While Intel has the occassional good product, their server chips are completely outclassed by AMD's Opteron, especially in multiprocessor setups. Buying, say, a 4-way Xeon instead of a 4-way dual-core Opteron server these days ought to be a firing offense. If you look at performance-per-watt the difference is even more extreme.
It sure looks like Intel has been unimpressed by the JFTC case against them.
The sources are unnamed because they'd rather not get themselves killed.
I think you overestimate the power of the Pentagon.
You're entitled to your opinion. Unfortunately, once again the leftists here on/. have decided that I'm not entitled to mine and have modded my previous post down to zero despite the help of one person who rated it "Insightful". These are probably the same people who shout about a vast right-wing conspiracy that is suppressing people who shout about vast right-wing conspiracies. Meanwhile, people suffering REAL repression get mocked because Bush might score points if they become free on his watch.
It's laughable how the mainstream media is treating the election in the Iranian dictatorship as if it's legitimate. See here for better researched commentary. The new Iranian President was about as "elected" as Stalin was. But we mustn't give President Bush any excuse to actually do anything to help along regime change in Iran, so the charade goes on.
Has this guy ever heard of corporate espionage? Granted, it's probably easier to just do an inside job rather than hack network security... if the security is competently done. I don't think any of the usual suspects would pass up an opportunity to be lazy if the PHBs running their target decided to oblige.
At least with your stereotypical "hackers" you'll know you've been hacked, what with your home page redone in leet-speak and all. Professionals will keep you in the dark as long as possible.
Logitech's MX900 mouse uses Bluetooth, but yeah, why they don't use it more often is beyond me too. Must be a cost issue of some sort. FWIW, I use a Microsoft Bluetooth mouse with my notebook. Logitech's mouse is supposed to be a bit nicer. Shame HP only provides Bluetooth radios with their Configure-To-Order notebooks and not with the gazillions they sell at retail. I always encourage people to add the Bluetooth option when helping them buy notebooks.
Seriously, there are so many ways to get info off computers your best bet is to focus on hiring decent people. Not infallible, just the least bad option.
I bet the same companies that are doing the email snooping have their employees send their username and password as cleartext while checking their email from countries with competent foreign intelligence services.
AMD has low-wattage Turions for 64-bit notebooks, Athlon 64 X2 dual cores for high-end PCs, Opteron dual cores for workstations and servers, and regular Athlon 64's for everything in between. They may very well have quad cores early next year.
Yes, maybe in a year Intel will have fixed their management problems and have decent designs for their fabs to crank out. Meanwhile, AMD isn't sitting still. I can only conclude that either Jobs has lost his mind or Intel is paying Apple a lot more than the $150 million Microsoft did.
Why would people deny themselves the tools they want (or need) waiting for the upgrades? Upgrades and changes will ALWAYS bee just over the horizon.
Yeah, but the resale value of that PowerPC Mac just got shot to hell. I usually sell my old gear to subsidize the new stuff.
Besides, using Intel blast furnaces instead of AMD64 CPUs is fscking retarded. You'd think all the raving reviews the Opteron has been getting from the content creation types (Star Wars animators, etc) would have been a clue to Jobs. Apparently his reality distortion field works both ways.
Ever ask yourself why the Kyoto Protocol excluded China, India, Brazil, etc? If you were really trying to solve global warming (ignoring the warming and cooling periods that happened for millenia before industrialization), wouldn't you at least want to include China? Wouldn't you want to encourage nuclear power plants to replace coal-fired ones?
OTOH, if you just wanted to screw a low-population-density nation like America that's heavily dependent on cars/trucks/etc, Kyoto's an effective way to do it.
Meanwhile, the trendy leftists here in the People's Republic of Ann Arbor won't allow high-density housing to be built so half the workers can't live near their jobs in the city, assuming they could afford the property taxes in the first place. But they'll scream bloody murder about President Bush not signing a treaty that very few of its signatories have a prayer of living up to, and tut-tut about how all the farmland surrounding the city is disappearing.
On the bright side, the feds recently made government agencies stop specifying Intel PCs, so maybe they'll start buying relatively efficient Athlon 64's instead of Intel blast furnaces. The EPA "Energy Star" program has been brilliant too, giving the marketing weasles something to latch onto. So there's a little progress.
If you haven't already bought (an AMD Athlon 64 4000+), just make sure to get one with a Winchester or Venus core.
Nitpick: the 90nm 4000+ is a San Diego core. 1MB L2 cache is San Diego, 512MB L2 90nm E3 core is Venice, D-series core is Winchester (older 3000+ to 3500+). (You have to be this geeky to get a 4-digit/. ID. It's a law.)
I did the same thing you did. I've got a Winchester core 3000+ in my 64-bit Fedora Core server. You can cut power consumption even more with a high efficiency power supply, Seasonic S12's being the absolute best (Newegg carries them). They made a very noticible difference over the Antecs I used to use. Using a 6600GT rather than a 6800GT video card made a huge difference too.
Use CrystalCPUID to manage your AMD64 CPU's speed and voltage rather than the default Cool 'n Quiet power management (set your Power Scheme to "Always On" to disable that, definitely leave the CnQ driver installed). On most HP AMD64 notebooks we've found that you can usually safely set the core voltage at about 0.2V below stock at full speed. Judging by the AMD Thermal Design Guide, that's enough to cut power consumption nearly in half. I swapped in a Mobile-class Athlon 64 3200+ into my Pavillion zv5000z in place of the stock DTR-class chip and have been running 1GHz at 0.8V, 1.6GHz at 1.025V, and 2GHz at 1.225V for months. That puts the full speed power consumption at slightly above AMD Turion ML levels. For the stock DTR chips, 1.3V at full speed is popular.
Of course, in average use, the standard AMD Cool 'n Quiet behavior of running 800MHz at 0.95V while idle will give you battery life that's almost as good as an undervolted setup. 3-4 hours of battery life with a 12 cell battery is common, versus a fraction of that for the poor bastards who bought the P4-based zv5000 series (HP wisely dropped Intel CPUs from their zv6000 line). Undervolting does wonders under heavy CPU load though.
MobileMeter is my favorite way to monitor CPU speed and temperature, and Hot CPU Tester Pro verifies that I didn't go too far.
And don't laugh - people lost everything during the McCarthy era simply because they associated with somebody who belonged to the wrong political party.
Senator Joe McCarthy was a lout, generally speaking. But he was on the right side of history and, in a broad sense, of morality as well. If, in some sort of parallel-universe exercise, the same number of (now proven) Soviet-Communist spies, collaborators, sympathizers, and the like were somehow switched to Nazis, and McCarthy went after them with the same vehemence as he went after Reds, Joe McCarthy might well have universities and foundations named after him today. Just imagine if a ring of Nazi party members were found to be working in Hollywood, never mind the State Department, taking money from Berlin to advance the Nazi cause. Does anyone really think "McCarthyism" would still be denounced as an unmitigated evil, often put at the front of the parade of horribles alongside Hitlerism and Stalinism?
I suppose my problem isn't with privacy efforts per se: if you have a legitimate technical reason, as other replies have discussed, that's fine and wonderful. Maybe the results would be the same either way. But it sickens me to see so many people apparently motivated by the thought of protecting terrorists, acting more afraid of Bush and Ashcroft and bogeymen-du-jour than of the people who thought it bright to drive airplanes into buildings. Sometimes we have to pick the least bad option.
Maybe this article will prove enlightening. One of the more interesting quotes:
The Pakistani-born, Queens-reared Babar frequented the New York Public Library (NYPL). As Deputy Attorney General James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee September 22: "We found out after we locked this guy up that he was going there because that library's hard drives were scrubbed after each user was done, and he was using that library to e-mail other al-Qaeda associates around the world. He knew that that was a sanctuary."
Most of the only time knowing what the bad guys did at a library is only helpful after the fact, but that can help a lot. Creating all these anonymizing systems in libraries is attracting the people that the government is rightly worried about. Is it really bright for governmental organizations (like public libraries) to expend the extra effort to do that?
Let's see how long it takes for this to get modded down to "-1, Troll".
The HP Pavillion zv6000 and Compaq R4000 notebooks use Socket 939 desktop CPUs with their aluminum lid removed. They've been shipping with the old 130nm core, all the way up to 4000+. In theory there's no reason you couldn't swap in a X2, so long as the BIOS supports it, although if you read the service manual they made it much more difficult to swap CPUs than they did on the zv5000z/R3000z series. Best to wait for HP to sell them with that option.
Too bad HP didn't include a card slot to upgrade from the onboard Radeon 200M video. Even with the 128MB dedicated RAM option (which all the retail models I've seen come with) it's too weak for serious gaming, which is pretty retarted for a desktop-replacement behemoth with the best gaming CPU on the planet. They also managed to break dual channel memory support, so sticking with the 3500+/3800+/etc ratings is a little misleading (subtract 100 to get the correct single-channel rating). That said, they're very inexpensive so you get an awful lot for your money.
Just out of curiosity, what region of your head was the pain in, how was it diagnosed, and what was the treatment? It wouldn't happen to be the top of your head, would it? I've been trying to figure out something similar.
AMD's earnings came in lower than expected due to a loss in their flash memory operations that their growing CPU sales couldn't fully make up for. Oddly enough, Wall Street semiconductor "analysts" didn't have much to say about Intel's much larger loss in their similarly-sized flash operation (AMD MirrorBit flash is cheaper to manufacture than Intel's flash, fewer manufacturing steps, higher reliability, etc). Granted, Intel is hiding this loss as best they can, but it's pretty obvious they're trying everything they can think of to make AMD bleed. As AMD64 CPU sales ramp up (and Fab 36 comes online early next year) their flash sales become less and less important and they're spinning off the operation, retaining an investment stake, just so Intel can't pull that stunt again.
This pattern held in April. Higher CPU sales, lower flash sales, small net loss. I think they'll be back to profitability in July, flash can't cause that much more damage, Opteron sales are still accelerating (dual cores are out, blade servers, etc), Turions are out in volume in June (the HP Pavillion L2000 and Acer Ferarri 4000 notebooks look particularly nice). WinXP x64 is having less of an impact than I'd hoped due to some incredible slacking by peripherals makers (where's your x64 printer/scanner/etc drivers, HP?) but AMD has 32-bit performance to fall back on and 64-bit Linux has been out for well over a year now.
according to The Inquirer. They'll do the launch at Computex Taipei next week and be officially buyable on June 7th. Pentium D's (D'oh!) will take a bit longer to reach retail. Something about awaiting approval from the fire marshal, I think. Paper launches are blast furnace CPUs are a bad combination, methinks.
1) Seasonic S12 series high-efficiency power supply. It makes a VERY noticible difference. 2) Athlon 64 CPU (preferably the new Venice or San Diego core) and Socket 939 motherboard. Enable PowerNOW! power management (current Linux distros like FC3 support it automagically, some BIOSes don't enable it by default). The CPU runs at 800MHz at 1.1V core while idle, jumping to full speed as needed (just like a notebook). Even at full speed power consumption is about half that of an Intel P4 blast furnace. Run 64-bit Linux and get even more work done per watt. 3) Avoid high-wattage video cards like the GeForce 6800 series in favor of 6600GT's. MASSIVE power consumption difference. Depending on how hard-core a gamer you are, the 6600GT's are good enough and a lot cheaper.
Fine, use the AMD Turion "Centrino Killer" notebook CPUs. No problem. If you're going to introduce a new Linux distro on a new hardware platform you might as well go straight to 64-bit. Pentium-M's can't do that.
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Intel does its best to make sure you don't get a choice.
While Intel has the occassional good product, their server chips are completely outclassed by AMD's Opteron, especially in multiprocessor setups. Buying, say, a 4-way Xeon instead of a 4-way dual-core Opteron server these days ought to be a firing offense. If you look at performance-per-watt the difference is even more extreme.
It sure looks like Intel has been unimpressed by the JFTC case against them.
The sources are unnamed because they'd rather not get themselves killed.
/. have decided that I'm not entitled to mine and have modded my previous post down to zero despite the help of one person who rated it "Insightful". These are probably the same people who shout about a vast right-wing conspiracy that is suppressing people who shout about vast right-wing conspiracies. Meanwhile, people suffering REAL repression get mocked because Bush might score points if they become free on his watch.
I think you overestimate the power of the Pentagon.
You're entitled to your opinion. Unfortunately, once again the leftists here on
I find myself almost drooling over the upcoming dual core X2 chips.
Not upcoming. They're here and here and here and elsewhere. Yeah, I want one too.
Can anyone tell me how liberal became a derogatory term in the U.S. ?
Supposedly it's FDR's fault. He turned it into a synonym for socialism and it was downhill from there. McGovern didn't help, as another poster noted.
Sometimes we use the term "classical liberal" in vain attempts to rescue the term.
It's laughable how the mainstream media is treating the election in the Iranian dictatorship as if it's legitimate. See here for better researched commentary. The new Iranian President was about as "elected" as Stalin was. But we mustn't give President Bush any excuse to actually do anything to help along regime change in Iran, so the charade goes on.
the Russian mafia, assorted lesser criminals...
Has this guy ever heard of corporate espionage? Granted, it's probably easier to just do an inside job rather than hack network security... if the security is competently done. I don't think any of the usual suspects would pass up an opportunity to be lazy if the PHBs running their target decided to oblige.
At least with your stereotypical "hackers" you'll know you've been hacked, what with your home page redone in leet-speak and all. Professionals will keep you in the dark as long as possible.
Logitech's MX900 mouse uses Bluetooth, but yeah, why they don't use it more often is beyond me too. Must be a cost issue of some sort. FWIW, I use a Microsoft Bluetooth mouse with my notebook. Logitech's mouse is supposed to be a bit nicer. Shame HP only provides Bluetooth radios with their Configure-To-Order notebooks and not with the gazillions they sell at retail. I always encourage people to add the Bluetooth option when helping them buy notebooks.
Get a job checking outbound email for espionage.
Seriously, there are so many ways to get info off computers your best bet is to focus on hiring decent people. Not infallible, just the least bad option.
I bet the same companies that are doing the email snooping have their employees send their username and password as cleartext while checking their email from countries with competent foreign intelligence services.
Intel's roadmap said there'd be 10GHz P4's. Oops.
AMD has low-wattage Turions for 64-bit notebooks, Athlon 64 X2 dual cores for high-end PCs, Opteron dual cores for workstations and servers, and regular Athlon 64's for everything in between. They may very well have quad cores early next year.
Yes, maybe in a year Intel will have fixed their management problems and have decent designs for their fabs to crank out. Meanwhile, AMD isn't sitting still. I can only conclude that either Jobs has lost his mind or Intel is paying Apple a lot more than the $150 million Microsoft did.
Why would people deny themselves the tools they want (or need) waiting for the upgrades? Upgrades and changes will ALWAYS bee just over the horizon.
Yeah, but the resale value of that PowerPC Mac just got shot to hell. I usually sell my old gear to subsidize the new stuff.
Besides, using Intel blast furnaces instead of AMD64 CPUs is fscking retarded. You'd think all the raving reviews the Opteron has been getting from the content creation types (Star Wars animators, etc) would have been a clue to Jobs. Apparently his reality distortion field works both ways.
Ever ask yourself why the Kyoto Protocol excluded China, India, Brazil, etc? If you were really trying to solve global warming (ignoring the warming and cooling periods that happened for millenia before industrialization), wouldn't you at least want to include China? Wouldn't you want to encourage nuclear power plants to replace coal-fired ones?
OTOH, if you just wanted to screw a low-population-density nation like America that's heavily dependent on cars/trucks/etc, Kyoto's an effective way to do it.
Meanwhile, the trendy leftists here in the People's Republic of Ann Arbor won't allow high-density housing to be built so half the workers can't live near their jobs in the city, assuming they could afford the property taxes in the first place. But they'll scream bloody murder about President Bush not signing a treaty that very few of its signatories have a prayer of living up to, and tut-tut about how all the farmland surrounding the city is disappearing.
On the bright side, the feds recently made government agencies stop specifying Intel PCs, so maybe they'll start buying relatively efficient Athlon 64's instead of Intel blast furnaces. The EPA "Energy Star" program has been brilliant too, giving the marketing weasles something to latch onto. So there's a little progress.
Good point about usiing efficient componants but, um...why do you even need a 6600 in a server?
:-). I like my notebook but its GeForce 440 Go just doesn't cut it for gaming.
Well, it also doubles as my UT2004 box
Since when do notebook computers come with socketed cpus?
Read the service guide. It's socketed. That's very common these days.
Um, does the Venice core really have half a gig of L2 cache ?-)
D'oh!
If you haven't already bought (an AMD Athlon 64 4000+), just make sure to get one with a Winchester or Venus core.
/. ID. It's a law.)
Nitpick: the 90nm 4000+ is a San Diego core. 1MB L2 cache is San Diego, 512MB L2 90nm E3 core is Venice, D-series core is Winchester (older 3000+ to 3500+). (You have to be this geeky to get a 4-digit
I did the same thing you did. I've got a Winchester core 3000+ in my 64-bit Fedora Core server. You can cut power consumption even more with a high efficiency power supply, Seasonic S12's being the absolute best (Newegg carries them). They made a very noticible difference over the Antecs I used to use. Using a 6600GT rather than a 6800GT video card made a huge difference too.
Use CrystalCPUID to manage your AMD64 CPU's speed and voltage rather than the default Cool 'n Quiet power management (set your Power Scheme to "Always On" to disable that, definitely leave the CnQ driver installed). On most HP AMD64 notebooks we've found that you can usually safely set the core voltage at about 0.2V below stock at full speed. Judging by the AMD Thermal Design Guide, that's enough to cut power consumption nearly in half. I swapped in a Mobile-class Athlon 64 3200+ into my Pavillion zv5000z in place of the stock DTR-class chip and have been running 1GHz at 0.8V, 1.6GHz at 1.025V, and 2GHz at 1.225V for months. That puts the full speed power consumption at slightly above AMD Turion ML levels. For the stock DTR chips, 1.3V at full speed is popular.
Of course, in average use, the standard AMD Cool 'n Quiet behavior of running 800MHz at 0.95V while idle will give you battery life that's almost as good as an undervolted setup. 3-4 hours of battery life with a 12 cell battery is common, versus a fraction of that for the poor bastards who bought the P4-based zv5000 series (HP wisely dropped Intel CPUs from their zv6000 line). Undervolting does wonders under heavy CPU load though.
MobileMeter is my favorite way to monitor CPU speed and temperature, and Hot CPU Tester Pro verifies that I didn't go too far.
And don't laugh - people lost everything during the McCarthy era simply because they associated with somebody who belonged to the wrong political party.
I'm going to let Jonah Goldberg take this one:
Senator Joe McCarthy was a lout, generally speaking. But he was on the right side of history and, in a broad sense, of morality as well. If, in some sort of parallel-universe exercise, the same number of (now proven) Soviet-Communist spies, collaborators, sympathizers, and the like were somehow switched to Nazis, and McCarthy went after them with the same vehemence as he went after Reds, Joe McCarthy might well have universities and foundations named after him today. Just imagine if a ring of Nazi party members were found to be working in Hollywood, never mind the State Department, taking money from Berlin to advance the Nazi cause. Does anyone really think "McCarthyism" would still be denounced as an unmitigated evil, often put at the front of the parade of horribles alongside Hitlerism and Stalinism?
I suppose my problem isn't with privacy efforts per se: if you have a legitimate technical reason, as other replies have discussed, that's fine and wonderful. Maybe the results would be the same either way. But it sickens me to see so many people apparently motivated by the thought of protecting terrorists, acting more afraid of Bush and Ashcroft and bogeymen-du-jour than of the people who thought it bright to drive airplanes into buildings. Sometimes we have to pick the least bad option.
Maybe this article will prove enlightening. One of the more interesting quotes:
The Pakistani-born, Queens-reared Babar frequented the New York Public Library (NYPL). As Deputy Attorney General James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee September 22: "We found out after we locked this guy up that he was going there because that library's hard drives were scrubbed after each user was done, and he was using that library to e-mail other al-Qaeda associates around the world. He knew that that was a sanctuary."
Most of the only time knowing what the bad guys did at a library is only helpful after the fact, but that can help a lot. Creating all these anonymizing systems in libraries is attracting the people that the government is rightly worried about. Is it really bright for governmental organizations (like public libraries) to expend the extra effort to do that?
Let's see how long it takes for this to get modded down to "-1, Troll".
The HP Pavillion zv6000 and Compaq R4000 notebooks use Socket 939 desktop CPUs with their aluminum lid removed. They've been shipping with the old 130nm core, all the way up to 4000+. In theory there's no reason you couldn't swap in a X2, so long as the BIOS supports it, although if you read the service manual they made it much more difficult to swap CPUs than they did on the zv5000z/R3000z series. Best to wait for HP to sell them with that option.
Too bad HP didn't include a card slot to upgrade from the onboard Radeon 200M video. Even with the 128MB dedicated RAM option (which all the retail models I've seen come with) it's too weak for serious gaming, which is pretty retarted for a desktop-replacement behemoth with the best gaming CPU on the planet. They also managed to break dual channel memory support, so sticking with the 3500+/3800+/etc ratings is a little misleading (subtract 100 to get the correct single-channel rating). That said, they're very inexpensive so you get an awful lot for your money.
Turion dual cores wait until next year. Meanwhile, this single-core Turion notebook looks very tempting, for those of us who can't quite afford a Ferarri.
Just out of curiosity, what region of your head was the pain in, how was it diagnosed, and what was the treatment? It wouldn't happen to be the top of your head, would it? I've been trying to figure out something similar.
Wow. WTF happened to AMD in early January?
AMD's earnings came in lower than expected due to a loss in their flash memory operations that their growing CPU sales couldn't fully make up for. Oddly enough, Wall Street semiconductor "analysts" didn't have much to say about Intel's much larger loss in their similarly-sized flash operation (AMD MirrorBit flash is cheaper to manufacture than Intel's flash, fewer manufacturing steps, higher reliability, etc). Granted, Intel is hiding this loss as best they can, but it's pretty obvious they're trying everything they can think of to make AMD bleed. As AMD64 CPU sales ramp up (and Fab 36 comes online early next year) their flash sales become less and less important and they're spinning off the operation, retaining an investment stake, just so Intel can't pull that stunt again.
This pattern held in April. Higher CPU sales, lower flash sales, small net loss. I think they'll be back to profitability in July, flash can't cause that much more damage, Opteron sales are still accelerating (dual cores are out, blade servers, etc), Turions are out in volume in June (the HP Pavillion L2000 and Acer Ferarri 4000 notebooks look particularly nice). WinXP x64 is having less of an impact than I'd hoped due to some incredible slacking by peripherals makers (where's your x64 printer/scanner/etc drivers, HP?) but AMD has 32-bit performance to fall back on and 64-bit Linux has been out for well over a year now.
according to The Inquirer. They'll do the launch at Computex Taipei next week and be officially buyable on June 7th. Pentium D's (D'oh!) will take a bit longer to reach retail. Something about awaiting approval from the fire marshal, I think. Paper launches are blast furnace CPUs are a bad combination, methinks.
National Review couldn't figure that one out either, but there was much rejoicing at the outcome.
The Institute for Justice does great work. They're basically the libertarian version of the ACLU. Congrats to them on their victory in court.
1) Seasonic S12 series high-efficiency power supply. It makes a VERY noticible difference.
2) Athlon 64 CPU (preferably the new Venice or San Diego core) and Socket 939 motherboard. Enable PowerNOW! power management (current Linux distros like FC3 support it automagically, some BIOSes don't enable it by default). The CPU runs at 800MHz at 1.1V core while idle, jumping to full speed as needed (just like a notebook). Even at full speed power consumption is about half that of an Intel P4 blast furnace. Run 64-bit Linux and get even more work done per watt.
3) Avoid high-wattage video cards like the GeForce 6800 series in favor of 6600GT's. MASSIVE power consumption difference. Depending on how hard-core a gamer you are, the 6600GT's are good enough and a lot cheaper.
See Newegg, etc for the parts.
Fine, use the AMD Turion "Centrino Killer" notebook CPUs. No problem. If you're going to introduce a new Linux distro on a new hardware platform you might as well go straight to 64-bit. Pentium-M's can't do that.