addition, HL2 is one of the ONLY games to feature a mixed-mode DX9 specially designed for Nvidia FX-series cards to make up for their poor pure-DX9 performance.
Most of the people who are interested in tests like this have already played HL2 to death, and are looking forward to the next batch pf PS 3.0 games:D
Right, analogies are key. I also have had great success with encouraging people like my mother to be more outgoing when it comes to GUIs.
Like most people who just "get by" using computers, she is terrified of messing with options, and jumping through menus.
Whenener she has a problem with a piece of software I've never touched (yet I'm expected to "fix"), I make it clear to her that I have no clue exactly how to fix it, but I tell her what kind of thing I'm looking for...a settings window, a configuration wizard, etc. And I explain to her quite clearly that she can't break anything by messing with these options...she can always undo something.
Now that she realizes that many programs offer similar basic features, but just present them in their own way, she is more confident with finding the solution to common problems she encounters (and calls me very rarely about problems).
It is all about the approach. I used to have to install GAMES for this woman.
The reason the x1600 architecture is the worst of the next generation is because ATI tried to build a 6600, and failed because they got too greedy.
The 6600 architecture was risky. 8 fragment pipelines, but only 4 ROPs meant the chip would be marginal at REALLY old games (just see how badly it scores in 3dmark 2001), and be excellent for newer games.
One of the benefits of the architecture is "free" anistropic filtering (compared to other architectures), because those 8 fragment pipes are never fully utilized.
The disbenefit of the architecture is poor AA performance above 2x, due to the limited number of ROPs. The 6600 line takes a bigger percentage performance hit in 4xAA than ANY of the 6800 chips (roughly 50%).
The x1600 tries to be a super 6600. With a slightly higher clock speed and 50% more fragment pipes, the x1600 XT should blow away the 6600 GT...but it doesn't, except in isolated instances like Battlefield 2 and Serious Sam 2. Most of modern games can barely keep the 6600's 2:1 ratio of fragment to ROPs full, and that's why Nvidia has yet to release a card with a ratio of fragment to ROPs higher than 2:1.
To top it off, for a card that has supposedly increased raw fragment processing power 77% over a 6600 GT, the memory bandwidth has increased less than 40%. The x1600 XT is clocked fast, but it is memory starved. In addition, the limitation of 4 texture units (versus 8 in the 6600 GT) means multi-texture effects (like bump-mapping) are going to be VERY slow.
I'm not going to talk about the other benefits of the x1000 series, because while they're nice, they're not the reason people hate the x1600.
The original poster meant well, but AMD is really about 2-3x more efficient for the same performance level on the desktop.
This is still an impressive figure, and it is even more impressive when you consider how much less power Athlon 64 processors use at idle than P4 processors (about 5-10x less, with Cool 'n Quiet enabled).
Athlon 64 processors are 3x more efficient at load than their Prescott counterparts (90w+ load). They are about 2x more efficient at load than Cedar Mill (~60w load,.65nm, reduced core voltage).
http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/11/15/3/page21.ht ml">Read the power usage of Prescott versus Winchester here (this is the raw power supplied by the voltage regulators to the processor, not the total system power)
Of course, this will all change once Conroe is released. But, I welcome Intel's return to competitiveness on the desktop. AMD has been floundering about since the move to 90nm, canceling next-generation chip projects, and doing a half-assed job of competing in the mobile market. They need this wakeup call.
You just attacked a stereotypical claim that 64-bit is somehow inherently faster, and then you made a erroneous claim of your own.
64 bit processors also need larger instruction caches because the instructions are way bigger in size. As a result, some small subset of things perform slower in 64 bit mode.
Actually, because x86-64 is an extension of the IA-32 CISC instuction set, it benefits from the exceptionally small instruction size. x86 uses variable instruction sizes. Thus, the move to a larger address space likely only affects instructions with explicit access to memory.
The addition of 8 more registers means that you can reduce the number of instructions, because you no longer have to cleverly juggle your data quite as much.
According to AMD, the the instruction size for x86-64 is typically 10-15% larger, while the number of instructions is reduced by about 10%. This is why we see virtuallty no performance hit with x86, and in certain situations we see a huge performance increase.
Take a closer look at those pictures, starting with the one that is a closeup of the Sigmatel chipset. Below that picture is another picture with two PCBs. The PCB on top in the picture is the one with the Sigmatel chipset (that chipset is on the back side, not shown in that picture).
Do you see any large collection of vias on the backside? I certainly don't. In fact, that's the most component-packed side of either of the two PCBs...it's really crowded.
BGA chips aren't much different from SIPP-style packages...they still connect to solder points on the surface of the board. You just can't see them.
Microsoft moved the video drivers into the kernel simply because, when NT 4.0 was released, speed was essential, and hardware was barely able to meet the needs of workstation users without the additional slowdowns of user-mode. Video card manufacturers responded to the call by making more stable video drivers for NT than their Win9x counterparts.
Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't remember WHY they put the video drivers in kernel space. The let Windows 2000 and Windows XP ship with the drivers in the kernel, even though performance was more than enough to move the driver back to user space.
But now, Microsoft is finally doing what they should have done with Windows 2000: Vista will move drivers back into user-mode, and I expect stability will improve dramatically. Hey, better late than never.
Exactly, all Creative Labs Muvo flash players (and likely the N200 series) use this concept. They have two PCBs bridged by a modular connector. The main PCB has the logic, USB connector and buttons. The other PCB has the memory and LCD. So, they can take advantage of this and produce multiple memory PCBs, and use the same main PCB for all device variations.
I do not understand why manufacturing of NAND memory is easier than manufacturing of ram memory. If they can do 16Gb of NAND than they should at least be able to manufacture 16Gb of ram memory as ram is still volatile and NAND is non-volatile. But I believe the biggest ram memory is still 2Gb and I do not know if that is mass produced.
Good question. Here is my take:
Memory makers typically push their latest process technology using NAND Flash because NAND Flash is a heavy growth market, and needs to be as small and low-power as possible. This means that they don't yet encounter unpredictable downturns. For example, Samsung was already using a 73 nm process on their NAND Flash as they recently moved their DRAM to 90 nm. Basically, when you combine the need for very small size and low-power, plus the huge growth market, the higher the density, the better.
NAND is also not hard to make in high densities because most manufacturers have developed ways to make one cell (two transistors) hold two bits of data. This is as-opposed to DRAM, which stores each bit using a transistor and a capacitor. Depending on the size of the capacitor, you should be able to get better density from a NAND Flash chip than DRAM.
DRAM cannot hope to reflect Flash's growth, and DRAM is also more volatile because its growth is directly attached to another volatile market: computers. To make this clear: people may buy multiple flash devices for each computer they own (including new AND existing computers), but they will typically only buy one or two sticks of DRAM, and typically only on new computers. In addition, the capacity of memory makers can sell is limited by market demand, so higher-density memory becomes wasteful.
While the potential growth for NAND is still "limitless", the mainstream DRAM market is very limited, and is dangerously tied to new PC sales. Thus, makers use tried-and-true processes with very low defect rates, and carefully select density based on a a balance of cost and market demand for larger-capacity DIMMs.
You might point to cutting-edge, high-end parts like GDDR3 on graphics cards as a high-growth market, but compared to sales of DIMMs, sales of high-end video card memory are small...they are also very low density parts, mostly to make the die size smaller and thus reduce the defect rate.
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
on
iTunes is Malware?
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· Score: 1
Itunes is not malware, but Quicktime is.
What's the bad thing about Quicktime? You can tell it not to fuck with your file associations, and it doesn't mess with them...but what it doesn't tell you is that it proactively takes over plugin duty for everything in your browser.
Without a word, everything is suddenly played through Quicktime plugin, INCLUDING FILE EXTENSIONS I SPECIFICALLY TOLD IT NOT TO. That, in my book, qualifies as malware, just like Realplayer.
The whole package is annoying. They even have the gall to bug you to upgrade every time you load Quicktime, and to try to sell you on Quicktime Pro just so you can view movies full-screen. This is something no other free player on the planet charges extra for.
Itunes requires Quicktime, and thus becomes useless in my book.
Mind you AMD will need DDR2 support in the future, unless they somehow decided GDDR3 was better, because in about a few years DDR2 modules will be coming down to the 2-2-2 timings level, and will blow away the standard ddr modules. i mean technically if you look at video cards with ddr2 and ddr3 memory there is no engineering reason why someone couldn't make a ddr2 or ddr3 memory that worked awesome today, but there is plenty of 'marketing' reasons why they nead to have a 'clear' roadmap into the future.
AMD needs DDR2 support in the future because, even with the latency issues, DDR2 at 667 MHz still outperforms DDR 400 with fast timings.
In addition, DDR2 uses a much lower voltage (1.8v), as opposed to DDR (2.6v), giving it significantly lower power consumption. If AMD wants to compete on the mobile front, they'll need to move to DDR2 pronto...Intel already made this move with Dothan and the mobile 915.
As for video cards, thay're not a good comparison. They get exceptionally good usage out of even high-latency memory becuase they perform non-random reads and writes. Graphics engines work on blocks of memory at a time, so they can take full advantage of the burst read modes (reads / writes multiple columns in one continuous burst) offered by DDR, DDR2 and GDDR3; this helps hide the high latency of these speedy parts. What, you didn't think that cards boasting 600-700 MHz DDR1 were doing it with low latency, did you? Fast DDR2 and GDDR3 parts are also very high latency
Sure, you can leverage burst reads on a PC, but only so much. If you have a lot of randomly-accessed data, burst reads will not be able to cover up the latency of reads / writes, and will simply mean more data to clog up your cache.
Also, GDDR3 is still not shipping at nearly the same density levels as DDR1 and DDR2. DDR1 is available with 2Gb density, and DDR2 is available in 1GB density. The best GDDR3 can do is 512Mb density chips, and these are currently only available through Samsung. The price of uptfitting a system with 1GB ram using these high-end 512Mb GDDR3 chips would be astronomical.
According to the Chiplist, the original second-sources for the 8088 were AMD, Harris, Siemens, Hitachi and NEC (V20).
For the 286, it was AMD, Harris, Siemens and Fujitsu.
For the 386, Intel cut their second-source contracts, but it seems there were quite a few clones: AMD (SX license, DX clone), Cyrix (clone, manufacturered by TI), Harris (clone), IBM (licensed 386SX), and Chips & Technologies (clone).
There's a timeline, pictures and lots of other information at the Red Hill CPU Guide.
What exactly was the point of your reply? It was not accurate, and it concerns CLONING, not COUNTERFEITING.
AMD, along with Siemens and other fabs, had under-the-table agreements with Intel to produce 8088, 80286 and 80386 processors. When Intel came out with the 486, they had built enough fab capacity to tell their partners to get lost.
AMD responded by making a faster 386 to compete with the 486, while they along with Cyrix developed 486 clones. These clones were reverse-engineered, and were 100% compatible with Intel's chips. Intel could not copyright the model number "486" because the official model name internally at Intel was "i486", so everyone used the term 486 to sell their chips.
This is a great example of CLONING. COUNTERFEITING, on the other hand, would be like AMD producing 386 chips, slapping a replica "Intel 486" logo on the chip and selling it as such. Clones tend to be from businesses trying to make a solid reputation for themselves, and performance should reflect the claims made by their manufacturer. Counterfeit products, on the other hand, can be anything from the same product made by the very same manufacturer (but the manufacturer doesn't report them to the copyright holder, and doesn't pay licensing fees) all the way down to a completely different product made with questionable quality.
Here's another example of classic digital counterfieting: back in the 1990s, before they put L2 cache on-die, motherboards had external cache chips. Once processor speeds started to exceed the speed of the bus by several times, the L2 cache became essential, but it was still very expensive.
Around this time, cheap Tiawanese motherboard makers started selling boards under the brand names "ECS" and "PCChips", which were cheap and claimed to have onboard cache. Not only were the boards of piss-poor quality, the cache chips were also fake (as in, COUNTERFIET). And you wonder why people who have been around in the hardware world still bemoan the names ECS/EliteGroup/PCChips
Don't worry, this is the same retarded channel that cuts longer anime series like Full-Metal Alchemist and Samurai Champloo into two. They leave a LONG 6-month hiatus between them with only a week's worth of promos before they start picking things back up.
And since I don't watch promos, I have no idea, really. If I didn't have Tivo, I would have missed the start of new episodes completely.
I like to point out that Adult Swim is currently whining about their poor numbers for Saturday night, even though they are showing new episodes. Of course, this wouldn't have anything to do with cutting series in half and leaving people hanging.
Don't worry, they treat all shows EQUALLY SHITTY. I'm amazed they get any viewers at all, it's easier to find a Ronco infomercial than find where the fuck in the lineup Adult Swim moved your favorite show this week.
Without question. The maximum read speed of DVD is 10Mbit/s.
You ever see a Superbit DVD? They run the video at almost 9Mbps and use the other ~1Mbps for a DTS (754Kbps) and Dolby 5.1 (384Kbps) stream. There is nothing else on the disc.
The Terminator 2 HD DVD does something similar: it use WMV9 for the video and audio, meaning much more quality for the same 10Mbit data rate, and the movie is the only thing on the disc..h264 should improve things even more, once encoders get better.
Yeah, get back to us when the Chinese can afford Windows XP *Starter Edition*, let alone the real deal. Or have you forgotten what market Starter Edition was specifically created for?
MS has an uphill battle in China and India. They have a huge share of the market, but the majority of their users are unable to pay for the software. This is as opposed to their amazing growth in the US and EU markets, where people casually pirated Windows...once that was locked down, and the BSA formed to deter large-scale corporate pirating, people and businesses could easily afford the price.
But the Chinese and Indians make orders of magnitue less money, and with the growing threat of Red Flag Linux from China, I'll be amazed if MS's earnings from China and India are anywhere near the US or EU markets in 20 years.
Yup, this is nothing but hype. But what do you expect from a small gaming house fighting to keep their head above water. I mean, Chronic Logic had an impressive web hype-backed launch after their free Bridge Builder program made the rounds. Pontifex was their first product, and I'm willing to bet that it and BCS are two of their best sellers.
Fast-forward to today: they havn't released a new iteration of the Pontifex 2 / BCS product in three years, and obviously they're not selling well anymore. In fact, Pontifex 2 v1.30 was renamed BCS just to give it a facelift, much like the naming games Nvidia and ATI play with "new" old products. I've noticed that community map development for BCS has slowed in the last year, and so has map competition contests. Bridge Builder, and the older Pontifex, on the other hand, seem to have a larger following. This is likey due to the fact that Bridge Builder is free, and Pontifex didn't require any special registration code if I recall correctly.
They didn't make much coin on the BridgeIT fiasco, and I've never heard my mother (who is a flash / puzzle games fiend) talking about how addicted she is to Triptych. Hopefully, they'll release a new version of BCS that has some killer new "must-have" feature and graphics that don't look 10 years old, before they lose all their remaining mindshare.
Actually, it supports the built-in ROM wavetable, you just can't load your own sounds. My Ensoniq AudioPCI (then renamed SB PCI 64, and supported by Creative) also lost its excellent support for wavesets with the Win2k drivers.
But this was also encouraged because the software synth by Roland that shipped with Win2k/XP sounded pretty damn good.
To be honest, the AWE32 was on its way out the door: the card was released in 1994, and had drivers made for Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and Windows 98. It was limited by the maximum 32MB on-card (assuming you could get your hands on the RARE 16MB 30-pin SIMMs), when modern PCI wavetable cards could use hundreds of megabytes of system ram for samples. There's a point where you just can't afford to support niche features. The software synth plus the age of the card made the decision to drop full support easy for Creative.
My take: never pay hundreds of dollars for a Creative sound card, because you simply don't have to. People have been doing this for years with the SB Live Value, and later the SB Audigy ES. I paid $35 for an Audigy ES last year, and it does everything I need, including Soundfont synth. I realistically expect it will be fully supported in Vista, and afterwards dropped like a rock. Well worth my $35.
So you paid too much for a soundcard back in the day, and support for its special features was dropped in the typical 5-7 year period...big deal, that's how the industry works. They always try to sell you something new, flashy and expensive, because if you could go on using your old card forever, they would go out of business.
We old fogeys would like to officially welcome you to the Internet, now that you've experienced how easily your idealistic usage of a free medium can be hampered by individuals and corporations alike seeking profits in the noise.
Now you can join the ranks of regular Internet users, who put up with assholes like ** *Beatles*Beatles that use every trick in the book to make Google's PageRank increasingly useless. You can be one of the many who put up with bots that harvest your email from random webpages, sell it to thousands of spammers so they can use their own bots to send you endless offers to enlarge your toes. You can be one of the lucky horde who dodge invasive rootkits on a daily basis that threaten to recruit your PC into their growing army of zombies.
So somebody tried to blackmail you out of your listeners. Boo-Hoo.
Welcome to the Internet. Maybe next time you'll register your RSS feed first, and maybe even propogate the hate by doing the same thing to somebody else:D
Slashdot Mirror
What a great idea. I'm not a hardcore classical music fan, but I have been listening to more of it these days. I've been futzing around with naming schemes, but I've never been satisfied. This looks more feasable than anything I've come up with.
Why don't laptop manufacturers do this?
Because Intel and AMD already do it for them, as best they can.
AMD offers the Turion 35w max TDP (1.45v load) and Turion 25w max TDP (1.2v load), and both chips scale back to VERY LOW voltages and speeds when idle.
Intel offers the Pentium M LV and ULV (Low Voltage and Ultra-Low Voltage) parts.
These parts are binned within a few voltage grades. This simplifies testing, because instead of dozens, perhaps hundreds of voltages to test, you only have a few.
With dynamic clock and voltage scaling, these processors automatically run at their lowest settings when you're doing something casual, like reading a webpage or document, or are watching a standard-defintion movie.
Sure, you can get a tiny bit more out of undervolting, but manufacturers leave that for enthusiasts because it is not worth it in their bottom line. As I mentioened before, testing parts with such fine granularity would only make all processors more expensive, and on the retail end, selling dozens of parts with different voltages would only make the marketplace more confusing.
Right, I think it is stupid as well, but here is the reason why my company prohibits USB thumbdrives:
According to them, Windows with logging enabled will log all disk transactions, including floppy, CD, Zip. Anytime you copy a file to the disk, it will be logged. But they claim that for USB devices such as flash drives, transactions are not logged.
Is this correct? I'm not certain. Is this overkill, considering that they have to trust the employees anyway? Sure. But if it is correct, I can understand why USB devices would be such a great concern.
It is hard to justify completely turning off USB or hot-gluing the ports closed now that vendors are starting to support USB exclusively. This is probably the best solution available to them.
I believe you meant to compare AMD's TURION to the Pentium M.
While the Turion MT was a good match for the Pentium M, the Turion ML was far more common, and used more power.
It seems the real thing holding the Turion back is that Via and ATI have not built power-optimized chipsets for it yet. However, I expect this to happen in 2006. The chipset makers know how critical power consumption is to compete with Intel, plus DDR2 will reduce the power required for memory by a lot (much lower voltage).
The only question is: will Turion dual-core be able to compete with Yonah? AMD has a lot of work to do if they want to be taken seriously in the mobile world. More along those lines: how is AMD going to sell themselves on the desktop once Intel catches up on the power consumption and performance front later this year with Conroe?
Gonna be an interesting year for processors.
HL2 is over a year old, and was intended to be released 2.5 years ago. It can "run" on a GeForce 2 MX, and was designed to run optimally on the Radeon 9500 / 9600 / 9700 / 9800 series.
:D
In addition, HL2 is one of the ONLY games to feature a mixed-mode DX9 specially designed for Nvidia FX-series cards to make up for their poor pure-DX9 performance.
Most of the people who are interested in tests like this have already played HL2 to death, and are looking forward to the next batch pf PS 3.0 games
Right, analogies are key. I also have had great success with encouraging people like my mother to be more outgoing when it comes to GUIs.
Like most people who just "get by" using computers, she is terrified of messing with options, and jumping through menus.
Whenener she has a problem with a piece of software I've never touched (yet I'm expected to "fix"), I make it clear to her that I have no clue exactly how to fix it, but I tell her what kind of thing I'm looking for...a settings window, a configuration wizard, etc. And I explain to her quite clearly that she can't break anything by messing with these options...she can always undo something.
Now that she realizes that many programs offer similar basic features, but just present them in their own way, she is more confident with finding the solution to common problems she encounters (and calls me very rarely about problems).
It is all about the approach. I used to have to install GAMES for this woman.
The reason the x1600 architecture is the worst of the next generation is because ATI tried to build a 6600, and failed because they got too greedy.
The 6600 architecture was risky. 8 fragment pipelines, but only 4 ROPs meant the chip would be marginal at REALLY old games (just see how badly it scores in 3dmark 2001), and be excellent for newer games.
One of the benefits of the architecture is "free" anistropic filtering (compared to other architectures), because those 8 fragment pipes are never fully utilized.
The disbenefit of the architecture is poor AA performance above 2x, due to the limited number of ROPs. The 6600 line takes a bigger percentage performance hit in 4xAA than ANY of the 6800 chips (roughly 50%).
The x1600 tries to be a super 6600. With a slightly higher clock speed and 50% more fragment pipes, the x1600 XT should blow away the 6600 GT...but it doesn't, except in isolated instances like Battlefield 2 and Serious Sam 2. Most of modern games can barely keep the 6600's 2:1 ratio of fragment to ROPs full, and that's why Nvidia has yet to release a card with a ratio of fragment to ROPs higher than 2:1.
To top it off, for a card that has supposedly increased raw fragment processing power 77% over a 6600 GT, the memory bandwidth has increased less than 40%. The x1600 XT is clocked fast, but it is memory starved. In addition, the limitation of 4 texture units (versus 8 in the 6600 GT) means multi-texture effects (like bump-mapping) are going to be VERY slow.
I'm not going to talk about the other benefits of the x1000 series, because while they're nice, they're not the reason people hate the x1600.
This is the intended link above for Winchester versus Prescott
The original poster meant well, but AMD is really about 2-3x more efficient for the same performance level on the desktop.
.65nm, reduced core voltage).
t ml">Read the power usage of Prescott versus Winchester here (this is the raw power supplied by the voltage regulators to the processor, not the total system power)
This is still an impressive figure, and it is even more impressive when you consider how much less power Athlon 64 processors use at idle than P4 processors (about 5-10x less, with Cool 'n Quiet enabled).
Athlon 64 processors are 3x more efficient at load than their Prescott counterparts (90w+ load). They are about 2x more efficient at load than Cedar Mill (~60w load,
http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/11/15/3/page21.h
Here is the total system power consumption comparison between Cedar Mill and Prescott. The reduction is about 30w at load.
Of course, this will all change once Conroe is released. But, I welcome Intel's return to competitiveness on the desktop. AMD has been floundering about since the move to 90nm, canceling next-generation chip projects, and doing a half-assed job of competing in the mobile market. They need this wakeup call.
You just attacked a stereotypical claim that 64-bit is somehow inherently faster, and then you made a erroneous claim of your own.
64 bit processors also need larger instruction caches because the instructions are way bigger in size. As a result, some small subset of things perform slower in 64 bit mode.
Actually, because x86-64 is an extension of the IA-32 CISC instuction set, it benefits from the exceptionally small instruction size. x86 uses variable instruction sizes. Thus, the move to a larger address space likely only affects instructions with explicit access to memory.
The addition of 8 more registers means that you can reduce the number of instructions, because you no longer have to cleverly juggle your data quite as much.
According to AMD, the the instruction size for x86-64 is typically 10-15% larger, while the number of instructions is reduced by about 10%. This is why we see virtuallty no performance hit with x86, and in certain situations we see a huge performance increase.
See AMD's presentation here.
No, they don't.
Take a closer look at those pictures, starting with the one that is a closeup of the Sigmatel chipset. Below that picture is another picture with two PCBs. The PCB on top in the picture is the one with the Sigmatel chipset (that chipset is on the back side, not shown in that picture).
Do you see any large collection of vias on the backside? I certainly don't. In fact, that's the most component-packed side of either of the two PCBs...it's really crowded.
BGA chips aren't much different from SIPP-style packages...they still connect to solder points on the surface of the board. You just can't see them.
Microsoft moved the video drivers into the kernel simply because, when NT 4.0 was released, speed was essential, and hardware was barely able to meet the needs of workstation users without the additional slowdowns of user-mode. Video card manufacturers responded to the call by making more stable video drivers for NT than their Win9x counterparts.
Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't remember WHY they put the video drivers in kernel space. The let Windows 2000 and Windows XP ship with the drivers in the kernel, even though performance was more than enough to move the driver back to user space.
But now, Microsoft is finally doing what they should have done with Windows 2000: Vista will move drivers back into user-mode, and I expect stability will improve dramatically. Hey, better late than never.
Exactly, all Creative Labs Muvo flash players (and likely the N200 series) use this concept. They have two PCBs bridged by a modular connector. The main PCB has the logic, USB connector and buttons. The other PCB has the memory and LCD. So, they can take advantage of this and produce multiple memory PCBs, and use the same main PCB for all device variations.
Have a look here for deconstruction of the Muvo 512MB
I do not understand why manufacturing of NAND memory is easier than manufacturing of ram memory. If they can do 16Gb of NAND than they should at least be able to manufacture 16Gb of ram memory as ram is still volatile and NAND is non-volatile. But I believe the biggest ram memory is still 2Gb and I do not know if that is mass produced.
Good question. Here is my take:
Memory makers typically push their latest process technology using NAND Flash because NAND Flash is a heavy growth market, and needs to be as small and low-power as possible. This means that they don't yet encounter unpredictable downturns. For example, Samsung was already using a 73 nm process on their NAND Flash as they recently moved their DRAM to 90 nm. Basically, when you combine the need for very small size and low-power, plus the huge growth market, the higher the density, the better.
NAND is also not hard to make in high densities because most manufacturers have developed ways to make one cell (two transistors) hold two bits of data. This is as-opposed to DRAM, which stores each bit using a transistor and a capacitor. Depending on the size of the capacitor, you should be able to get better density from a NAND Flash chip than DRAM.
DRAM cannot hope to reflect Flash's growth, and DRAM is also more volatile because its growth is directly attached to another volatile market: computers. To make this clear: people may buy multiple flash devices for each computer they own (including new AND existing computers), but they will typically only buy one or two sticks of DRAM, and typically only on new computers. In addition, the capacity of memory makers can sell is limited by market demand, so higher-density memory becomes wasteful.
While the potential growth for NAND is still "limitless", the mainstream DRAM market is very limited, and is dangerously tied to new PC sales. Thus, makers use tried-and-true processes with very low defect rates, and carefully select density based on a a balance of cost and market demand for larger-capacity DIMMs.
You might point to cutting-edge, high-end parts like GDDR3 on graphics cards as a high-growth market, but compared to sales of DIMMs, sales of high-end video card memory are small...they are also very low density parts, mostly to make the die size smaller and thus reduce the defect rate.
Itunes is not malware, but Quicktime is.
What's the bad thing about Quicktime? You can tell it not to fuck with your file associations, and it doesn't mess with them...but what it doesn't tell you is that it proactively takes over plugin duty for everything in your browser.
Without a word, everything is suddenly played through Quicktime plugin, INCLUDING FILE EXTENSIONS I SPECIFICALLY TOLD IT NOT TO. That, in my book, qualifies as malware, just like Realplayer.
The whole package is annoying. They even have the gall to bug you to upgrade every time you load Quicktime, and to try to sell you on Quicktime Pro just so you can view movies full-screen. This is something no other free player on the planet charges extra for.
Itunes requires Quicktime, and thus becomes useless in my book.
Virtually all games are single-threaded, but a surprising number of them released recently are multithreaded.
Quake 4 and Call of Duty 2 are both multithreaded via patch, thanks most likely to their development on the XBOX 360.
Serious Sam 2 also ships with multithreading support.
That's a whole lotta big-name multithreaded games for winter 2005. I expect many more next year.
Mind you AMD will need DDR2 support in the future, unless they somehow decided GDDR3 was better, because in about a few years DDR2 modules will be coming down to the 2-2-2 timings level, and will blow away the standard ddr modules. i mean technically if you look at video cards with ddr2 and ddr3 memory there is no engineering reason why someone couldn't make a ddr2 or ddr3 memory that worked awesome today, but there is plenty of 'marketing' reasons why they nead to have a 'clear' roadmap into the future.
AMD needs DDR2 support in the future because, even with the latency issues, DDR2 at 667 MHz still outperforms DDR 400 with fast timings.
In addition, DDR2 uses a much lower voltage (1.8v), as opposed to DDR (2.6v), giving it significantly lower power consumption. If AMD wants to compete on the mobile front, they'll need to move to DDR2 pronto...Intel already made this move with Dothan and the mobile 915.
As for video cards, thay're not a good comparison. They get exceptionally good usage out of even high-latency memory becuase they perform non-random reads and writes. Graphics engines work on blocks of memory at a time, so they can take full advantage of the burst read modes (reads / writes multiple columns in one continuous burst) offered by DDR, DDR2 and GDDR3; this helps hide the high latency of these speedy parts. What, you didn't think that cards boasting 600-700 MHz DDR1 were doing it with low latency, did you? Fast DDR2 and GDDR3 parts are also very high latency
Sure, you can leverage burst reads on a PC, but only so much. If you have a lot of randomly-accessed data, burst reads will not be able to cover up the latency of reads / writes, and will simply mean more data to clog up your cache.
Also, GDDR3 is still not shipping at nearly the same density levels as DDR1 and DDR2. DDR1 is available with 2Gb density, and DDR2 is available in 1GB density. The best GDDR3 can do is 512Mb density chips, and these are currently only available through Samsung. The price of uptfitting a system with 1GB ram using these high-end 512Mb GDDR3 chips would be astronomical.
According to the Chiplist, the original second-sources for the 8088 were AMD, Harris, Siemens, Hitachi and NEC (V20).
For the 286, it was AMD, Harris, Siemens and Fujitsu.
For the 386, Intel cut their second-source contracts, but it seems there were quite a few clones: AMD (SX license, DX clone), Cyrix (clone, manufacturered by TI), Harris (clone), IBM (licensed 386SX), and Chips & Technologies (clone).
There's a timeline, pictures and lots of other information at the Red Hill CPU Guide.
What exactly was the point of your reply? It was not accurate, and it concerns CLONING, not COUNTERFEITING.
AMD, along with Siemens and other fabs, had under-the-table agreements with Intel to produce 8088, 80286 and 80386 processors. When Intel came out with the 486, they had built enough fab capacity to tell their partners to get lost.
AMD responded by making a faster 386 to compete with the 486, while they along with Cyrix developed 486 clones. These clones were reverse-engineered, and were 100% compatible with Intel's chips. Intel could not copyright the model number "486" because the official model name internally at Intel was "i486", so everyone used the term 486 to sell their chips.
This is a great example of CLONING. COUNTERFEITING, on the other hand, would be like AMD producing 386 chips, slapping a replica "Intel 486" logo on the chip and selling it as such. Clones tend to be from businesses trying to make a solid reputation for themselves, and performance should reflect the claims made by their manufacturer. Counterfeit products, on the other hand, can be anything from the same product made by the very same manufacturer (but the manufacturer doesn't report them to the copyright holder, and doesn't pay licensing fees) all the way down to a completely different product made with questionable quality.
Here's another example of classic digital counterfieting: back in the 1990s, before they put L2 cache on-die, motherboards had external cache chips. Once processor speeds started to exceed the speed of the bus by several times, the L2 cache became essential, but it was still very expensive.
Around this time, cheap Tiawanese motherboard makers started selling boards under the brand names "ECS" and "PCChips", which were cheap and claimed to have onboard cache. Not only were the boards of piss-poor quality, the cache chips were also fake (as in, COUNTERFIET). And you wonder why people who have been around in the hardware world still bemoan the names ECS/EliteGroup/PCChips
Don't worry, this is the same retarded channel that cuts longer anime series like Full-Metal Alchemist and Samurai Champloo into two. They leave a LONG 6-month hiatus between them with only a week's worth of promos before they start picking things back up.
And since I don't watch promos, I have no idea, really. If I didn't have Tivo, I would have missed the start of new episodes completely.
I like to point out that Adult Swim is currently whining about their poor numbers for Saturday night, even though they are showing new episodes. Of course, this wouldn't have anything to do with cutting series in half and leaving people hanging.
Don't worry, they treat all shows EQUALLY SHITTY. I'm amazed they get any viewers at all, it's easier to find a Ronco infomercial than find where the fuck in the lineup Adult Swim moved your favorite show this week.
Without question. The maximum read speed of DVD is 10Mbit/s.
.h264 should improve things even more, once encoders get better.
You ever see a Superbit DVD? They run the video at almost 9Mbps and use the other ~1Mbps for a DTS (754Kbps) and Dolby 5.1 (384Kbps) stream. There is nothing else on the disc.
The Terminator 2 HD DVD does something similar: it use WMV9 for the video and audio, meaning much more quality for the same 10Mbit data rate, and the movie is the only thing on the disc.
Yeah, get back to us when the Chinese can afford Windows XP *Starter Edition*, let alone the real deal. Or have you forgotten what market Starter Edition was specifically created for?
MS has an uphill battle in China and India. They have a huge share of the market, but the majority of their users are unable to pay for the software. This is as opposed to their amazing growth in the US and EU markets, where people casually pirated Windows...once that was locked down, and the BSA formed to deter large-scale corporate pirating, people and businesses could easily afford the price.
But the Chinese and Indians make orders of magnitue less money, and with the growing threat of Red Flag Linux from China, I'll be amazed if MS's earnings from China and India are anywhere near the US or EU markets in 20 years.
Yup, this is nothing but hype. But what do you expect from a small gaming house fighting to keep their head above water. I mean, Chronic Logic had an impressive web hype-backed launch after their free Bridge Builder program made the rounds. Pontifex was their first product, and I'm willing to bet that it and BCS are two of their best sellers.
Fast-forward to today: they havn't released a new iteration of the Pontifex 2 / BCS product in three years, and obviously they're not selling well anymore. In fact, Pontifex 2 v1.30 was renamed BCS just to give it a facelift, much like the naming games Nvidia and ATI play with "new" old products. I've noticed that community map development for BCS has slowed in the last year, and so has map competition contests. Bridge Builder, and the older Pontifex, on the other hand, seem to have a larger following. This is likey due to the fact that Bridge Builder is free, and Pontifex didn't require any special registration code if I recall correctly.
They didn't make much coin on the BridgeIT fiasco, and I've never heard my mother (who is a flash / puzzle games fiend) talking about how addicted she is to Triptych. Hopefully, they'll release a new version of BCS that has some killer new "must-have" feature and graphics that don't look 10 years old, before they lose all their remaining mindshare.
Actually, it supports the built-in ROM wavetable, you just can't load your own sounds. My Ensoniq AudioPCI (then renamed SB PCI 64, and supported by Creative) also lost its excellent support for wavesets with the Win2k drivers.
But this was also encouraged because the software synth by Roland that shipped with Win2k/XP sounded pretty damn good.
To be honest, the AWE32 was on its way out the door: the card was released in 1994, and had drivers made for Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and Windows 98. It was limited by the maximum 32MB on-card (assuming you could get your hands on the RARE 16MB 30-pin SIMMs), when modern PCI wavetable cards could use hundreds of megabytes of system ram for samples. There's a point where you just can't afford to support niche features. The software synth plus the age of the card made the decision to drop full support easy for Creative.
My take: never pay hundreds of dollars for a Creative sound card, because you simply don't have to. People have been doing this for years with the SB Live Value, and later the SB Audigy ES. I paid $35 for an Audigy ES last year, and it does everything I need, including Soundfont synth. I realistically expect it will be fully supported in Vista, and afterwards dropped like a rock. Well worth my $35.
So you paid too much for a soundcard back in the day, and support for its special features was dropped in the typical 5-7 year period...big deal, that's how the industry works. They always try to sell you something new, flashy and expensive, because if you could go on using your old card forever, they would go out of business.
We old fogeys would like to officially welcome you to the Internet, now that you've experienced how easily your idealistic usage of a free medium can be hampered by individuals and corporations alike seeking profits in the noise.
:D
Now you can join the ranks of regular Internet users, who put up with assholes like ** *Beatles*Beatles that use every trick in the book to make Google's PageRank increasingly useless. You can be one of the many who put up with bots that harvest your email from random webpages, sell it to thousands of spammers so they can use their own bots to send you endless offers to enlarge your toes. You can be one of the lucky horde who dodge invasive rootkits on a daily basis that threaten to recruit your PC into their growing army of zombies.
So somebody tried to blackmail you out of your listeners. Boo-Hoo.
Welcome to the Internet. Maybe next time you'll register your RSS feed first, and maybe even propogate the hate by doing the same thing to somebody else