"Allow people to freely register to access any machine, exclusively, for 15 minutes at a time, by SSH. Allow those people to copy over their own actual software and get measurable performance on the only workload that matters, and base their product selection on that measurement."
Great, I run Maya. Now, does my exclusive 15 minutes include the 5+ hours it's going to take to send the software to them? Also, will Intel indemnify me against the makers of Maya for any copyright infringment suits that come from my sending it to Intel in violation of the licensing? Also, do I get to custom-configure the memory, hard drive, video card, power supply, mainboard, etc in the computer to my exact specifications so as to get an accurate picture of the performance I'd see under my specific system configuration?
It's a decent idea, but unworkable in the real world.
"I'm sure there are quite a few people who are capable of understanding it, but they've chosen to apply their brains elsewhere."
The average person's IQ is about 100. These are the people sitting on their asses watching 'reality TV' 4 hours a day while periodically drooling on themselves. Most are unable to grasp the complex inner workings of a keyboard, let alone a microprocessor. A number of these people get confused while using a graphical word processor. It's not just computers, either. It seems a majority of people have major problems with the grammar and syntax of the English language; despite the fact that it's their primary or only language. A lot of these people can't give correct change, despite all the effort that's gone into adjusting the US monetary system to reduce the number of bills and coins returned from any given transaction to an absolute minimum. These are the people who can't get a 4-part food order correct.
How is it you're going to explain a 30-stage pipeline to someone who gets lost after "cheeseburger, large fries, large coke... (mystery item that ends up being wrong)"? How is it that you're going to explain cache latency to someone who can't count to 100 using four simple coin denominations? You're truly such a gifted teacher that you can explain TLBs and speculative execution to a room full of people who barely passed high school math?
Then again, you could define the cast 'n' crew of Cebit or IDF as "quite a few people", but when it comes to average folks, they're so hopelessly lost as to illicit little more than my sympathy.
There's a fraction of a small percentage of people in this world who are capable of understanding all the inner workings of a modern microprocessor. Of that group, there is a subset of people who actually care enough about it to invest the time and effort to learn about it. I'd wager a bet that you could put the group of folks who can understand it together and have a number smaller than the population of New Hampshire.
"yes. whats wrong with that? those are all very important pieces of info. i would fully expect all that in well written liturature about a processor."
It is listed, in whitepapers. We're talking about marketing to the masses here. Tell me, do you think you can walk into a coffee shop and talk to the gal behind the counter about speculative execution for more than 10 seconds without getting her confused and bored? There's a fraction of a small percentage of people in this world who are capable of understanding all the parts of processor design. By confusing average folk with technical data, you're lying to them just as much as you are by using performance ratings. I'll bet I could go into detail about the original Pentium's design, explain all the things that were done to up the performance in really simple terms, and get a bunch of people excited about buying it so long as I never tell them its name.
Think about that for a moment - if I can sell a Pentium 200MHz system to a room full of people who could buy a Pentium 4 for the same price simply by talking up the complicated design specifics, am I any more honest than Intel is with its MHz listings, or AMD with its performance ratings?
"Even the earliest Pentium 4s were able to greatly out-clock the pentium III's when they first came out. "
Yeah, you can do that when you do a complete core overhaul. Going from Northwood to Prescott is a fairly large change, but nowhere near as big a change as going from the PIII to the P4.
"But now we have the 31 stage Prescott and the about same clock rate. If Intel thought it could keep bumping the clock rate up, they wouldn't move to something like AMD's performance rating. Yet here we are. Something has changed."
What has changed is that Intel is having problems with the 90nm process, Prescott produces massive amounts of heat, the LGA 775 socket isn't going to solve those problems enough to ramp Prescott beyond 4GHz, if even that high, and the changes being made with the introduction of IA32-64 (aka AMD64) will give processors a pretty decent bump in performance.
Intel knows now that clock frequency ramps have limits. Sure, Bob Colwell told them as much when the P4 was being designed, but now they're actually slamming into walls of fire (heat). Right this second, they're not in such a serious situation that changing to performance ratings is necessary, but they will be fairly soon. Thus, if they do it now, it looks like a new initiative to give Intel an advantage in the marketplace. If they wait until their backs are against the wall, it looks like Intel is struggling to keep up and has lost its edge in the marketplace.
You see now why this is being done? It's just management finally starting to get a little smarter.
and please mod this person up. (S)He is correct in stating that the AMD model numbers are derived NOT from the Pentium 4, the Athlon classic, the Centrino, Celeron, PIII, Crusoe, 8088, or any other God-forsaken chip, but from the Thunderbird core Athlon CPUs. Those were the last Athlons to advertise the clock frequency, and thus were the obvious choice for a comparison chip for the next generation of processors. If I just bought a 1.4GHz Thunderbird Athlon (common chip for the time), I would expect that an AthlonXP 1500+ would perform better than it, and I would be correct. An AthlonXP 1500+ under the new rating system, were it to be compared to the Athlon classic core (far less efficient than Thunderbird) would probably run at about 1.1GHz. As it is, the AthlonXP Palomino core 1500+, being a relatively minor revision to Thunderbird, ran at 1.33GHz.
So mod this guy up. He's right, the post he's replying to is wrong.
Just out of curiosity, what would you have them do? Are you saying that any time Intel or AMD wants to show you a CPU, they should list clock frequency, L1, L2, and L3 cache sizes, each of their individual latencies, main memory latency, clock multiplier, average IPC, number of pipeline stages, instruction set extensions (SSE, Powernow, etc), architectual information, die process size, average and max heat dissipation figures, speculative execution capabilities, out-of-order operation specs, core stepping and revisions, a picture of the actual die, and about 10,000 other things that contribute to performance?
And just what the hell are you going to do with all that information, let alone the average consumer? I seriously doubt most of the engineers at Intel or AMD could even take all that information and have a good idea of what Spec numbers or other benchmarks would look like. At some point, you've got to figure out a way to simply things so that most people can at least have a rudimentary understanding of what it is they're buying. AMD attempts to do that with the model numbering scheme, which is designed to denote the relative performance of each CPU. Intel is now moving to some sort of similar system, now that clock ramping on the P4 is reaching its limits.
There is no measurement of absolute performance. There is no single number that gives you an honest picture of how things are. You can take 100 benchmarks of different applications, and you'll still have only a relative idea of performance, at best. Intel would be lying if they sold you a chip rated at 2.4GHz, which was only actually running at 1GHz. AMD doesn't mention GHz, and until you can produce a 3GHz Thunderbird core Athlon, their model system is perfectly legitimate.
Guess the rumours of Intel's problems with 90nm, Prescott's severe ramping problems, issues that even 775 can't solve, and the incredible heat dissipation of the newer chips are all true. This seems to be yet more confirmation, even moreso than the release of 2.4GHz Prescott chips this week. Gee, boys, guess we should have listened to Bob Colwell when he was standing around screaming about the unsustainable clock ramping and heat dissipation curves.
When the architect of the P6 says something, you usually ought to listen. Perhaps next time you'll get off your high horses and follow the suggestions of the smart people. Now he's gone, you're fucked for '04, and you're in serious trouble on the desktop front if Tejas doesn't turn out to be a rabbit out of a hat.
Just so I'm not complaining without some semblence of constructive commentary, I might like to suggest that the problems we're currently facing would be largely solved and prevented from happening again by stripping down the Federal government like a Corvette left unattended in South-Central LA on a Saturday night.
With the Federal government all but dismantled, the vast majority of the problems we're working through now would be impossible.
There was a very good reason we enumerated a rather short list of powers and responsibilities for our Federal government. For clues as to why it was done in this way, open up a newspaper.
"We need to throw these [[Bush,] Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, several Generals and Admirals, and some media "pundits"] greedy fuckers in Jail and let them be raped like they've been raping the rest of the world for years."
Your 'solution' strikes me as being no better than the acts already perpetrated against this nation by those you've mentioned. A better idea may, in fact, be to put mechanisms into place which would prevent the problems we've seen under Bush/Cheney from happening once more in the future.
Funny how Dems decry the media as the puppets of multi-national conglomerates owned by frat buddies of high-ranking pubblies, while pubbies decry the liberal hippie media as a bunch of commie-loving bastards.
What's even funnier is that Oliver Stone, probably one of the most hated (by right-wingers) directors in Hollywood once made a film about how aweful and terrible the media is. It was called, "Natural Born Killers".
The media doesn't care if you're a Democrat or a Republican. The media doesn't care what your position is. The media doesn't care if you're alive, dead, growing mushrooms out of your eyelids, or bleeding to death in the back of a city cab. What they do care about are the ratings you and your story may bring to them. What the media does care about is reporting the things that will keep them employed and successful.
There's a concept that's lost on most people these days, and it's something that would solve probably 80% of the problems plaguing us at this point: personal responsibility.
"Would you be saying the same thing if a Democrat was in office?"
You say that as though Republicans are any different from Democrats. At this point, pubbies are pretty much liberal-lite. The few real conservatives left with any say get shouted down by the liberals and neo-con morons of the supposedly right-leaning party.
Why are we spending more than ever? Why are we looking at a $500+ Billion deficeit? Why are we pumping $530 Billion into a socialist medical plan? Why are we sapping the life out of Social(ist) Security while continuing to pretend it's doing something useful? Why are we pushing things like TIA? Why are we pushing for gun control on the same level Reno & Friends were? Why are we letting illegal immigrants stay in this country? Why are we allowing them to work here legally? Why are we contining to push the farce known as the "War on Drugs", which is really just a code for wasteful government spending designed to look pretty while sending the Bill of Rights through a shredder? Why are we locking US citizens up without trials or lawyers? Why are we passing censorship laws? Why are we even talking about adding Constitutional amendments to snatch even more rights from the states?
The list goes on and on, but suffice it to say that Bush and the rest of the Pubbies have shifted left of many Dems - so far so, in fact, that many so-called liberals are getting whiplash from it.
We've actually managed to elect a Republican President who's too liberal for many liberals.
The problem with your logic, in terms of "us" voting these people into office, is that these same people are now utilizing fear in an extreme manner to force citizens into submission. They present programs such as this as the only alternative to sudden, painful, horrifying death. They marginalize civil liberties advocates on BOTH sides of the political spectrum as extremists, and then proceed to convince the public at large that the entire nation will burst into flames unless these types of actions are taken.
" If Hubble is in a dangerous orbit, why can't NASA design a space tug to move it to a safer orbit? Should NASA have a space tug by now anyway, it is 2004."
You speak as though NASA has a budget with which to build such a device. As of right now, NASA has been ordered to complete a project which will cost an estimated $400 Billion with a ~$13.5 Billion per year budget within approx 20 years.
You do the math.
Give NASA the DOD's budget and you'd see men walking on the rings of Saturn in your lifetime.
Your student lives in a world filled with idiots (relative to him). The reason you can't get him to interact well with others is the same reason you can't get most average folks to interact well with severely retarded individuals. He's operating on a completely different intellectual plane, and trying to get him to think and act like his 'peers' will inevitably cause him to shun his intelligence. If you truly want to challenge the kid, start throwing stuff at him that's years beyond what he's currently being taught by others. I think your only real hope of improving his social interaction at all without dumbing him down is to introduce him to psychology and sociology at a level that's challenging for him. If you help him understand the underlying motivations for his peers, you may find that it helps him to better deal with them.
Regardless of how he handles the social interactions, never, never stop pushing the limits of his intellect. I can tell you first-hand that the moment he's no longer challenged, he'll simply glide through whatever it is he's asked to do. As the cliche goes, a mind is a terrible thing to waste - moreso when you're dealing with a brilliant mind.
" We keep hearing a lot of this talk from Americans. Often in the same breath as defending their constitutional right to own guns as defense against big bad government.
Strange thing is we never seem to see the riots on the streets as the American people overthrow their oppressors by force. Just how far do they have to go for you to act? Or do you not really believe in such violence after all? Seems that constitutional right was just talk after all."
The idea isn't to try overthrowing the government by force - that's absurd. No modern revolution works in an industrialized nation without the support of the police and the military. The idea is that if the government should ever become so corrupt that our basic rights, such as the sanctity of our homes, are infringed upon, we will have some manner of defending ourselves.
The idea is, when Uncle Sam sends his goons to break down my door, I'm taking as many of 'em with me as I can. The good citizens of the great state of New Hampshire said it best:
"This is because Intel refused to grant them licenses to manufacture Slot-1, and then Socket-370 compatible CPUs."
Cite sources, please? I've never heard this before. Ever.
"It was either that, or continue making Socket-7 compatible CPUs and spiral down the obsolete technology commode."
The "Super" Socket 7 may have been aging, but the K6-3 was still a kickass chip that used Socket7 to its full potential.
"I'm pretty sure that, had they been granted a license, AMD would have manufactured Slot-1 and then Socket 370 compatible CPUs and saved themselves the costs of developing their own chipsets"
I seriously doubt that, for a number of reasons. First of all, it had always been Jerry Sanders' dream to one day split off completely from Intel, competing directly against it with superior technology, and eventually surpassing it in performance and market share. Having gotten many board manufacturers behind AMD by extending the life of Socket 7, AMD was able to use the designs they'd been working with for a while, and put them to practical use. What Slot 1 and Socket 370 would have lacked, more than anything, is the Alpha 21164/21264 Bus. AMD had been designing much of the K7 architecture around it, seeing it as a very advanced (wasn't everything when it came to Alpha?) design with very promising potential. The result of this choice is that they were able to stick with Socket A for several years, and continue producing it even today. I think AMD looked at what Intel was doing and saw nothing but performance ceilings. I think they then looked at what Alpha was doing and saw the sky as the limit.
P6 was designed from the ground up by folks who had never done an x86 CPU before. This new team had no x86 experience, and thus presented AMD with a perfect opportunity to split. The timing could not have been better for AMD to throw what weight it had behind the new K7 CPUs. Now, that's not to say that P6 was poorly designed, nor that there was anything especially wrong with the design of Slot 1/Socket 370; just that the timing was perfect for AMD to stick their own flag in the dirt for a change. They took the risk, and it has paid off handsomely.
"Apparently you folks are telling me that the 3000+/400 and 3200+/400 was the filler chip."
I'm telling you that the 3000+/3200+ products were used to compete with the higher-end P4 CPUs, and that they represent the upper end of the potential for the K7 line.
" I didn't realize there was a 3.4GHz ceiling. Why would there be?"
Because Intel is having major problems with the Prescott P4s on S478. Supposedly, LGA775 solves many of those problems. Intel is preparing the dump Socket 478 some time in Q2. The fact that Intel has said that the P4 will hit about 4GHz by the end of this year, coupled with the fact that it's currently stuck at 3.2GHz (with 3.4 coming some time later in Q1), means that 3.4GHz is probably the last Socket478 CPU.
"All too often the 'job' part ruins the 'fun' part."
So you're telling me that Ron Jeremy responds to a woman coming onto him with, "Naa, you look pretty hot an' all, but it'd feel too much like work..."?
"They only produced two marginal FSB400 processors with the "32-bit" Barton core, and then focused all their attention on the Athlon 64s."
Out with the old, in with the new; sounds good to me.
"People who've made a choice in the past year to go with an AMD-compatible FSB400 mainboard are getting the shaft"
Those who made the choice to purchase a CPU which is at the upper end of an architecture's limits have only themselves to blame. If AMD spent another 20 years trying to make K7 faster, you'd be posting to slashdot in 2024 complaining about how people who just bought the latest Athlons are 'getting the shaft'. What about people who bought 233MHz P1s? What about people who bought 600MHz Slot 1s? What about people who bought 1GHz P3s? Are all these people 'getting the shaft'? Or is this simply an inevitable event in the course of chip development? Look, socket A has been around since S370. Since that time, Intel has gone through... what, 3, 4 sockets? AMD makes CPUs that go from competing with 600MHz P3s to competing with 3GHz P4s, and you continue to complain when they finally reach a ceiling they can't break through.
Look, most experts were looking at the death of the K7 at about 2GHz. They were looking at the architecture, and it simply doesn't do well at a whole lot above that. Yes, some chips will make it to higher speeds with excellent cooling, but those are the exceptions - not the rule. It's a credit to AMD that the massive core improvements from Thunderbird to Barton have kept the K7 in competition for this long. Now that the Mhz train has run out of steam and they can't squeeze any more performance out of K7, there's not a whole lot they can do with it. The extra cache, the FSB jumps - they're just not sustaining K7 performance improvements anymore. The concept of diminishing returns really comes into play at this point.
"AMD is unwittingly forcing them to move to Intel during their next upgrade."
I'm not quite sure I understand this part. Let's see, I can buy Socket 478 board with a 3.2GHz P4, which will be worthless if I want to get to anything above 3.4GHz. Or, I can wait for LGA775, which might be ready some time this summer. Or, I can go to Athlon64's S754, which will hit 4000+ at a minimum. Or I can wait for Socket 939, which should be out some time towards the end of this month, and go even further with the Athlon64/FX lines.
"Currently Intel's latest 3.0+ GHz offerings are spanking Athlon 64s in benchmarks with 32 bit applications."
Pull yourself away from Tomspropagandamachine.com and look at Anandtech, Ace's hardware, or just about anywhere else on the face of the planet. The only 32-bit apps that the P4 wins at all are encoding/streaming benchmarks. When you look at games, office, rar'ing, etc, the A64s put the P4 down like an old dog.
"When users decide to do the next upgrade, they're going to say "hey, I have to replace my mainboard anyway", and they're going to go to Intel because it has more upgrade possibilities, is cheaper than the Athlon 64 for the same level of computing power, and currently performs better."
You've stumbled into the SCOiverse, I think. Are you going to try and tell me that the P4 is cheaper than an Athlon64 3000+ system?? Let's see: P4 3GHz upgrades to... 3.4GHz max. Athlon64 3000+ upgrades to, at least 4000+, probably closer to 4400+. As for current performance, you've got to be looking at Tom's to even be able to imagine that one. It's amazing what sorts of results you can conjure up when you rig benchmarks by kneecapping the "competition's" (competition? isn't this supposed to be an unbiased review?) products by tweaking driver versions/settings/etc.
"So this is more of a plea for AMD to extend the Athlon "32" line a bit further. Please AMD, don't prematurely kill off 32-bit Athlon chip development!"
Your wish is Jerry Sanders' command! AMD has already stated that socket A will live throughout '04, an
If you're interested in the architectual aspects, you really need to watch the presentation linked to by Ace's. It's an hour long, but it's well worth it if you're into that sort of thing. This is the 'father' of AMD64 talking about his baby, and then taking questions from reasonably intelligent people at the end.
"People bash the x86 architecture and at the same time, bash anything that isn't x86."
Well, I think that people look at the x86 architecture, and they can see the many, many horrible hacks that have been used to sustain it. That much is pretty obvious if you spend even 10 minutes looking over things. You sit there scratching your head and going, "What the hell? Why'd they do that?", and then realize it's because something, somewhere, was broken until they did it. The reason people don't like to start looking into replacement architectures is exactly as you expressed; the must-have software. You can try running that software under emulation, but the best architecture in the world is always going to take a performance nosedive when running code under emulation. I can look at what IBM has been doing, or even at what Intel was doing with EPIC back in the day, and I can say, "wow, that's pretty cool". But what I can't do is put down the x86, toss all the old software, and hope that all the new software, written for a completely new architecture, is going to work in some sort of reliable fashion. What you really get with x86 is 20 years of experience, and thus, a measure of predictability. In essence, you're paying for predictable problems (much better than unpredictable ones) with old, poor architecture.
"The AMD solution doesn't do away with x86"
AMD64 actually does get rid of a lot of garbage in x86 that is no longer in use. Take a look at the presentation (link at Ace's) by the guy who designed AMD64. He was actually pretty thrilled (well, as thrilled as this guy gets) about being able to dump a lot of the cruft x86 has accumulated. Unfortunately, many things had to remain intact, for the obvious reason of compatibility. I have to warn you though, the guy from the AMD presentation is a real ball of fire. (Although, the ex-Intel guy from the other presenation was pretty interesting and funny)
"Heh, I guess the Cray Red Storm system kind of shoots down that theory...;-)"
Not really - I mean, I could design a cluster with a few million Pentium Pro CPUs and have it compete with the upper end Itanium boxes. Does that mean the Pentium Pro was designed to compete with Itanium?
The Opteron makes an excellent solution in many different scenarios, but don't take its flexibility to mean that it was meant to be in direct competition with Itanium. As I stated, however, it indirectly competes with (vis-a-vis Xeon) Itanium, and in fact, creates a situation in which Itanium cannot possibly be self-sustaining within a year from now.
Slashdot Mirror
"what do you do about HTTP, FTP, IRC, and all the other protocols which are completely built around unencrypted transmission?"
Freenet.
"Allow people to freely register to access any machine, exclusively, for 15 minutes at a time, by SSH. Allow those people to copy over their own actual software and get measurable performance on the only workload that matters, and base their product selection on that measurement."
Great, I run Maya. Now, does my exclusive 15 minutes include the 5+ hours it's going to take to send the software to them? Also, will Intel indemnify me against the makers of Maya for any copyright infringment suits that come from my sending it to Intel in violation of the licensing? Also, do I get to custom-configure the memory, hard drive, video card, power supply, mainboard, etc in the computer to my exact specifications so as to get an accurate picture of the performance I'd see under my specific system configuration?
It's a decent idea, but unworkable in the real world.
"I'm sure there are quite a few people who are capable of understanding it, but they've chosen to apply their brains elsewhere."
The average person's IQ is about 100. These are the people sitting on their asses watching 'reality TV' 4 hours a day while periodically drooling on themselves. Most are unable to grasp the complex inner workings of a keyboard, let alone a microprocessor. A number of these people get confused while using a graphical word processor. It's not just computers, either. It seems a majority of people have major problems with the grammar and syntax of the English language; despite the fact that it's their primary or only language. A lot of these people can't give correct change, despite all the effort that's gone into adjusting the US monetary system to reduce the number of bills and coins returned from any given transaction to an absolute minimum. These are the people who can't get a 4-part food order correct.
How is it you're going to explain a 30-stage pipeline to someone who gets lost after "cheeseburger, large fries, large coke... (mystery item that ends up being wrong)"? How is it that you're going to explain cache latency to someone who can't count to 100 using four simple coin denominations? You're truly such a gifted teacher that you can explain TLBs and speculative execution to a room full of people who barely passed high school math?
Then again, you could define the cast 'n' crew of Cebit or IDF as "quite a few people", but when it comes to average folks, they're so hopelessly lost as to illicit little more than my sympathy.
There's a fraction of a small percentage of people in this world who are capable of understanding all the inner workings of a modern microprocessor. Of that group, there is a subset of people who actually care enough about it to invest the time and effort to learn about it. I'd wager a bet that you could put the group of folks who can understand it together and have a number smaller than the population of New Hampshire.
"yes. whats wrong with that? those are all very important pieces of info. i would fully expect all that in well written liturature about a processor."
It is listed, in whitepapers. We're talking about marketing to the masses here. Tell me, do you think you can walk into a coffee shop and talk to the gal behind the counter about speculative execution for more than 10 seconds without getting her confused and bored? There's a fraction of a small percentage of people in this world who are capable of understanding all the parts of processor design. By confusing average folk with technical data, you're lying to them just as much as you are by using performance ratings. I'll bet I could go into detail about the original Pentium's design, explain all the things that were done to up the performance in really simple terms, and get a bunch of people excited about buying it so long as I never tell them its name.
Think about that for a moment - if I can sell a Pentium 200MHz system to a room full of people who could buy a Pentium 4 for the same price simply by talking up the complicated design specifics, am I any more honest than Intel is with its MHz listings, or AMD with its performance ratings?
Sort of like AMD's Opteron ratings?
Server CPUs
Uniprocessor line: 142, 144, 148, etc
Dual processor line: 242, 244, 248, etc
Quad/8 processor line: 842, 844, 848, etc
Workstation CPUs
AthlonFX 51, 53, 55...
Feeling better yet?
"Even the earliest Pentium 4s were able to greatly out-clock the pentium III's when they first came out. "
Yeah, you can do that when you do a complete core overhaul. Going from Northwood to Prescott is a fairly large change, but nowhere near as big a change as going from the PIII to the P4.
"But now we have the 31 stage Prescott and the about same clock rate.
If Intel thought it could keep bumping the clock rate up, they wouldn't move to something like AMD's performance rating. Yet here we are.
Something has changed."
What has changed is that Intel is having problems with the 90nm process, Prescott produces massive amounts of heat, the LGA 775 socket isn't going to solve those problems enough to ramp Prescott beyond 4GHz, if even that high, and the changes being made with the introduction of IA32-64 (aka AMD64) will give processors a pretty decent bump in performance.
Intel knows now that clock frequency ramps have limits. Sure, Bob Colwell told them as much when the P4 was being designed, but now they're actually slamming into walls of fire (heat). Right this second, they're not in such a serious situation that changing to performance ratings is necessary, but they will be fairly soon. Thus, if they do it now, it looks like a new initiative to give Intel an advantage in the marketplace. If they wait until their backs are against the wall, it looks like Intel is struggling to keep up and has lost its edge in the marketplace.
You see now why this is being done? It's just management finally starting to get a little smarter.
and please mod this person up. (S)He is correct in stating that the AMD model numbers are derived NOT from the Pentium 4, the Athlon classic, the Centrino, Celeron, PIII, Crusoe, 8088, or any other God-forsaken chip, but from the Thunderbird core Athlon CPUs. Those were the last Athlons to advertise the clock frequency, and thus were the obvious choice for a comparison chip for the next generation of processors. If I just bought a 1.4GHz Thunderbird Athlon (common chip for the time), I would expect that an AthlonXP 1500+ would perform better than it, and I would be correct. An AthlonXP 1500+ under the new rating system, were it to be compared to the Athlon classic core (far less efficient than Thunderbird) would probably run at about 1.1GHz. As it is, the AthlonXP Palomino core 1500+, being a relatively minor revision to Thunderbird, ran at 1.33GHz.
So mod this guy up. He's right, the post he's replying to is wrong.
Have a nice day.
Just out of curiosity, what would you have them do? Are you saying that any time Intel or AMD wants to show you a CPU, they should list clock frequency, L1, L2, and L3 cache sizes, each of their individual latencies, main memory latency, clock multiplier, average IPC, number of pipeline stages, instruction set extensions (SSE, Powernow, etc), architectual information, die process size, average and max heat dissipation figures, speculative execution capabilities, out-of-order operation specs, core stepping and revisions, a picture of the actual die, and about 10,000 other things that contribute to performance?
And just what the hell are you going to do with all that information, let alone the average consumer? I seriously doubt most of the engineers at Intel or AMD could even take all that information and have a good idea of what Spec numbers or other benchmarks would look like. At some point, you've got to figure out a way to simply things so that most people can at least have a rudimentary understanding of what it is they're buying. AMD attempts to do that with the model numbering scheme, which is designed to denote the relative performance of each CPU. Intel is now moving to some sort of similar system, now that clock ramping on the P4 is reaching its limits.
There is no measurement of absolute performance. There is no single number that gives you an honest picture of how things are. You can take 100 benchmarks of different applications, and you'll still have only a relative idea of performance, at best. Intel would be lying if they sold you a chip rated at 2.4GHz, which was only actually running at 1GHz. AMD doesn't mention GHz, and until you can produce a 3GHz Thunderbird core Athlon, their model system is perfectly legitimate.
Guess the rumours of Intel's problems with 90nm, Prescott's severe ramping problems, issues that even 775 can't solve, and the incredible heat dissipation of the newer chips are all true. This seems to be yet more confirmation, even moreso than the release of 2.4GHz Prescott chips this week. Gee, boys, guess we should have listened to Bob Colwell when he was standing around screaming about the unsustainable clock ramping and heat dissipation curves.
When the architect of the P6 says something, you usually ought to listen. Perhaps next time you'll get off your high horses and follow the suggestions of the smart people. Now he's gone, you're fucked for '04, and you're in serious trouble on the desktop front if Tejas doesn't turn out to be a rabbit out of a hat.
Just so I'm not complaining without some semblence of constructive commentary, I might like to suggest that the problems we're currently facing would be largely solved and prevented from happening again by stripping down the Federal government like a Corvette left unattended in South-Central LA on a Saturday night.
With the Federal government all but dismantled, the vast majority of the problems we're working through now would be impossible.
There was a very good reason we enumerated a rather short list of powers and responsibilities for our Federal government. For clues as to why it was done in this way, open up a newspaper.
"We need to throw these [[Bush,] Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, several Generals and Admirals, and some media "pundits"] greedy fuckers in Jail and let them be raped like they've been raping the rest of the world for years."
Your 'solution' strikes me as being no better than the acts already perpetrated against this nation by those you've mentioned. A better idea may, in fact, be to put mechanisms into place which would prevent the problems we've seen under Bush/Cheney from happening once more in the future.
Funny how Dems decry the media as the puppets of multi-national conglomerates owned by frat buddies of high-ranking pubblies, while pubbies decry the liberal hippie media as a bunch of commie-loving bastards.
What's even funnier is that Oliver Stone, probably one of the most hated (by right-wingers) directors in Hollywood once made a film about how aweful and terrible the media is. It was called, "Natural Born Killers".
The media doesn't care if you're a Democrat or a Republican. The media doesn't care what your position is. The media doesn't care if you're alive, dead, growing mushrooms out of your eyelids, or bleeding to death in the back of a city cab. What they do care about are the ratings you and your story may bring to them. What the media does care about is reporting the things that will keep them employed and successful.
There's a concept that's lost on most people these days, and it's something that would solve probably 80% of the problems plaguing us at this point: personal responsibility.
"Would you be saying the same thing if a Democrat was in office?"
You say that as though Republicans are any different from Democrats. At this point, pubbies are pretty much liberal-lite. The few real conservatives left with any say get shouted down by the liberals and neo-con morons of the supposedly right-leaning party.
Why are we spending more than ever? Why are we looking at a $500+ Billion deficeit? Why are we pumping $530 Billion into a socialist medical plan? Why are we sapping the life out of Social(ist) Security while continuing to pretend it's doing something useful? Why are we pushing things like TIA? Why are we pushing for gun control on the same level Reno & Friends were? Why are we letting illegal immigrants stay in this country? Why are we allowing them to work here legally? Why are we contining to push the farce known as the "War on Drugs", which is really just a code for wasteful government spending designed to look pretty while sending the Bill of Rights through a shredder? Why are we locking US citizens up without trials or lawyers? Why are we passing censorship laws? Why are we even talking about adding Constitutional amendments to snatch even more rights from the states?
The list goes on and on, but suffice it to say that Bush and the rest of the Pubbies have shifted left of many Dems - so far so, in fact, that many so-called liberals are getting whiplash from it.
We've actually managed to elect a Republican President who's too liberal for many liberals.
The problem with your logic, in terms of "us" voting these people into office, is that these same people are now utilizing fear in an extreme manner to force citizens into submission. They present programs such as this as the only alternative to sudden, painful, horrifying death. They marginalize civil liberties advocates on BOTH sides of the political spectrum as extremists, and then proceed to convince the public at large that the entire nation will burst into flames unless these types of actions are taken.
That's called treason, in my book.
Which launches DDoS attacks against itself, but then runs out of money and breaks up into smaller, poorer versions of itself.
You know, I always thought KDE was a bloated, ugly, slow GUI, but now that it's available in Icelandic; well I guess it's alright!
(relax, it's called a joke)
" If Hubble is in a dangerous orbit, why can't NASA design a space tug to move it to a safer orbit? Should NASA have a space tug by now anyway, it is 2004."
You speak as though NASA has a budget with which to build such a device. As of right now, NASA has been ordered to complete a project which will cost an estimated $400 Billion with a ~$13.5 Billion per year budget within approx 20 years.
You do the math.
Give NASA the DOD's budget and you'd see men walking on the rings of Saturn in your lifetime.
Your student lives in a world filled with idiots (relative to him). The reason you can't get him to interact well with others is the same reason you can't get most average folks to interact well with severely retarded individuals. He's operating on a completely different intellectual plane, and trying to get him to think and act like his 'peers' will inevitably cause him to shun his intelligence. If you truly want to challenge the kid, start throwing stuff at him that's years beyond what he's currently being taught by others. I think your only real hope of improving his social interaction at all without dumbing him down is to introduce him to psychology and sociology at a level that's challenging for him. If you help him understand the underlying motivations for his peers, you may find that it helps him to better deal with them.
Regardless of how he handles the social interactions, never, never stop pushing the limits of his intellect. I can tell you first-hand that the moment he's no longer challenged, he'll simply glide through whatever it is he's asked to do. As the cliche goes, a mind is a terrible thing to waste - moreso when you're dealing with a brilliant mind.
" We keep hearing a lot of this talk from Americans. Often in the same breath as defending their constitutional right to own guns as defense against big bad government.
Strange thing is we never seem to see the riots on the streets as the American people overthrow their oppressors by force. Just how far do they have to go for you to act? Or do you not really believe in such violence after all? Seems that constitutional right was just talk after all."
The idea isn't to try overthrowing the government by force - that's absurd. No modern revolution works in an industrialized nation without the support of the police and the military. The idea is that if the government should ever become so corrupt that our basic rights, such as the sanctity of our homes, are infringed upon, we will have some manner of defending ourselves.
The idea is, when Uncle Sam sends his goons to break down my door, I'm taking as many of 'em with me as I can. The good citizens of the great state of New Hampshire said it best:
"Live free or Die"
"This is because Intel refused to grant them licenses to manufacture Slot-1, and then Socket-370 compatible CPUs."
Cite sources, please? I've never heard this before. Ever.
"It was either that, or continue making Socket-7 compatible CPUs and spiral down the obsolete technology commode."
The "Super" Socket 7 may have been aging, but the K6-3 was still a kickass chip that used Socket7 to its full potential.
"I'm pretty sure that, had they been granted a license, AMD would have manufactured Slot-1 and then Socket 370 compatible CPUs and saved themselves the costs of developing their own chipsets"
I seriously doubt that, for a number of reasons. First of all, it had always been Jerry Sanders' dream to one day split off completely from Intel, competing directly against it with superior technology, and eventually surpassing it in performance and market share. Having gotten many board manufacturers behind AMD by extending the life of Socket 7, AMD was able to use the designs they'd been working with for a while, and put them to practical use. What Slot 1 and Socket 370 would have lacked, more than anything, is the Alpha 21164/21264 Bus. AMD had been designing much of the K7 architecture around it, seeing it as a very advanced (wasn't everything when it came to Alpha?) design with very promising potential. The result of this choice is that they were able to stick with Socket A for several years, and continue producing it even today. I think AMD looked at what Intel was doing and saw nothing but performance ceilings. I think they then looked at what Alpha was doing and saw the sky as the limit.
P6 was designed from the ground up by folks who had never done an x86 CPU before. This new team had no x86 experience, and thus presented AMD with a perfect opportunity to split. The timing could not have been better for AMD to throw what weight it had behind the new K7 CPUs. Now, that's not to say that P6 was poorly designed, nor that there was anything especially wrong with the design of Slot 1/Socket 370; just that the timing was perfect for AMD to stick their own flag in the dirt for a change. They took the risk, and it has paid off handsomely.
"Apparently you folks are telling me that the 3000+/400 and 3200+/400 was the filler chip."
I'm telling you that the 3000+/3200+ products were used to compete with the higher-end P4 CPUs, and that they represent the upper end of the potential for the K7 line.
" I didn't realize there was a 3.4GHz ceiling. Why would there be?"
Because Intel is having major problems with the Prescott P4s on S478. Supposedly, LGA775 solves many of those problems. Intel is preparing the dump Socket 478 some time in Q2. The fact that Intel has said that the P4 will hit about 4GHz by the end of this year, coupled with the fact that it's currently stuck at 3.2GHz (with 3.4 coming some time later in Q1), means that 3.4GHz is probably the last Socket478 CPU.
"All too often the 'job' part ruins the 'fun' part."
So you're telling me that Ron Jeremy responds to a woman coming onto him with, "Naa, you look pretty hot an' all, but it'd feel too much like work..."?
"They only produced two marginal FSB400 processors with the "32-bit" Barton core, and then focused all their attention on the Athlon 64s."
... 3.4GHz max. Athlon64 3000+ upgrades to, at least 4000+, probably closer to 4400+. As for current performance, you've got to be looking at Tom's to even be able to imagine that one. It's amazing what sorts of results you can conjure up when you rig benchmarks by kneecapping the "competition's" (competition? isn't this supposed to be an unbiased review?) products by tweaking driver versions/settings/etc.
Out with the old, in with the new; sounds good to me.
"People who've made a choice in the past year to go with an AMD-compatible FSB400 mainboard are getting the shaft"
Those who made the choice to purchase a CPU which is at the upper end of an architecture's limits have only themselves to blame. If AMD spent another 20 years trying to make K7 faster, you'd be posting to slashdot in 2024 complaining about how people who just bought the latest Athlons are 'getting the shaft'. What about people who bought 233MHz P1s? What about people who bought 600MHz Slot 1s? What about people who bought 1GHz P3s? Are all these people 'getting the shaft'? Or is this simply an inevitable event in the course of chip development? Look, socket A has been around since S370. Since that time, Intel has gone through... what, 3, 4 sockets? AMD makes CPUs that go from competing with 600MHz P3s to competing with 3GHz P4s, and you continue to complain when they finally reach a ceiling they can't break through.
Look, most experts were looking at the death of the K7 at about 2GHz. They were looking at the architecture, and it simply doesn't do well at a whole lot above that. Yes, some chips will make it to higher speeds with excellent cooling, but those are the exceptions - not the rule. It's a credit to AMD that the massive core improvements from Thunderbird to Barton have kept the K7 in competition for this long. Now that the Mhz train has run out of steam and they can't squeeze any more performance out of K7, there's not a whole lot they can do with it. The extra cache, the FSB jumps - they're just not sustaining K7 performance improvements anymore. The concept of diminishing returns really comes into play at this point.
"AMD is unwittingly forcing them to move to Intel during their next upgrade."
I'm not quite sure I understand this part. Let's see, I can buy Socket 478 board with a 3.2GHz P4, which will be worthless if I want to get to anything above 3.4GHz. Or, I can wait for LGA775, which might be ready some time this summer. Or, I can go to Athlon64's S754, which will hit 4000+ at a minimum. Or I can wait for Socket 939, which should be out some time towards the end of this month, and go even further with the Athlon64/FX lines.
"Currently Intel's latest 3.0+ GHz offerings are spanking Athlon 64s in benchmarks with 32 bit applications."
Pull yourself away from Tomspropagandamachine.com and look at Anandtech, Ace's hardware, or just about anywhere else on the face of the planet. The only 32-bit apps that the P4 wins at all are encoding/streaming benchmarks. When you look at games, office, rar'ing, etc, the A64s put the P4 down like an old dog.
"When users decide to do the next upgrade, they're going to say "hey, I have to replace my mainboard anyway", and they're going to go to Intel because it has more upgrade possibilities, is cheaper than the Athlon 64 for the same level of computing power, and currently performs better."
You've stumbled into the SCOiverse, I think. Are you going to try and tell me that the P4 is cheaper than an Athlon64 3000+ system?? Let's see: P4 3GHz upgrades to
"So this is more of a plea for AMD to extend the Athlon "32" line a bit further. Please AMD, don't prematurely kill off 32-bit Athlon chip development!"
Your wish is Jerry Sanders' command! AMD has already stated that socket A will live throughout '04, an
If you're interested in the architectual aspects, you really need to watch the presentation linked to by Ace's. It's an hour long, but it's well worth it if you're into that sort of thing. This is the 'father' of AMD64 talking about his baby, and then taking questions from reasonably intelligent people at the end.
"People bash the x86 architecture and at the same time, bash anything that isn't x86."
Well, I think that people look at the x86 architecture, and they can see the many, many horrible hacks that have been used to sustain it. That much is pretty obvious if you spend even 10 minutes looking over things. You sit there scratching your head and going, "What the hell? Why'd they do that?", and then realize it's because something, somewhere, was broken until they did it. The reason people don't like to start looking into replacement architectures is exactly as you expressed; the must-have software. You can try running that software under emulation, but the best architecture in the world is always going to take a performance nosedive when running code under emulation. I can look at what IBM has been doing, or even at what Intel was doing with EPIC back in the day, and I can say, "wow, that's pretty cool". But what I can't do is put down the x86, toss all the old software, and hope that all the new software, written for a completely new architecture, is going to work in some sort of reliable fashion. What you really get with x86 is 20 years of experience, and thus, a measure of predictability. In essence, you're paying for predictable problems (much better than unpredictable ones) with old, poor architecture.
"The AMD solution doesn't do away with x86"
AMD64 actually does get rid of a lot of garbage in x86 that is no longer in use. Take a look at the presentation (link at Ace's) by the guy who designed AMD64. He was actually pretty thrilled (well, as thrilled as this guy gets) about being able to dump a lot of the cruft x86 has accumulated. Unfortunately, many things had to remain intact, for the obvious reason of compatibility. I have to warn you though, the guy from the AMD presentation is a real ball of fire. (Although, the ex-Intel guy from the other presenation was pretty interesting and funny)
"Heh, I guess the Cray Red Storm system kind of shoots down that theory... ;-)"
Not really - I mean, I could design a cluster with a few million Pentium Pro CPUs and have it compete with the upper end Itanium boxes. Does that mean the Pentium Pro was designed to compete with Itanium?
The Opteron makes an excellent solution in many different scenarios, but don't take its flexibility to mean that it was meant to be in direct competition with Itanium. As I stated, however, it indirectly competes with (vis-a-vis Xeon) Itanium, and in fact, creates a situation in which Itanium cannot possibly be self-sustaining within a year from now.