No. There was nothing revolutionary about this. The progress was slow-and-steady like everything else.
You could already do fully-featured real-time 3D rendering for years before 3DFX cards were even conceived, and the price came down iteratively.
At first the only source for real-time 3D was government contractors with supercomputers. But this performance had a price (usually a million+)
Then the cost was reduced to the "thousands of dollars" over the next few years for arcades (and for major workstation vendors like SGI). This involved custom cores designed for that specific purpose (that were more efficient), and 1-2 die shrinks. Arcade games started with sprite scaling and rotation, or polygonal graphics in 1988, and scaled all the way up to games like Sega's Daytona USA (1993) featuring a texture-mapped and filtered immerse game world.
The cost was then reduced over the course of the next 4 years. In that time you had 1-2 silicon shrinks, allowing for greater integration. You also had the sudden appearance of the Pentium and Pentium Pro processors with strong floating-point performance, allowing for another cost reduction (temporary removal of the geometry unit from 3D chipsets).
In the end you got the 3DFX chipset (along with several other competing products), which was a result of 15 years of iterative progress.
Be careful when you highlight the high cost of Windows. They charge a lot more than Apple, but you get a lot more:
Average support lifecycle for recent Apple OS releases (bugfixes and security patches): 2-3 years. The latest OS to be abandoned is Leopard (after 2 years). Snow Leopard is expected to be abandoned soon (it's in Extended Support now), and Apple has made no commitment to how long they will continue to support it.
When you pay more for the Microsoft OS, you get a commitment to long support lifecycles, AND you know exactly how long your OS will be supported:
Mainstream Windows 7 Support (bugfixes + security fixes) = until 2015
Extended Windows 7 Support (security fixes) = until 2020.
So what Microsoft is giving you here is a CHOICE - you can choose to use your Windows install for a decade after release, and have no fear of your system being exploited by an unpatched vulnerability. In the Apple world your only "choice" is to keep upgrading, and that's not much help if your hardware is suddenly unsupported.
So, in this perspective the $200 cost of a full-on Windows 8 license is a pretty good deal (and if you want less freedom you can always buy the OEM version for $100). And for the big picture the $40 upgrade price is an absolute STEAL: for your $40 you will get bug fixes until 2018 and exploit fixes until 2023 (by that time even Mountain Lion will be long-since forgotten).
From context, my inference is that UK usage of "tariff" is more broad than ours. (For British readers: Americans only say "tariff" when speaking of taxes on imported goods.)
I'll agree that it's probably not government-levied.
However, the Brits do mandate their *sharable* networks by government regulation so that the devices all play nice with each other, and many times before people have prattled on about how great this system is because it produces cheap phone plans.
Well, now the UK has it's first modern wireless service update in nearly a decade, and of course there are price premiums and massive caps just like everywhere else in the world.
It's just a laugh because people across the pond pretend that thanks to massive regulations they are immune to high prices, whereas in-reality those low prices came from having a mature network that was relatively small (and thus paid-for earlier, resulting in lower prices).
Don't worry kids, you will always pay high prices for new technologies:D
Yeah, I always grimaced when people pushed the "hydrogen economy," only because it STILL meant you would have to replace/convert every single engine in the world, and they could NEVER solve the problem of storing hydrogen in high density without major leakage.
The whole time, all I thought was "why can't we use our technology to make gasoline out of the same hydrogen + air components?" This is realizing that dream and fixing one of the hard problems - how do we make renewable energy *useful*?
Who cares how much of our grid today is non-renewable? This is the sort of technological advance that *convinces* people that they can go with renewable energy without any major sacrifices to make use of it! And that's the sort of thing that convinces voters and lawmakers to reconsider their stance when building new electric generation.
And it was also the less stable of the two. I found this out after my guru friend told me to go with Reiser for the best performance.
All it took for me to switch back over to EXT3 forever was coming back one day and finding my filesystem inaccessible. Years of stable operation from the same disk on EXT3 showed that is was NOT a hardware issue.
ReiserFS was "almost" as stable as EXT3, but when we're talking about something that handles all your critical data, "almost" doesn't cut it! I suppose if you can afford a backup solution, you can take your chances with Reiser...but I have no more patience for his filesystem, regardless of his crimes.
I guess you're right. What I really meant to say was "religious fervor."
It does not have to be attached to any particular mainstream religious dogma to work - a good preacher can work-up a crowd about virtually anything. Bush frothed-up the masses and convinced them to go to war based purely upon his sermon of the evils of terrorism. His movement to create the illogical need to wipe "terrorism" from the earth no matter where is similar to other holy wars, and that's the connection I'm making.
He had some justification going into Afghanistan, but then he fed the fires and used the fervor to walk into a country that had not (recently) provoked us, with no real evidence of wrongdoing or direct association with our enemies.
While Bush was probably not the first President to use religious fervor to get his way, he is the most recent (hence why I used him as an example). Very rarely do good things come out of the fire of the pulpit.
If this means that we can bomb the shit out of anyone who burns an American (or European) Flag, then I say let's do it.
I disagree.
If the West turned this into eye-for-an-eye justice, then we too would be turning this into a Holy War. No room for compromise and no forgiveness = unending bloodshed and hate.
Usually (but NOT always) Western nations base foreign policy decisions on rational thought and keep religion out of it. The last time we didn't, Bush got us on the crazy train into Iraq for almost a decade (and we're still *there*, just in smaller numbers). Foreign policy is the LAST place you want to use religious justice as your reasoning.
Owning VxWorks also gives Intel a way to get into military designs. These are high margin, low-volume parts just like server CPUs, so it's a lucrative market for Intel to get into.
That said, they've only made half-assed commitments, offering just 7 years availability of embedded processors (most places do 10+ years). That works for simpler projects, but the bigger government designs may require a CPU upgrade before the finished product even ships!
And yes in the Windows desktop world it's no big deal to upgrade a CPU,. but in the embedded world where board support packages will vary from one board to another (regardless of processor compatibility), upgrading your computer can range in difficulty from simple to incredibly complex. And since these things are always low-volume, you constantly run the risks of running into driver/hardware bugs on a new platform, so there are lots of reasons to avoid changing the hardware powering a project as much as possible.
AMD has a long history of poor managment decisions.
Back in the late 1990s AMD's CPU busines was a money pit, and the company was kept afloat by their profitable NOR flash joint-venture, but they spent way too much money on their CPU business (for example, those two huge fabs in Dresden that they just divested), and there was nothing left to foster new flash technologies. In the 2000s, NAND became the flash architecture of choice, and since AMD was caught without spare cash, they couldn't afford a crash-course investment in the new chip tech, they spun the unit off as Spansion and left it to slowly rot. Last time I checked, Spansion had only offered competitive NAND THIS YEAR, because they didn't have the cash, and they're still making mostly NOR products. Spansion's sales have dropped to about a quarter of the peak since the spinoff with no end in sight, and they can thank AMD for putting them in that spiral of doom.
Intel (also a MASSIVE NOR flash maker) did not see NAND flash coming, but once they realized their mistake they had the massive piles of cash to make a quick transition. Now just seven years later they are one of the world's premiere NAND providers, all because of their diverse portfolio (and common sense on where they should spend their money).
AMD *had* the money to fix Spansion before they went on their fab spree chasing Intel. And given the peak revenue of over 1.5 billion yearly (nearly as high as their CPU revenues today!) it was worth saving. But they spent the earnings from Spansion on Fabs 36 and 38. They wasted 2.5 billion on Fab 36 alone! And then they spent way too much money (that they didn't have) on ATI, which really has not improved their fortunes.
AMD is also the king of Multicore. Try finding a sub-$200 six or even 8 core processor from Intel. For those of use who care about multiprocessing and parallelism over single core performance, AMD is pretty much the only game in town.
AMD is offering 8 cores at $200 not because they're nice guys and want to share the love - they're offering them because they can't compete wth just 4 cores at the same price point. If they did have that ability, you can bet they would be charging a premium price for that.
So, what is the result of the $200 showdown? Pit the 2500 versus the 8150 (their best 8-core chip)! In this one test the 2500 wins the first pass by 30%, and the 8150 wins the second pass by 25%. Now, the second pass takes much longer, so the 8150 still wins (by about 15%), but it's a small win in a sea of disappointment.
h.264 video transcoding is AMD's BEST BENCHMARK, and they barely scrape by with twice the cores. Add Hyperthreading to the mix (i7 3770K), and they get blown away once again.
People wonder idly why Intel charges so much money for their quad-core parts, but the reason is obvious if you see the test results - they're almost twice as fast in single-threaded tasks!
Hardcore AMD fans like to point out that Intel hardly ever reduces prices on chips, and they always conveniently ignore the fact that Intel is constantly increasing the performance-per-dollar at every price point. For example, the desktop "around $200" price point has seen the following since 2007:
2007 - Core 2 Duo E6300 - 1.87 GHz 2008 - Core 2 Duo E8400 - 3.0 GHz 2009 - Core i5 750 2.6 GHz - upgrade to quad core and turbo boost! 2010 - Core i5 760 2.8 GHz 2011 - Core i5 2500 3.3 GHz - major increase, also gets integrated graphics for the first time 2012 - Core i5 3570 3.4 GHz
So the prices are set when they are launched and stay that way, but this is because Intel has a complete planned lineup and does not need one chip to step on all the others. Instead, Intel replaces their entire lineup every year ot two, and each replacement bumps the performance-per-dollar up.
Even without AMD around to push things, Intel is forced to do this because the PC market is saturated, so they can't sell the same-old-thing on the low-end and expect people to upgrade before their computer breaks. And since Intel has a comprehensive lineup of processors, today you can buy a CPU with TWICE the processing power of that 2007 Core 2 Duo E6300 plus integrated graphics for under $50!
I don't really see a problem here. AMD served their purpose keeping the market moving forward a decade ago, but now they are not needed.
You're getting ahead of yourself. AGP was impossible to bridge multiple cards together, and PCI Express only made an entrance in 2004. That's nowhere near a decade yet, and by the time it was released pure 2D cards were long-dead.
But your dream lives on in the embedded world, where PowerVR is dominant thanks to the low memory bandwidth demands of tiled rendering and Infinite Planes/HSR to eliminate overdraw. The only problem with that platform? It's so tiny and integrated that your dream of a swappable 3D module is simply impossible to implement.
But don't worry your little head. The video cards in existence today can turn off parts OR the entire 3D core to save power, so you don't have to have your dream of modular removable cores to get the power savings you've been dreaming of.
Except that making that arrangement work over the pathetic PCI bus absolutely required tile-based rendering. PowerVR got around the massive framebuffer bandwidth requirement by drawing a tile at a time in their on-chip buffer and only WRITING the framebuffer out once (could not do this in an immediate renderer architecture).
And people forget that the PowerVR PCX2 cards all had their own on-board memory to store textures (can't stream those over PCI), so yeah you could use half the ram of other cards, but it wasn't like they massively reduced costs by featuring no ram at all.
But even PowerVR admitted that it was stupid to continue having separate 2D cards, as their second generation unit included it's own 2D core.
1. Baudot was case-insensitive. That adds another bit folks!
2. Baudot was replaced by ASCII precisely because it was inefficient for mixed-use text/numbers/symbols. You had to send a distinct command word to change between symbol and letter tables, so a heavily-mixed data stream could use up to 10 bits per-character. They chose a constant 7 bits per-character over "maybe 5 bits, could be up to 10 bits."
I didn't write the summary posted on Slashdot. My summary (it's probably still in the "firehose" section) was one line. The Slashdot editor just scraped the first few paragraphs of my article. You can tell the number of people who actually read my article by the discussion of PowerVR graphics. There isn't one.
And yet those are your words un-edited (aside from the first paragraph, where they inserted a link)! The incendiary TITLE, and the second and third paragraphs of the article summary are stripped directly from your blog post! How have you magically disavowed all knowledge of the the words that you posted on your blog?
And yet I'll bet you still find a way to convince yourself that your title is not incendiary or fluff.
Speaking of which, you sidestepped my concerns over the main tenet of your article (and I quote): "ARM ends up being several times more efficient than Intel." You make this claim without any analysis, and expect the world to believe you. Except that people have already commented on this matter who tend to know a little bit more about processor micro architectures than you Bruce (like Linus Torvalds, and David Kanter offers further insight), and the general consensus is that Intel is not at any disadvantage against ARM.
Want to tell me in *technical terms* why your worthless blog post has merit at all? Yes, we all know Intel has a process advantage...boo, hoo hoo! Got any other REAL complaints aside from that obvious one?
So you decided that the best way to get this point across to the Slashdot denizens (who never read the article) is to NOT ONCE mention the weaknesses of ARM or the strengths of x86 in your summary.
Never in all my years reading Real World Tech have I ever seen a thread or article absolutely decide the question of "which instruction set is better?" between ARM and x86 (and some of the biggest industry heavyweights weigh-in on those discussions). Does better code density trump better compiler optimization flexibility. And does it even matter when ARM introduces out-of-order in mainstream cores like the A9, and Intel keeps Hyperthreading attached to every new Atom core to deal with blocking?
So just because you feel slighted you write this fluff piece? Bruce, you shouldn't say things that aren't true just because you didn't get what you want, and because this "locked-down" tablet ecosystem is quickly taking away the free software community's free-ride.
These 10w Haswell chips will also be the pick of the litter, but the power consumption will be nowhere near that of Atom (and neither will the price...expect to pay upwards of $300 for these exotic cores). The Lava Xolo X900 costs only $400 on the street, so you can imagine Intel's charging around $25 for their chipset.
My off-the-cuff calculations (assuming we take a direct path and are always at that speed) have us catching up with Voyager after just 21 days. I'm sure even with proper orbital mechanics taken into account we could do it it inside of 100 days.
I find it hard to believe we have the technology to crush 35 years of space flight into 100 days.
I have an old Mac running Tiger, and I can tell you this: Apple stops providing security updates after a certain number of OS releases. And now, Snow Leopard is the next one up to be discontinued.
You can still use all your programs, but I hope you don't mind being hacked and having your identity stolen. It's all part of The Apple Experience (TM)!
That's not a "reboot," that's cutting off your legs to leave more room for the fancy new horn you're gonna grow "any time now."
HP had no real plans, and that extends to their sudden itch to ditch the PC division. They had no real goals that would be made easier by having less cruft, and they would lose tons of revenue (and even some profit) by ditching the consumer PC business unit.
They don't have to ditch the PC unit to evolve and grow new units. It's not like Apple suddenly cut their desktop lines when they got this crazy idea to build music players and create an online music store. It's not like IBM decided to ditch their PC business overnight and become a consulting powerhouse (they did it over the course of a decade). IT CAN BE DONE. The problem is, your company needs a REAL PLAN of action to pull this kind of thing off - if you half-ass every new concept, you end up like Microsoft: going nowhere.
Dioxin used to be a 4 letter word in this country. The poor handling of Dioxin-contaminated wastes made front-page newsfor decades.
Despite the EPA buying out towns, sealing off toxic waste dumps and spending hundreds of millions incinerating contaminated soil, the world has managed to forget the dioxin scare in a scant two decades. To make it clear how forgotten the scare is, I'm the only one I know who finds this haircare product's brand name unappetizing.
Is it chemical lobbyists? They probably have some influence. But it's probably also the apologist tendency to forget things that are embarrassing. The combination has made people forget.
They did that. If you read the article, you'd see their calculations were for a splitting of the asteroid.
The REAL reason why we can't recreate this is because the movie makers made the asteroid the size of Texas (assumed 1000km diameter). I'm sure if we were dealing with something more realistic (say,Yucatan impact, 10km asteroid), we might have a chance in hell of stopping it.
Because anyone who's read Peter F. Hamilton knows he's wordy-as-fuck and his books span a thousand+ pages.
I took a chance on "The Reality Dysfunction" as my first Hamilton experience, and after a couple months of pain I finished...only to discover that the damn thing was a trilogy, and the story completely left me hanging. What pissed me off most was during those months of reading, there was *barely* anything interesting happening in the book, and it *barely* kept me going. I finished that book from sheer determination, and then when I found out it was a three-part torture set, I lost my will to continue.
I'm not enough of a masochist to finish that trilogy. The Reality Dysfunction was my first and last Hamilton experience.
Ram is cheap. The only reason you see so little of it on tablets and smartphones is because each chip takes space on your board, and because each chip adds a significant drain on the battery.
In a notebook-sized device, more ram is easy to fit, and it's a much smaller component of total battery life (the screen is the biggest culprit here).
Also, it has to compete with entry-level CULV notebooks in the same price range that usually start at 4GB. Hence the large amount of ram.
Slashdot Mirror
No. There was nothing revolutionary about this. The progress was slow-and-steady like everything else.
You could already do fully-featured real-time 3D rendering for years before 3DFX cards were even conceived, and the price came down iteratively.
At first the only source for real-time 3D was government contractors with supercomputers. But this performance had a price (usually a million+)
Then the cost was reduced to the "thousands of dollars" over the next few years for arcades (and for major workstation vendors like SGI). This involved custom cores designed for that specific purpose (that were more efficient), and 1-2 die shrinks. Arcade games started with sprite scaling and rotation, or polygonal graphics in 1988, and scaled all the way up to games like Sega's Daytona USA (1993) featuring a texture-mapped and filtered immerse game world.
The cost was then reduced over the course of the next 4 years. In that time you had 1-2 silicon shrinks, allowing for greater integration. You also had the sudden appearance of the Pentium and Pentium Pro processors with strong floating-point performance, allowing for another cost reduction (temporary removal of the geometry unit from 3D chipsets).
In the end you got the 3DFX chipset (along with several other competing products), which was a result of 15 years of iterative progress.
Be careful when you highlight the high cost of Windows. They charge a lot more than Apple, but you get a lot more:
Average support lifecycle for recent Apple OS releases (bugfixes and security patches): 2-3 years. The latest OS to be abandoned is Leopard (after 2 years). Snow Leopard is expected to be abandoned soon (it's in Extended Support now), and Apple has made no commitment to how long they will continue to support it.
When you pay more for the Microsoft OS, you get a commitment to long support lifecycles, AND you know exactly how long your OS will be supported:
Mainstream Windows 7 Support (bugfixes + security fixes) = until 2015
Extended Windows 7 Support (security fixes) = until 2020.
So what Microsoft is giving you here is a CHOICE - you can choose to use your Windows install for a decade after release, and have no fear of your system being exploited by an unpatched vulnerability. In the Apple world your only "choice" is to keep upgrading, and that's not much help if your hardware is suddenly unsupported.
So, in this perspective the $200 cost of a full-on Windows 8 license is a pretty good deal (and if you want less freedom you can always buy the OEM version for $100). And for the big picture the $40 upgrade price is an absolute STEAL: for your $40 you will get bug fixes until 2018 and exploit fixes until 2023 (by that time even Mountain Lion will be long-since forgotten).
I'll agree that it's probably not government-levied.
However, the Brits do mandate their *sharable* networks by government regulation so that the devices all play nice with each other, and many times before people have prattled on about how great this system is because it produces cheap phone plans.
Well, now the UK has it's first modern wireless service update in nearly a decade, and of course there are price premiums and massive caps just like everywhere else in the world.
It's just a laugh because people across the pond pretend that thanks to massive regulations they are immune to high prices, whereas in-reality those low prices came from having a mature network that was relatively small (and thus paid-for earlier, resulting in lower prices).
Don't worry kids, you will always pay high prices for new technologies :D
Yeah, I always grimaced when people pushed the "hydrogen economy," only because it STILL meant you would have to replace/convert every single engine in the world, and they could NEVER solve the problem of storing hydrogen in high density without major leakage.
The whole time, all I thought was "why can't we use our technology to make gasoline out of the same hydrogen + air components?" This is realizing that dream and fixing one of the hard problems - how do we make renewable energy *useful*?
Who cares how much of our grid today is non-renewable? This is the sort of technological advance that *convinces* people that they can go with renewable energy without any major sacrifices to make use of it! And that's the sort of thing that convinces voters and lawmakers to reconsider their stance when building new electric generation.
And it was also the less stable of the two. I found this out after my guru friend told me to go with Reiser for the best performance.
All it took for me to switch back over to EXT3 forever was coming back one day and finding my filesystem inaccessible. Years of stable operation from the same disk on EXT3 showed that is was NOT a hardware issue.
ReiserFS was "almost" as stable as EXT3, but when we're talking about something that handles all your critical data, "almost" doesn't cut it! I suppose if you can afford a backup solution, you can take your chances with Reiser...but I have no more patience for his filesystem, regardless of his crimes.
I guess you're right. What I really meant to say was "religious fervor."
It does not have to be attached to any particular mainstream religious dogma to work - a good preacher can work-up a crowd about virtually anything. Bush frothed-up the masses and convinced them to go to war based purely upon his sermon of the evils of terrorism. His movement to create the illogical need to wipe "terrorism" from the earth no matter where is similar to other holy wars, and that's the connection I'm making.
He had some justification going into Afghanistan, but then he fed the fires and used the fervor to walk into a country that had not (recently) provoked us, with no real evidence of wrongdoing or direct association with our enemies.
While Bush was probably not the first President to use religious fervor to get his way, he is the most recent (hence why I used him as an example). Very rarely do good things come out of the fire of the pulpit.
I disagree.
If the West turned this into eye-for-an-eye justice, then we too would be turning this into a Holy War. No room for compromise and no forgiveness = unending bloodshed and hate.
Usually (but NOT always) Western nations base foreign policy decisions on rational thought and keep religion out of it. The last time we didn't, Bush got us on the crazy train into Iraq for almost a decade (and we're still *there*, just in smaller numbers). Foreign policy is the LAST place you want to use religious justice as your reasoning.
Owning VxWorks also gives Intel a way to get into military designs. These are high margin, low-volume parts just like server CPUs, so it's a lucrative market for Intel to get into.
That said, they've only made half-assed commitments, offering just 7 years availability of embedded processors (most places do 10+ years). That works for simpler projects, but the bigger government designs may require a CPU upgrade before the finished product even ships!
And yes in the Windows desktop world it's no big deal to upgrade a CPU,. but in the embedded world where board support packages will vary from one board to another (regardless of processor compatibility), upgrading your computer can range in difficulty from simple to incredibly complex. And since these things are always low-volume, you constantly run the risks of running into driver/hardware bugs on a new platform, so there are lots of reasons to avoid changing the hardware powering a project as much as possible.
AMD has a long history of poor managment decisions.
Back in the late 1990s AMD's CPU busines was a money pit, and the company was kept afloat by their profitable NOR flash joint-venture, but they spent way too much money on their CPU business (for example, those two huge fabs in Dresden that they just divested), and there was nothing left to foster new flash technologies. In the 2000s, NAND became the flash architecture of choice, and since AMD was caught without spare cash, they couldn't afford a crash-course investment in the new chip tech, they spun the unit off as Spansion and left it to slowly rot. Last time I checked, Spansion had only offered competitive NAND THIS YEAR, because they didn't have the cash, and they're still making mostly NOR products. Spansion's sales have dropped to about a quarter of the peak since the spinoff with no end in sight, and they can thank AMD for putting them in that spiral of doom.
Intel (also a MASSIVE NOR flash maker) did not see NAND flash coming, but once they realized their mistake they had the massive piles of cash to make a quick transition. Now just seven years later they are one of the world's premiere NAND providers, all because of their diverse portfolio (and common sense on where they should spend their money).
AMD *had* the money to fix Spansion before they went on their fab spree chasing Intel. And given the peak revenue of over 1.5 billion yearly (nearly as high as their CPU revenues today!) it was worth saving. But they spent the earnings from Spansion on Fabs 36 and 38. They wasted 2.5 billion on Fab 36 alone! And then they spent way too much money (that they didn't have) on ATI, which really has not improved their fortunes.
And benhmark after benchmark shows the reason for that: the AMD quad-core is nowhere near powerful enough to compete with the Intel quad core (this goes for both Stars AND 'dozer). Just see here where the A10-5800K (their best quad core right this second) gets bested by the Intel 2500 (priced at around $200) in their best test. It just goes downhill from there.
AMD is offering 8 cores at $200 not because they're nice guys and want to share the love - they're offering them because they can't compete wth just 4 cores at the same price point. If they did have that ability, you can bet they would be charging a premium price for that.
So, what is the result of the $200 showdown? Pit the 2500 versus the 8150 (their best 8-core chip)! In this one test the 2500 wins the first pass by 30%, and the 8150 wins the second pass by 25%. Now, the second pass takes much longer, so the 8150 still wins (by about 15%), but it's a small win in a sea of disappointment.
h.264 video transcoding is AMD's BEST BENCHMARK, and they barely scrape by with twice the cores. Add Hyperthreading to the mix (i7 3770K), and they get blown away once again.
People wonder idly why Intel charges so much money for their quad-core parts, but the reason is obvious if you see the test results - they're almost twice as fast in single-threaded tasks!
Hardcore AMD fans like to point out that Intel hardly ever reduces prices on chips, and they always conveniently ignore the fact that Intel is constantly increasing the performance-per-dollar at every price point. For example, the desktop "around $200" price point has seen the following since 2007:
2007 - Core 2 Duo E6300 - 1.87 GHz
2008 - Core 2 Duo E8400 - 3.0 GHz
2009 - Core i5 750 2.6 GHz - upgrade to quad core and turbo boost!
2010 - Core i5 760 2.8 GHz
2011 - Core i5 2500 3.3 GHz - major increase, also gets integrated graphics for the first time
2012 - Core i5 3570 3.4 GHz
So the prices are set when they are launched and stay that way, but this is because Intel has a complete planned lineup and does not need one chip to step on all the others. Instead, Intel replaces their entire lineup every year ot two, and each replacement bumps the performance-per-dollar up.
Even without AMD around to push things, Intel is forced to do this because the PC market is saturated, so they can't sell the same-old-thing on the low-end and expect people to upgrade before their computer breaks. And since Intel has a comprehensive lineup of processors, today you can buy a CPU with TWICE the processing power of that 2007 Core 2 Duo E6300 plus integrated graphics for under $50!
I don't really see a problem here. AMD served their purpose keeping the market moving forward a decade ago, but now they are not needed.
You're getting ahead of yourself. AGP was impossible to bridge multiple cards together, and PCI Express only made an entrance in 2004. That's nowhere near a decade yet, and by the time it was released pure 2D cards were long-dead.
But your dream lives on in the embedded world, where PowerVR is dominant thanks to the low memory bandwidth demands of tiled rendering and Infinite Planes/HSR to eliminate overdraw. The only problem with that platform? It's so tiny and integrated that your dream of a swappable 3D module is simply impossible to implement.
But don't worry your little head. The video cards in existence today can turn off parts OR the entire 3D core to save power, so you don't have to have your dream of modular removable cores to get the power savings you've been dreaming of.
Except that making that arrangement work over the pathetic PCI bus absolutely required tile-based rendering. PowerVR got around the massive framebuffer bandwidth requirement by drawing a tile at a time in their on-chip buffer and only WRITING the framebuffer out once (could not do this in an immediate renderer architecture).
And people forget that the PowerVR PCX2 cards all had their own on-board memory to store textures (can't stream those over PCI), so yeah you could use half the ram of other cards, but it wasn't like they massively reduced costs by featuring no ram at all.
But even PowerVR admitted that it was stupid to continue having separate 2D cards, as their second generation unit included it's own 2D core.
Except two things:
1. Baudot was case-insensitive. That adds another bit folks!
2. Baudot was replaced by ASCII precisely because it was inefficient for mixed-use text/numbers/symbols. You had to send a distinct command word to change between symbol and letter tables, so a heavily-mixed data stream could use up to 10 bits per-character. They chose a constant 7 bits per-character over "maybe 5 bits, could be up to 10 bits."
And yet those are your words un-edited (aside from the first paragraph, where they inserted a link)! The incendiary TITLE, and the second and third paragraphs of the article summary are stripped directly from your blog post! How have you magically disavowed all knowledge of the the words that you posted on your blog?
And yet I'll bet you still find a way to convince yourself that your title is not incendiary or fluff.
Speaking of which, you sidestepped my concerns over the main tenet of your article (and I quote): "ARM ends up being several times more efficient than Intel." You make this claim without any analysis, and expect the world to believe you. Except that people have already commented on this matter who tend to know a little bit more about processor micro architectures than you Bruce (like Linus Torvalds, and David Kanter offers further insight), and the general consensus is that Intel is not at any disadvantage against ARM.
Want to tell me in *technical terms* why your worthless blog post has merit at all? Yes, we all know Intel has a process advantage...boo, hoo hoo! Got any other REAL complaints aside from that obvious one?
So you decided that the best way to get this point across to the Slashdot denizens (who never read the article) is to NOT ONCE mention the weaknesses of ARM or the strengths of x86 in your summary.
Never in all my years reading Real World Tech have I ever seen a thread or article absolutely decide the question of "which instruction set is better?" between ARM and x86 (and some of the biggest industry heavyweights weigh-in on those discussions). Does better code density trump better compiler optimization flexibility. And does it even matter when ARM introduces out-of-order in mainstream cores like the A9, and Intel keeps Hyperthreading attached to every new Atom core to deal with blocking?
So just because you feel slighted you write this fluff piece? Bruce, you shouldn't say things that aren't true just because you didn't get what you want, and because this "locked-down" tablet ecosystem is quickly taking away the free software community's free-ride.
And you can keep pretending all you want that Intel can't compete with ARM on performance/watt or price. I guess you weren't paying attention when Intel released the Atom Z2460 phone platform, with competitive performance and battery life? The Xolo x900 has a street price of around $400, so you can bet Intel is charging a tiny fee for that chipset.
Tell me again why Intel can't compete?
Intel's top Atom chips have a 10W TDP. Of course the chipset/RAM also play a large factor, but still -- this is an amazingly frugal CPU
You're thinking of the wrong Atom CPU there. You want to compare Intel's lowest-power Core architecture to...their lowest-power Atom.
Intel has placed an Atom Z2460 on a smartphone platform, complete with 1.6 GHz core speed and sub 1w typical power consumption, and they've done it on just the old 32nm process. The 10w parts you're thinking of are for desktops.
These 10w Haswell chips will also be the pick of the litter, but the power consumption will be nowhere near that of Atom (and neither will the price...expect to pay upwards of $300 for these exotic cores). The Lava Xolo X900 costs only $400 on the street, so you can imagine Intel's charging around $25 for their chipset.
Are we REALLY capable of speeds that fast?
My off-the-cuff calculations (assuming we take a direct path and are always at that speed) have us catching up with Voyager after just 21 days. I'm sure even with proper orbital mechanics taken into account we could do it it inside of 100 days.
I find it hard to believe we have the technology to crush 35 years of space flight into 100 days.
I have an old Mac running Tiger, and I can tell you this: Apple stops providing security updates after a certain number of OS releases. And now, Snow Leopard is the next one up to be discontinued.
You can still use all your programs, but I hope you don't mind being hacked and having your identity stolen. It's all part of The Apple Experience (TM)!
That's not a "reboot," that's cutting off your legs to leave more room for the fancy new horn you're gonna grow "any time now."
HP had no real plans, and that extends to their sudden itch to ditch the PC division. They had no real goals that would be made easier by having less cruft, and they would lose tons of revenue (and even some profit) by ditching the consumer PC business unit.
They don't have to ditch the PC unit to evolve and grow new units. It's not like Apple suddenly cut their desktop lines when they got this crazy idea to build music players and create an online music store. It's not like IBM decided to ditch their PC business overnight and become a consulting powerhouse (they did it over the course of a decade). IT CAN BE DONE. The problem is, your company needs a REAL PLAN of action to pull this kind of thing off - if you half-ass every new concept, you end up like Microsoft: going nowhere.
HP does not have a REAL PLAN.
It probably was intentional.
Dioxin used to be a 4 letter word in this country. The poor handling of Dioxin-contaminated wastes made front-page news for decades.
Despite the EPA buying out towns, sealing off toxic waste dumps and spending hundreds of millions incinerating contaminated soil, the world has managed to forget the dioxin scare in a scant two decades. To make it clear how forgotten the scare is, I'm the only one I know who finds this haircare product's brand name unappetizing.
Is it chemical lobbyists? They probably have some influence. But it's probably also the apologist tendency to forget things that are embarrassing. The combination has made people forget.
They did that. If you read the article, you'd see their calculations were for a splitting of the asteroid.
The REAL reason why we can't recreate this is because the movie makers made the asteroid the size of Texas (assumed 1000km diameter). I'm sure if we were dealing with something more realistic (say,Yucatan impact, 10km asteroid), we might have a chance in hell of stopping it.
Why The Night's Dawn Trilogy, you ask?
Because anyone who's read Peter F. Hamilton knows he's wordy-as-fuck and his books span a thousand+ pages.
I took a chance on "The Reality Dysfunction" as my first Hamilton experience, and after a couple months of pain I finished...only to discover that the damn thing was a trilogy, and the story completely left me hanging. What pissed me off most was during those months of reading, there was *barely* anything interesting happening in the book, and it *barely* kept me going. I finished that book from sheer determination, and then when I found out it was a three-part torture set, I lost my will to continue.
I'm not enough of a masochist to finish that trilogy. The Reality Dysfunction was my first and last Hamilton experience.
Ram is cheap. The only reason you see so little of it on tablets and smartphones is because each chip takes space on your board, and because each chip adds a significant drain on the battery.
In a notebook-sized device, more ram is easy to fit, and it's a much smaller component of total battery life (the screen is the biggest culprit here).
Also, it has to compete with entry-level CULV notebooks in the same price range that usually start at 4GB. Hence the large amount of ram.
And Curiosity is running on a modified Mac - PowerPC G3/750
PPC just happens to be the preferred platform for VxWorks in the defense/airborne embedded world.
It has nothing to do with the Mac association - this happened as a natural transition from the Motorola 68000-series to Motorola's investments in PPC.
And just like Macs, the embedded world is SLOWLY moving to Intel. But with 10-year concept-to-launch mission timetables, the transition is very slow.