It's the human condition to make fun of the misfortunes of others, as well as make fun of ourselves. If you can't laugh about the world around you, you'll die an unhappy person.
The appeal is this: in the end of the day you know how much you're going to pay without a protracted battle beforehand. This was especially nice in the days before you could price a car on the internet.
When I was buying my first new car, the internet was not the wealth of knowledge that it is now. So I had an idea of price range, but really no concrete dollar amounts between the cars I was looking at (Civic, Corolla, Saturn). To get an idea of price at any other dealership meant getting into negotiations, and trying to separate the dealer-added crap from the factory packages.
At the Saturn dealership, I got to see the price of every car and every package. And after suffering though several other dealerships, I began to see this one fact: the no-haggle prices were as good or better than I could get anywhere else. At the end of the day, the salesman still gets his cut, so why waste your time and breath trying to move a mountain?
You won' t get high dollar for your trade from a no-haggle place (that's where they make their money), but you can always take it to another used car lot. I didn't have that problem at the time, so I really had a good experience.
Today you have unlimited knowledge on the internet, so you can go in prepared...or use any number of other buying options.
They didn't. Saturns were sold at GM dealerships, just they tricked some hapless suckers into thinking that they were buying them direct form the manufacturer. Want a Saturn part today? Call your local Chevy dealership.
That's not quite how it worked. Saturn never convinced people they were "buying direct." You had to go to your local Saturn dealership to buy a car. You still had to talk to a salesman. The only difference was, the no-haggle price meant the salesman sold the car purely on features, style, or the company backing the car.
Saturn was a new car concept from General Motors designed to compete with Japan. It was promoted as an entirely separate branch of the company, with a separate assembly plant and independent dealer network. They attracted new customers with high mpg and no-pressure sales tactics, which allowed them to sell the brand as "almost" a different company.
That said, what you state is true: in the end of the day it was just another GM dealer. Just like one GM dealer could "just sell Pontiac," and another could "just sell Chevy," your Saturn dealer was a GM dealer that "just sold Saturn." The GM connection allowed them to open as many dealerships as they wanted.
So let's say they use a standard USB 3 connector. Standard bi-directional data links, standard power.
What if the communication over that standard USB interface is encrypted? Hackers could possibly find an exploit, but it won't be available tomorrow, or possibly even a year from now.
They could easily implement this for the Xbone version and turn it off in their (encrypted) ROM on the PC version.
Its not like you couldn't afford to buy a little pipsqueak like Via
Buy? VIA and Nvidia have similar revenue (4-5B/yr). The only thing that could happen would be a merger, and that would never fly because Jen-Hsun Huang would insist on running the combined company.
And there's no guarantee that the VIA x86 license would still be honored after a buyout. I believe that's one of the reasons nobody has made a move to purchase them.
Imagine laptops and tablets that could run full windows and Linux when plugged into the wall but when on battery you would switch into "uber battery" mode and get ARM battery life with none of the downsides...who wouldn't want to buy that?
I think you overestimate the demand for such a complex machine, and also forget that only since last year have you been capable of running Windows on ARM. The real solution has been to add all the ARM power optimizations to the Intel Atom, and now Haswell, so that you can get all-day battery life without compromise (and with no added hybrid system cost).
As for the value of the VIA Nano, it's reasonably impressive, but not suited for phones or tablets. A single core still uses at least 4w, but perhaps better process tech could help. A merger with Nvidia would have fixed ONE SERIOUS PROBLEM for VIA: their shitty chipets, and terrible IGP, and crappy drivers for both.
It comes with Office, so it's a business computer that can also play the tablet game, right?
Except that there's no Outlook. Try getting business done without that.
And you can't join a domain. That goes hand-in-hand with the above.
And most critical to anyone who just wants to get work done: it's not x86-compatible, and you're limited to Windows Store apps.
Who the hell came up with this horrible hodgepodge of an OS? And who expected anyone to pay a premium price for it? They'll be lucky if they can get these things to move even for $200!
I guess you had better clarify your claims next time you make them.
I will agree that STARS was the pinnacle of AMD performance per sq mm, but they have abandoned the architecture. While you can still buy old stock, eventually these parts will disappear, and all you will have left is Piledriver-derived parts. The world will have to wait to see if they can actually fix things with Steamroller, but until then it's a lost cause for floating-point. Piledriver does do well in mixed loads like software rendering and video encoding, so at least there is potential for more performance (if they can fix the front-end and I/O).
For floating point operations, AMD tends to be faster than Intel
Let me make this very clear: back in the days of the Athlon versus the Pentium IV, Intel had the disadvantage because the damn thing was designed primarily for SSE2, and they had a decode imbalance in the design. The Athlon had 3 x87 FPU pipes which made it superior despite the P4's faster clock...but once developers targeted SSE2, the Pentium IV matched the Athlon in FPU, and outclassed it on ALU operations (since both chips had dual 64-bit SSE2 units).
With the introduction of the Core 2, Intel switched to a 4-wide decode and DUAL 128-bit SSE2 units, allowing 2 instruction / cycle throughput, TOASTING the Athlon 64 in all matters of performance. Almost two years later AMD countered with Barcelona, which also had dual 128-bit SSE2 units, but was castrated by their 3-wide decoder. It was a match for Core 2 at the same clocks, but they couldn't match the clocks Intel had.
With the new Core series of chips, and the reintroduction of Hyperthreading, Intel wiped the floor with AMD in anything multithreaded, and they steadily increased single-threaded performance with each new iteration. Dual AVX 256-bit units in Sandy Bridge also potentially DOUBLED Intel's FP throughput. At the same time, AMD moved away from FP performance with Bulldozer, which shared dual 128-bit AVX execution units between two cores. Even with twice the cores AMD still lagged behind in peak FPU throughput, because the shared decode units meant roughly two-wide decode when all cores were heavily-loaded.
So today AMD is not the destination for high FPU throughput, and they really have not been for a decade. I really cannot understand your claims to the contrary.
Right. Because it's totally impossible to hand those tasks off to somebody else.
Show me a developer that makes that kind of dosh consistently that they can afford support staff.
More than likely, unless the poster is an idea man, he will be working contract jobs to make those apps (which means even less money for his work). Only if he is a *successful* idea man AND driven could he possibly make this lifestyle work, and he's also have to be a social darling (can't sell shit without contacts/connections).
That is the reality of going into business on your own. It's even more complicated if you're doing this in another country (language barriers, distance, work permits, etc)!
I figure this is as good a place to ask as any, since the buzzword keeps being paraded around every chance people get.
What is the difference between the Semantic Web and the existing Meta Element system in HTML? As far as I can see from descriptions, the Symantec Web just wants to attach metadata to every single object on the web. This improves on the Meta Element (per-page descriptions only), but it's hardly a sea-change.
Also, how are you going to entice authors to write all that metadata? The only reason they bothered was to improve their search rankings back in the 90s. Now that search engines ignore the Meta Elements, their use is discouraged, and you're back to finding a way to get lazy developers to document things.
If this was a previous generation where AMD was actually still competitive, Titan would have been the high end part, and it would have cost $500 instead of $1000.
Their problem is that the cost of implementing large-die processors is getting extremely expensive compared to how it used to be. We used to see previous-generation processes used for high-end cores because the maturity overcame the extra cost of the large die. But now that large dies are prohibitive (and assuming prices cannot grow), the graphics makers have no way to improve performance until the new 20nm process is released.
Nvidia has an out because of their vase supercomputing following with Tesla and Cuda, so they can afford to make an outlandish GPU like GK110 and charge $3500 for it! This gives them a path to offer a "new" top-end card with more performance, but since it's powerful enough to *almost* cost them a Titan or Tesla sale, they still want to charge a premium. In the end of the day the ONLY chip Nvidia makes that is mass-market affordable is GK104, so that's why AMD has no response to the GK110.
Since AMD is no longer really a threat in the high-end GPU space, Nvidia can literally maintain the MSRPs of the old parts as if the new parts are merely higher performing extensions of the previous generation without any downward pricing pressure on anything.
AMD is plenty competitive. They revamped their drivers and improved silicon/clocks to make the HD 7970 GE the fastest graphics card on the market, and priced it lower than the GTX 680. The GTX 780 (And 770 to be released soon) are a direct response to that performance acheivement.
That's strange: There was already a console called the "Jaguar" (made by Atari), one called the "GCN" (abbreviation for GameCube, made by Nintendo), and one called the "Xbox 1" (the original Xbox, made by Microsoft, gained this name after the 360 came out)
If you actually PAID ATTENTION to the marketplace, you would understand these acronyms:
Brazos = AMD's current low-power CPU architecture. Used in their APUs. Built on 40nm process.
Jaguar = AMD's next-generation low-power CPU architecture. Built on 28nm process. Confirmed for PS4.
GCN = Graphics Core Next = AMD's latest graphics architecture. Built only on the 28nm process. This is confirmed in the PS4.
VLIW-4 is AMD's previous graphics revision, used in the HD 6900 series. This was last built on 40nm process.
The product launch is confusing because the SoC AMD is building for Microsoft is based upon the older 40nm process. Given the lack of specifics, the 40nm process technology IMPLIES the product could use older technology (Brazos, VLIW-4). So I was simply stating my uncertainty.
Just keep telling yourself you understand CPU arch
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AMD doesn't make Hyperthreaded(tm) CPUs, but they use a very similar technique for duplicating core components. Don't be so dense.
Bulldozer module is NOTHING like hyperthreading.
Hyperthreading duplicates/shares key registers, cache entries and TLBs in order to execute instructions from TWO THREADS on the same processor core. The EXECUTE and DECODE are typically much wider to allow two threads to fully-utilize all the execution resources of a single core. Software must be written specifically to take advantage of this feature (separate threads for FPU and ALU ops, and go easy on the thread locking), or you'll see zero, or possibly NEGATIVE improvement. Best-case scaling throughput (Nehalem) is 20-30%.
Bulldozer modules are two COMPLETELY INDEPENDENTLY OPERATING cores that share decoders and an FPU unit. The decoders are tasked depending on how many cores in the module are loaded, and the FPUs just have a shared reservation station available to both processors (assumes that most loads are integer-heavy). Neither processor can execute instructions from another thread, and the best-case scaling is much higher than Hyperthreading (typically 70-80%).
Also, Bullozer will be losing one of it's major disadvantages when Steamroller launches: the decoders will be 4-wide for each module, and run independently, which is expected to allow scaling to 90-95% in integer-heavy loads.
As you can see, there is NOTHING in common between the two designs. The Bulldozer approach reduces the size of the core in favor of putting more cores on a die. The Intel Hyperthreading approach is to make a much wider core, and get more efficient use of those execution units. The only thing they have in common is that they both can theoretically improve multithreaded performance.
AMD doesn't make Hyperthreaded CPUs, so it will be either 4 or 8 cores.
I am a bit hesitant to guess between Brazos versus Jaguar, GCN versus VILW-4, given the 40nm process used for the SoC. I also consider it a guarantee that their hardware is way under the PS4 given how light they are on the specifics - it screams of the Wii U!
That said, I would not worry about the hard drive size. That will be increased in future revisions.
(and even American private schools) do better with less.
But you get so much less in a private school:
1. Less teacher overhead (time spent with rulebreakers, and slow students) because most students actually want to be there. And for those who do not want to be there, they will break rules, and they will either get kicked-out, or their parents will donate large sums of money (both help solve problems). Public schools are the providers of last recourse, so they can't pick-and-choose; this holds-back results and costs more money.
2. Less support facilities. Many private schools don't have large libraries, making research a chore...unless your family is rich and has computers at home. There's also a dearth of counseling personnel because most of the rich students don't need that kind of mental support that becomes mandatory when your friends are gunned-down in front of you.
3. Less funding going to subsidize poor students. There's the subsidized lunch programs (even "full-price" is still subsidized), to-the-curb busing, after-school child care for earlier grades, and for the older kids, fully-funded extra-curricular activities. At many private schools you won't find a lunchroom at all, and if there's food service it's contracted-out to nearby fast food joints...but parents concerned about a healthy lunch can just make one for their kids. For many poor kids, free lunch may be the only major meal of the day, and it's better than relying solely on EBT because it's not wasted by the parent. Private school busing is typically very limited (if available at all), and most extra-curricular activities have to be self-funded.
I won't compare American schools to European in the complexity that I did above because there's a totally different culture driving those, and thus there's more to their "solution" than just spending less on students. Also, the more "social-friendly" governments of Europe might tend to pay for a lot of the services that public schools in this country are expected to provide. This mean they may spend similar amounts of money, just shuffled into different pots. But I don't know enough about their school systems to compare.
Do I think that our public schools need help? YES, desperately! But at the same time, I detest when people come along and act like money is NOT A DIFFERENCE MAKER, simply because some classes of students can *seemingly* get by on less of it. The last thing you want to do for a poorly-performing school is take more money away from it - that's exactly what No Child Left Behind does, and its hurting instead of helping.
Interesting but Apple developed iPhone over ~2 - 2.5 years. Depending on when the key players sat with Intel that likely would have been enough time to develop a first generation chip.
Remember, Intel was THE LEADER in cutting-edge ARM chips until they sold the ARM division to Marvell in June 2006. They even introduced high-end feature like Mobile MMX and SpeedStep, and pushed clock speeds higher than any of their competitors.
That's absolutely in the time-frame of iPhone development, plus a year into Paul's tenure. The fact that they sold the ARM division and decided to start back at square one with Atom (not exactly a power miser in the first revision) shows that they had no intention of going "high volume, low price" like Steve Jobs was asking.
And yet, I much prefer this method to having to watch ads, so long as the thread's priority isn't so high that it interferes with the running of the machine.
If you're going to drop cash, why do it indirectly through your electric bill? Just drop the app a buck or two!
Please read my grandparent post. Good bread can't survive a week, heavily processed bread-like foodstuff can. Folks in the US are not used to regular bread because of their supermarket fixation. Logistical problems affected food you eat, and after those years, you don't even know what what we call bread looks like, thus not understanding why we're so riled up about nasty American bread-substitutes.
Stop pretending you know what you are talking about.
My GF bakes me fresh bread every week. No preservatives. I keep it in my breadbox and it lasts 5-6 days (if I don't slice it). It's a little drier by day 5-6, but still perfectly usable for toast. If your bakery can't make a loaf last a week, I suggest you find a more competent bakery!
The bread on American store shelves is not as good quality as what my GF makes, but it does come a lot closeer than it used to. For example, on weeks when she doesn't have the time to bake, breads like this one are almost as good.
USB 3.0 has much higher sustained speeds due to adding full-duplex communication (USB 2.0 was single-duplex).
Also, they updated the signaling system to replace the outdated BOT protocol (USB 1-2) with UASP (USB Attached SCSI), giving it a similar feature-set and sustained throughput potential as Firewire.
This new standard for USB 3 is already supported on all Intel Ivy Bridge chipsets, and most new high-end devices. This 10 Gbps revision will almost certainly make it a mandatory feature (can't find confirmation, but it would be incredibly stupid to move that much data around with BOT). These moves make USB much more competitive and a better fit for high-end users.
Short of buying someone with a fab, Apple cannot just buy a fab. They need the knowhow as much as the physical plant. What will happen is they will buy rights to the output of a fab for X years for Y dollars. They could also buy a small Fab firm, but there are not that many of those left. Who short of Intel and Samsung is down to 22nm? And we both know Apple is not buying Intel or Samsung.
How about Sandisk?
They're a 6 Billion dollar a year company in terms of revenue (about a quarter of Samsung), and with a market cap of 14 Billion they're quite purchasable.
They have their own NAND fabs, have a growing SSD business (vertical integration with desktops?). The only stick point I can see is the Sansa music players, which might get buried during the buyout.
(1) It's more portable than most of those safer languages. When every design you build is custom hardware, you want to have easy code reuse for standard functionality and signal processing.
(2) VxWorks (not sure about 6xx, but previous versions this really stands) is built to be a front-end for C - it adds a multi-tasking thin OS (limited memory protection), debugging and logging tools, and that's about it. You get a marginal Tornado IDE supporting C and C++, and that's what you're supposed to run with.
Using other languages with VxWorks means you're not supported by the folks at Wind River. Trust me - I deal daily with the difficulties of getting Ada to run on top of VxWorks via a 3rd-party IDE (including making their conflicting task models work together). It's a complete pain!
No, Slot 1 was to allow them to put the cache on the same board as the processor soldered down so they could sell you the cache RAM instead of empty sockets you could fill with cheaper SRAM from another company.
There is actually a better reason Intel made this change with Slot 1:
They moved the cache to a Back-side bus (introduced on the PPro), which meant better cache performance (no shared bus traffic) and higher throughput (clock independent of FSB). Unfortunately this required faster cache chips (half core clock), so to guarantee compatibility AND quality Intel included them on a package.
In the days of Sockets 1-7, people often bought cheap bogus cache chips. This continued to be a problem in the later years (when motherboards came with already soldered cache) - second and third-tier motherboard makers often cut corners with fake cache chips, and unless you were an enthusiast/hacker you'd never be able to tell the difference. This gave Intel a bad name because people spent hundreds of dollars on their chips and got 486-class performance!
The on-package cache was an acknowledgement by Intel that this was a serious black eye on their reputation for quality, so they took the extra cost of selling slot packages instead of PGAs until they could offer an on-die solution (see Socket 370 only for Celerons, and later FCPGA socket for all Coppermine processors).
And no, for the last time - Intel made no additional money off reselling those cache chips. At the time they already had processors costing hundreds to thousands of dollars, and those price ranges didn't change with the introduction of the Pentium II.
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It's hard to argue who was better when The Doctor of that era had a penchant for wearing a "decorative vegetable."
Both were completely out of their gourd :D
It's the human condition to make fun of the misfortunes of others, as well as make fun of ourselves. If you can't laugh about the world around you, you'll die an unhappy person.
The appeal is this: in the end of the day you know how much you're going to pay without a protracted battle beforehand. This was especially nice in the days before you could price a car on the internet.
When I was buying my first new car, the internet was not the wealth of knowledge that it is now. So I had an idea of price range, but really no concrete dollar amounts between the cars I was looking at (Civic, Corolla, Saturn). To get an idea of price at any other dealership meant getting into negotiations, and trying to separate the dealer-added crap from the factory packages.
At the Saturn dealership, I got to see the price of every car and every package. And after suffering though several other dealerships, I began to see this one fact: the no-haggle prices were as good or better than I could get anywhere else. At the end of the day, the salesman still gets his cut, so why waste your time and breath trying to move a mountain?
You won' t get high dollar for your trade from a no-haggle place (that's where they make their money), but you can always take it to another used car lot. I didn't have that problem at the time, so I really had a good experience.
Today you have unlimited knowledge on the internet, so you can go in prepared...or use any number of other buying options.
That's not quite how it worked. Saturn never convinced people they were "buying direct." You had to go to your local Saturn dealership to buy a car. You still had to talk to a salesman. The only difference was, the no-haggle price meant the salesman sold the car purely on features, style, or the company backing the car.
Saturn was a new car concept from General Motors designed to compete with Japan. It was promoted as an entirely separate branch of the company, with a separate assembly plant and independent dealer network. They attracted new customers with high mpg and no-pressure sales tactics, which allowed them to sell the brand as "almost" a different company.
That said, what you state is true: in the end of the day it was just another GM dealer. Just like one GM dealer could "just sell Pontiac," and another could "just sell Chevy," your Saturn dealer was a GM dealer that "just sold Saturn." The GM connection allowed them to open as many dealerships as they wanted.
So let's say they use a standard USB 3 connector. Standard bi-directional data links, standard power.
What if the communication over that standard USB interface is encrypted? Hackers could possibly find an exploit, but it won't be available tomorrow, or possibly even a year from now.
They could easily implement this for the Xbone version and turn it off in their (encrypted) ROM on the PC version.
Buy? VIA and Nvidia have similar revenue (4-5B/yr). The only thing that could happen would be a merger, and that would never fly because Jen-Hsun Huang would insist on running the combined company.
And there's no guarantee that the VIA x86 license would still be honored after a buyout. I believe that's one of the reasons nobody has made a move to purchase them.
I think you overestimate the demand for such a complex machine, and also forget that only since last year have you been capable of running Windows on ARM. The real solution has been to add all the ARM power optimizations to the Intel Atom, and now Haswell, so that you can get all-day battery life without compromise (and with no added hybrid system cost).
As for the value of the VIA Nano, it's reasonably impressive, but not suited for phones or tablets. A single core still uses at least 4w, but perhaps better process tech could help. A merger with Nvidia would have fixed ONE SERIOUS PROBLEM for VIA: their shitty chipets, and terrible IGP, and crappy drivers for both.
It comes with Office, so it's a business computer that can also play the tablet game, right?
Except that there's no Outlook. Try getting business done without that.
And you can't join a domain. That goes hand-in-hand with the above.
And most critical to anyone who just wants to get work done: it's not x86-compatible, and you're limited to Windows Store apps.
Who the hell came up with this horrible hodgepodge of an OS? And who expected anyone to pay a premium price for it? They'll be lucky if they can get these things to move even for $200!
FIXED LINK
I guess you had better clarify your claims next time you make them.
I will agree that STARS was the pinnacle of AMD performance per sq mm, but they have abandoned the architecture. While you can still buy old stock, eventually these parts will disappear, and all you will have left is Piledriver-derived parts. The world will have to wait to see if they can actually fix things with Steamroller, but until then it's a lost cause for floating-point. Piledriver does do well in mixed loads like software rendering and video encoding, so at least there is potential for more performance (if they can fix the front-end and I/O).
Also, I do not think I have ever seen a floating point intensive application that was not I/O bound. Not to say that it can't happen, but when you're modeling something, data tends to get tossed about casually. And sometimes extra I/O can have unforeseen benefit, so you can never have enough of it (see the Euler 3D test results for the i7 4950HQ)!
Let me make this very clear: back in the days of the Athlon versus the Pentium IV, Intel had the disadvantage because the damn thing was designed primarily for SSE2, and they had a decode imbalance in the design. The Athlon had 3 x87 FPU pipes which made it superior despite the P4's faster clock...but once developers targeted SSE2, the Pentium IV matched the Athlon in FPU, and outclassed it on ALU operations (since both chips had dual 64-bit SSE2 units).
With the introduction of the Core 2, Intel switched to a 4-wide decode and DUAL 128-bit SSE2 units, allowing 2 instruction / cycle throughput, TOASTING the Athlon 64 in all matters of performance. Almost two years later AMD countered with Barcelona, which also had dual 128-bit SSE2 units, but was castrated by their 3-wide decoder. It was a match for Core 2 at the same clocks, but they couldn't match the clocks Intel had.
With the new Core series of chips, and the reintroduction of Hyperthreading, Intel wiped the floor with AMD in anything multithreaded, and they steadily increased single-threaded performance with each new iteration. Dual AVX 256-bit units in Sandy Bridge also potentially DOUBLED Intel's FP throughput. At the same time, AMD moved away from FP performance with Bulldozer, which shared dual 128-bit AVX execution units between two cores. Even with twice the cores AMD still lagged behind in peak FPU throughput, because the shared decode units meant roughly two-wide decode when all cores were heavily-loaded.
So today AMD is not the destination for high FPU throughput, and they really have not been for a decade. I really cannot understand your claims to the contrary.
Show me a developer that makes that kind of dosh consistently that they can afford support staff.
More than likely, unless the poster is an idea man, he will be working contract jobs to make those apps (which means even less money for his work). Only if he is a *successful* idea man AND driven could he possibly make this lifestyle work, and he's also have to be a social darling (can't sell shit without contacts/connections).
That is the reality of going into business on your own. It's even more complicated if you're doing this in another country (language barriers, distance, work permits, etc)!
I figure this is as good a place to ask as any, since the buzzword keeps being paraded around every chance people get.
What is the difference between the Semantic Web and the existing Meta Element system in HTML? As far as I can see from descriptions, the Symantec Web just wants to attach metadata to every single object on the web. This improves on the Meta Element (per-page descriptions only), but it's hardly a sea-change.
Also, how are you going to entice authors to write all that metadata? The only reason they bothered was to improve their search rankings back in the 90s. Now that search engines ignore the Meta Elements, their use is discouraged, and you're back to finding a way to get lazy developers to document things.
Their problem is that the cost of implementing large-die processors is getting extremely expensive compared to how it used to be. We used to see previous-generation processes used for high-end cores because the maturity overcame the extra cost of the large die. But now that large dies are prohibitive (and assuming prices cannot grow), the graphics makers have no way to improve performance until the new 20nm process is released.
Nvidia has an out because of their vase supercomputing following with Tesla and Cuda, so they can afford to make an outlandish GPU like GK110 and charge $3500 for it! This gives them a path to offer a "new" top-end card with more performance, but since it's powerful enough to *almost* cost them a Titan or Tesla sale, they still want to charge a premium. In the end of the day the ONLY chip Nvidia makes that is mass-market affordable is GK104, so that's why AMD has no response to the GK110.
AMD is plenty competitive. They revamped their drivers and improved silicon/clocks to make the HD 7970 GE the fastest graphics card on the market, and priced it lower than the GTX 680. The GTX 780 (And 770 to be released soon) are a direct response to that performance acheivement.
If you actually PAID ATTENTION to the marketplace, you would understand these acronyms:
Brazos = AMD's current low-power CPU architecture. Used in their APUs. Built on 40nm process.
Jaguar = AMD's next-generation low-power CPU architecture. Built on 28nm process. Confirmed for PS4.
GCN = Graphics Core Next = AMD's latest graphics architecture. Built only on the 28nm process. This is confirmed in the PS4.
VLIW-4 is AMD's previous graphics revision, used in the HD 6900 series. This was last built on 40nm process.
The product launch is confusing because the SoC AMD is building for Microsoft is based upon the older 40nm process. Given the lack of specifics, the 40nm process technology IMPLIES the product could use older technology (Brazos, VLIW-4). So I was simply stating my uncertainty.
Bulldozer module is NOTHING like hyperthreading.
Hyperthreading duplicates/shares key registers, cache entries and TLBs in order to execute instructions from TWO THREADS on the same processor core. The EXECUTE and DECODE are typically much wider to allow two threads to fully-utilize all the execution resources of a single core. Software must be written specifically to take advantage of this feature (separate threads for FPU and ALU ops, and go easy on the thread locking), or you'll see zero, or possibly NEGATIVE improvement. Best-case scaling throughput (Nehalem) is 20-30%.
Bulldozer modules are two COMPLETELY INDEPENDENTLY OPERATING cores that share decoders and an FPU unit. The decoders are tasked depending on how many cores in the module are loaded, and the FPUs just have a shared reservation station available to both processors (assumes that most loads are integer-heavy). Neither processor can execute instructions from another thread, and the best-case scaling is much higher than Hyperthreading (typically 70-80%).
Also, Bullozer will be losing one of it's major disadvantages when Steamroller launches: the decoders will be 4-wide for each module, and run independently, which is expected to allow scaling to 90-95% in integer-heavy loads.
As you can see, there is NOTHING in common between the two designs. The Bulldozer approach reduces the size of the core in favor of putting more cores on a die. The Intel Hyperthreading approach is to make a much wider core, and get more efficient use of those execution units. The only thing they have in common is that they both can theoretically improve multithreaded performance.
AMD doesn't make Hyperthreaded CPUs, so it will be either 4 or 8 cores.
I am a bit hesitant to guess between Brazos versus Jaguar, GCN versus VILW-4, given the 40nm process used for the SoC. I also consider it a guarantee that their hardware is way under the PS4 given how light they are on the specifics - it screams of the Wii U!
That said, I would not worry about the hard drive size. That will be increased in future revisions.
But you get so much less in a private school:
1. Less teacher overhead (time spent with rulebreakers, and slow students) because most students actually want to be there. And for those who do not want to be there, they will break rules, and they will either get kicked-out, or their parents will donate large sums of money (both help solve problems). Public schools are the providers of last recourse, so they can't pick-and-choose; this holds-back results and costs more money.
2. Less support facilities. Many private schools don't have large libraries, making research a chore...unless your family is rich and has computers at home. There's also a dearth of counseling personnel because most of the rich students don't need that kind of mental support that becomes mandatory when your friends are gunned-down in front of you.
3. Less funding going to subsidize poor students. There's the subsidized lunch programs (even "full-price" is still subsidized), to-the-curb busing, after-school child care for earlier grades, and for the older kids, fully-funded extra-curricular activities. At many private schools you won't find a lunchroom at all, and if there's food service it's contracted-out to nearby fast food joints...but parents concerned about a healthy lunch can just make one for their kids. For many poor kids, free lunch may be the only major meal of the day, and it's better than relying solely on EBT because it's not wasted by the parent. Private school busing is typically very limited (if available at all), and most extra-curricular activities have to be self-funded.
I won't compare American schools to European in the complexity that I did above because there's a totally different culture driving those, and thus there's more to their "solution" than just spending less on students. Also, the more "social-friendly" governments of Europe might tend to pay for a lot of the services that public schools in this country are expected to provide. This mean they may spend similar amounts of money, just shuffled into different pots. But I don't know enough about their school systems to compare.
Do I think that our public schools need help? YES, desperately! But at the same time, I detest when people come along and act like money is NOT A DIFFERENCE MAKER, simply because some classes of students can *seemingly* get by on less of it. The last thing you want to do for a poorly-performing school is take more money away from it - that's exactly what No Child Left Behind does, and its hurting instead of helping.
Remember, Intel was THE LEADER in cutting-edge ARM chips until they sold the ARM division to Marvell in June 2006. They even introduced high-end feature like Mobile MMX and SpeedStep, and pushed clock speeds higher than any of their competitors.
That's absolutely in the time-frame of iPhone development, plus a year into Paul's tenure. The fact that they sold the ARM division and decided to start back at square one with Atom (not exactly a power miser in the first revision) shows that they had no intention of going "high volume, low price" like Steve Jobs was asking.
If you're going to drop cash, why do it indirectly through your electric bill? Just drop the app a buck or two!
Stop pretending you know what you are talking about.
My GF bakes me fresh bread every week. No preservatives. I keep it in my breadbox and it lasts 5-6 days (if I don't slice it). It's a little drier by day 5-6, but still perfectly usable for toast. If your bakery can't make a loaf last a week, I suggest you find a more competent bakery!
The bread on American store shelves is not as good quality as what my GF makes, but it does come a lot closeer than it used to. For example, on weeks when she doesn't have the time to bake, breads like this one are almost as good.
USB 3.0 has much higher sustained speeds due to adding full-duplex communication (USB 2.0 was single-duplex).
Also, they updated the signaling system to replace the outdated BOT protocol (USB 1-2) with UASP (USB Attached SCSI), giving it a similar feature-set and sustained throughput potential as Firewire.
This new standard for USB 3 is already supported on all Intel Ivy Bridge chipsets, and most new high-end devices. This 10 Gbps revision will almost certainly make it a mandatory feature (can't find confirmation, but it would be incredibly stupid to move that much data around with BOT). These moves make USB much more competitive and a better fit for high-end users.
How about Sandisk?
They're a 6 Billion dollar a year company in terms of revenue (about a quarter of Samsung), and with a market cap of 14 Billion they're quite purchasable.
The company has a shiny outlook thanks to the increase in flash prices this year, so I would think that a takeover bid would be graciously accepted right now.
They have their own NAND fabs, have a growing SSD business (vertical integration with desktops?). The only stick point I can see is the Sansa music players, which might get buried during the buyout.
The reason they insist on C is for two reasons:
(1) It's more portable than most of those safer languages. When every design you build is custom hardware, you want to have easy code reuse for standard functionality and signal processing.
(2) VxWorks (not sure about 6xx, but previous versions this really stands) is built to be a front-end for C - it adds a multi-tasking thin OS (limited memory protection), debugging and logging tools, and that's about it. You get a marginal Tornado IDE supporting C and C++, and that's what you're supposed to run with.
Using other languages with VxWorks means you're not supported by the folks at Wind River. Trust me - I deal daily with the difficulties of getting Ada to run on top of VxWorks via a 3rd-party IDE (including making their conflicting task models work together). It's a complete pain!
There is actually a better reason Intel made this change with Slot 1:
They moved the cache to a Back-side bus (introduced on the PPro), which meant better cache performance (no shared bus traffic) and higher throughput (clock independent of FSB). Unfortunately this required faster cache chips (half core clock), so to guarantee compatibility AND quality Intel included them on a package.
In the days of Sockets 1-7, people often bought cheap bogus cache chips. This continued to be a problem in the later years (when motherboards came with already soldered cache) - second and third-tier motherboard makers often cut corners with fake cache chips, and unless you were an enthusiast/hacker you'd never be able to tell the difference. This gave Intel a bad name because people spent hundreds of dollars on their chips and got 486-class performance!
The on-package cache was an acknowledgement by Intel that this was a serious black eye on their reputation for quality, so they took the extra cost of selling slot packages instead of PGAs until they could offer an on-die solution (see Socket 370 only for Celerons, and later FCPGA socket for all Coppermine processors).
And no, for the last time - Intel made no additional money off reselling those cache chips. At the time they already had processors costing hundreds to thousands of dollars, and those price ranges didn't change with the introduction of the Pentium II.
You remember when credit cards used to have annual fees? They didn't just forget about those costs, they just found new ways to make money off you!