This all comes down to what you are scared of and who you trust.
Are you actually worried that a terrorist is going to kill you? Are you really concerned about the dealers on the corner selling drugs or the kids next door smoking pot? What is it you are afraid of and why? Does the government need personal information on millions of americans to fight what you are most afraid of?
When I think about these questions I can answer them pretty quickly. I am more worried about being killed in a car crash than being blown away by terrorists. I don't care what people shoot/smoke/snort as long as they do it on their own property. What am I most afraid of? The government's reactionary and arbitrary laws. The government certainly doesn't need to know personal information about millions of american's to stay the fuck out of my life.
What I see is the USA spending 30 mil on things I'm not concerned about when they could have put it into education, public transportation, food for the poor, social-security, research, etc, etc. But the question needs to be asked: Why does the goverment want to spy on americans? Because the majority of the american publics wants the government to. Most american's want the government to tell gays they can't marry. Most people don't want grandpa to be allowed to smoke a bowl before going to bed. Most people want to fine radio and TV stations for making certain vibrations in the air!
Most people cannot handle freedom and they want someone else to tell then what they can and cannot do. We need to fix the people more than we need to fix the government.
I've tried many "performance enhancing" drugs over the years. From caffeine to adderall, riddlin, cocaine, and methamphetamines. All these things have been reported to allow one to think and work faster and longer.
My experience? I perform much worse on these substances. Sometimes I'm jittery and cannot focus. At times I think and work so fast that I make many carless errors that end up taking me more time to fix than if I had done the work slower and did it right the first time. The drugs that kept me up and allowed me to work longer just took more of me the next day.
I can tell you all, from personal experience, that taking stimulants to try and help you through the day is a waste of money, is a health risk, and may actually decrease your overall monthly or yearly performance. Not to mention the fact that our over-reaching government would be more than happy to put you in jail for a very very long time for posessing many of these substances.
What makes you think Intel is selling parts at a loss?
In a sense, all CPU companies sell some chips at a loss. Processing a wafer costs almost the same amount no matter what chip is on it. A mess of CPUs come off of the wafer and are then binned based on their power and performance characteristics. CPUs from each bin sell for different amounts. The top bin with the best chips sell for a lot and make a nice margin. The lower bins sell for quite a bit less, and have less of a margin. Many CPU companies will even sell some of the lower binned CPUs for less than the cost to produce them because the higher-binned CPUs will offset this loss. Further, selling a chip for something is better than not selling the chip at all.
I say that Intel is selling many CPUs at a loss because the low end parts are the ones they are dropping their prices on the most. Further, Intel is dropping prices on their 90nm chips the most, and these are quite a bit larger than their 65nm parts. In the CPU industry, the larger chips cost more to make.
So, what I see is Intel dropping prices on the parts that already have low margins, and are the most expensive to produce. This is not a good thing for them.
While you have a decent point, I don't think you remember history well. A few years ago, Intel created the "NetBurst" architecture. They ended up with a 31-stage pipeline, and Intel said that they would take CPUs to 10GHz by 2005/2006. Intel even had press events and demonstrated a 5GHz NetBurst P4.
Where are our 10GHz Pentium 4s now? Does anyone really remember Intel's promise? Does anyone really care?
Intel can fudge benchmarks and make crazy promises all they want. In the end, everyone seems to still love them because they are Intel. I don't think Intel will suffer at all, whether they lie or not.
Intel is suffering from the Osborne Effect. They have hyped their new products (which are comming in July/August of 2006) so much that no one wants their current parts. This has forced Intel to drop the prices of netburst (read: P4) parts through the floor to keep moving them. Intel is selling many parts at a loss, and they have more price cuts (up to 60%) planned for the 23rd of July. Conroe is a great chip, but it currently has bad yeilds and will not make up a significant portion of Intel's shipped CPUs until the end of this year. At that point, Conroe based chips will be 20% of production; you can only imagine how many will be available on launch, a whole 6 months earlier than that. Intel has a killer chip on their hands, but it will be along time before Intel is able to ship enough of these to do much to the market. In the mean time, Intel will continue to sell their old tech at a loss to clear out inventory and try to keep AMD from making more marketshare gains... I don't think it is going to work.
These benchmarks were run on boxes that Intel built. Even the AMD box was built and configured by Intel. Trusting these benchmarks is abit like trusting a study funded by the oil industry claiming that global warming isn't real. There have been a good number of independant tests of the Conroe and these put the top of the line Conroe around 12% faster on average than a FX-62. The results from the Intel benchmarks show a much bigger performance delta, and to be quite honest, I don't trust them one bit. Somewhere around 15% is much more reasonable.
We found that it was faster than the current flagship Pentium Extreme Edition 965 processor in nearly every single-threaded scenario, but there were times where Conroe fell behind in multi-tasking scenarios.
I think that's a very funny quote. This is exactly what I was expecting all along. The reason most people have been running Super-PI and other toy benchmarks is because they are single-threaded, and that is the one area where Conroe really shines.
If the Conroe can't beat the Pentium Extreme Edition 965 how is it going "own" or "destroy" an Athlon 64 FX-64? The Conroe myth gets busted a little bit every day.
There is no FSB and the memory is LOCAL to the processor. How would this maintain coherency? The Athlon64 processors also don't allow cHT. Not that they don't physically have support for it, just it's been disabled.
Given where I work, and that I've never heard of this before today... I suspect it's a hoax.
The only way this would work is if the OS was aware of it and manually routed data from one node to another (e.g. like a northbridge DMA device you can pipe info to).
AMD's own slides from the 2006 analyst's presentation backup this information. If you look at the slides, it is pretty clear that AMD has enabled one ccHT link on some of the Athlon 64 X2 series. _slides_
There is a student on campus that was bragging that he could do just as the article describes. A professor put down $100 and bet the student that he couldn't get into his car in 15 min without breaking anything. The student took the bet. Needless to say, the whole class was out in the parking lot 5 min later to watch. It took the student about 5 minutes. The car chirped and the lights flagshed. I assume this meant the doors had been unlocked. Next, the car started, the student opened the door and got it.
This was really cool to see live. There is a something about seeing it done live that is very impressive.
Whoever subimtted the article doesn't understand what the external HT links are for. They are _NOT_ a replacement for USB or any other similar technology. External HT is used to link multiple chassis together to form a large SMP box. This is similar to infiniband, etc. This is NOT designed to be a way to just plug in a CPU to an external port. Read the pdf:
2) That all changed when AMD released the K6 processor with an excellent floating point unit. Then the war became a Mhz slugfest between AMD and Intel in which Cyrix was marginalized. Intel reached the 1000Mhz mark first with the P3 but AMD wasn't far behind with the Athlon.
That is not true at all. AMD reached 1GHz first by a couple of days. I hate the way these things get turned around. Next you'll try to tell me that Intel was first to dual core because they paper launched it two days before AMD, even though AMD was the first to have actual shipping parts...
Both Intel and AMD are releasing CPUs which support OS partitioning in hardware this year (2006). Does the OpenVZ project support or have plans to support these hardware features?
The human brain's evolution is driven most strongly by social competition. It's actually a leading theory that social competition was one of the primary causes of the human brain as we know it.
Suggested reading:
"Ecological dominence, social competition, and coalitionary arms races: Why humans evolved extraordinary intelegence", Flin, Geary, Ward.
I think women should be able to kill anything that is living inside them and therefore a risk to their health. It doesn't matter when, or why, it is their body to do with as they please for any reason. Well, at least, that's the way it should be.
The dual-core AMD parts are NOT connected by an HT link. The HT (Hyper-Transport) links only run at 1GHz. They are sloooow compared to the SRQ (System Request Queue). AMD connects the two cores on the K8 by means of the SRQ, which runs at full CPU clockspeed. Go to AMDs site and look at a couple of CPU architecture diagrams before you start spreading this stuff around. Saying AMD connects core by HT is just as bad as saying AMD connects cores by using the FSB. AMD made a nice design. They didn't just slap a couple of cores together.
Since when is breaking the law morally wrong? The reason the US has guns is so that its citizents can break unjust laws and defent themselves from an unreasonable government. There is nothing "wrong" with breaking the law, and I wish peopld would start realizing that.
He is not trying to extract insane amounts of money from them. He just wants them to comply and post the source code. It really isn't hard. It would be like the RIAA going to court to get people to share their mp3s.... You see where I'm going with this, right?
Mod parent up. This article is a waste of time. I know people like to put linux and *BSD on everything, but talking about this as a price/feature advantage is just crazy. When the mini comes with OS X, which supports gcc, gdb, X windows, (almost all gnu software) as well as all the Mac software, why the hell would throwing out all that support somehow become "cost savings" ?
Just because this article mentions that the nForce4 for intel CPUs is unstable and has issues doesn't imply anything about the AMD nForce4 chipset. There are many major server vendors (Tyan comes to mind first) that are using the nVidia chipset. These vendors don't just slap anything into their motherboards you know. A lot of validation and testing going into every part they use. I am very happy with the stability and speed of Tyan's boards. If Tyan says it's good enough for them, then it is probably good enough for me. I don't see why people would even say somthing like: "The nVidia shipset sucks on Intel, I guess it's ok for AMD because people in that market are used to crap!" It just doesn't work that way. The Intel and AMD nVidia chipsets are very different.
I could be wrong, but I bet the reason you get double the performance when you double the number of processors is that they are not adding on more slow processors. They keey adding faster chips. This might be why it seems to scale so well.
I think your right. I have seen benchmarks on the AMDzone forums which show that while AMD gets a speed boost (on average) from 64-bit mode, Intel takes a performance hit (again, on average) when in 64-bit mode.
Intel is just trying to be compatible with AMD64. They won't have a serious product for another quarter or two (or three).
because it is physically impossible to get buffer overruns
That's garbage. Do you really think that MS's VBRUNx.DLL is free of all programming errors? I would argue that VB is less secure because one cannot verify the underlying libraries because they are closed source.
Slashdot Mirror
This all comes down to what you are scared of and who you trust.
Are you actually worried that a terrorist is going to kill you? Are you really concerned about the dealers on the corner selling drugs or the kids next door smoking pot? What is it you are afraid of and why? Does the government need personal information on millions of americans to fight what you are most afraid of?
When I think about these questions I can answer them pretty quickly. I am more worried about being killed in a car crash than being blown away by terrorists. I don't care what people shoot/smoke/snort as long as they do it on their own property. What am I most afraid of? The government's reactionary and arbitrary laws. The government certainly doesn't need to know personal information about millions of american's to stay the fuck out of my life.
What I see is the USA spending 30 mil on things I'm not concerned about when they could have put it into education, public transportation, food for the poor, social-security, research, etc, etc. But the question needs to be asked: Why does the goverment want to spy on americans? Because the majority of the american publics wants the government to. Most american's want the government to tell gays they can't marry. Most people don't want grandpa to be allowed to smoke a bowl before going to bed. Most people want to fine radio and TV stations for making certain vibrations in the air!
Most people cannot handle freedom and they want someone else to tell then what they can and cannot do. We need to fix the people more than we need to fix the government.
I've tried many "performance enhancing" drugs over the years. From caffeine to adderall, riddlin, cocaine, and methamphetamines. All these things have been reported to allow one to think and work faster and longer.
My experience? I perform much worse on these substances. Sometimes I'm jittery and cannot focus. At times I think and work so fast that I make many carless errors that end up taking me more time to fix than if I had done the work slower and did it right the first time. The drugs that kept me up and allowed me to work longer just took more of me the next day.
I can tell you all, from personal experience, that taking stimulants to try and help you through the day is a waste of money, is a health risk, and may actually decrease your overall monthly or yearly performance. Not to mention the fact that our over-reaching government would be more than happy to put you in jail for a very very long time for posessing many of these substances.
What makes you think Intel is selling parts at a loss?
In a sense, all CPU companies sell some chips at a loss. Processing a wafer costs almost the same amount no matter what chip is on it. A mess of CPUs come off of the wafer and are then binned based on their power and performance characteristics. CPUs from each bin sell for different amounts. The top bin with the best chips sell for a lot and make a nice margin. The lower bins sell for quite a bit less, and have less of a margin. Many CPU companies will even sell some of the lower binned CPUs for less than the cost to produce them because the higher-binned CPUs will offset this loss. Further, selling a chip for something is better than not selling the chip at all.
I say that Intel is selling many CPUs at a loss because the low end parts are the ones they are dropping their prices on the most. Further, Intel is dropping prices on their 90nm chips the most, and these are quite a bit larger than their 65nm parts. In the CPU industry, the larger chips cost more to make.
So, what I see is Intel dropping prices on the parts that already have low margins, and are the most expensive to produce. This is not a good thing for them.
While you have a decent point, I don't think you remember history well. A few years ago, Intel created the "NetBurst" architecture. They ended up with a 31-stage pipeline, and Intel said that they would take CPUs to 10GHz by 2005/2006. Intel even had press events and demonstrated a 5GHz NetBurst P4.
Where are our 10GHz Pentium 4s now? Does anyone really remember Intel's promise? Does anyone really care?
Intel can fudge benchmarks and make crazy promises all they want. In the end, everyone seems to still love them because they are Intel. I don't think Intel will suffer at all, whether they lie or not.
Intel is suffering from the Osborne Effect. They have hyped their new products (which are comming in July/August of 2006) so much that no one wants their current parts. This has forced Intel to drop the prices of netburst (read: P4) parts through the floor to keep moving them. Intel is selling many parts at a loss, and they have more price cuts (up to 60%) planned for the 23rd of July. Conroe is a great chip, but it currently has bad yeilds and will not make up a significant portion of Intel's shipped CPUs until the end of this year. At that point, Conroe based chips will be 20% of production; you can only imagine how many will be available on launch, a whole 6 months earlier than that. Intel has a killer chip on their hands, but it will be along time before Intel is able to ship enough of these to do much to the market. In the mean time, Intel will continue to sell their old tech at a loss to clear out inventory and try to keep AMD from making more marketshare gains... I don't think it is going to work.
These benchmarks were run on boxes that Intel built. Even the AMD box was built and configured by Intel. Trusting these benchmarks is abit like trusting a study funded by the oil industry claiming that global warming isn't real. There have been a good number of independant tests of the Conroe and these put the top of the line Conroe around 12% faster on average than a FX-62. The results from the Intel benchmarks show a much bigger performance delta, and to be quite honest, I don't trust them one bit. Somewhere around 15% is much more reasonable.
We found that it was faster than the current flagship Pentium Extreme Edition 965 processor in nearly every single-threaded scenario, but there were times where Conroe fell behind in multi-tasking scenarios.
I think that's a very funny quote. This is exactly what I was expecting all along. The reason most people have been running Super-PI and other toy benchmarks is because they are single-threaded, and that is the one area where Conroe really shines.
If the Conroe can't beat the Pentium Extreme Edition 965 how is it going "own" or "destroy" an Athlon 64 FX-64? The Conroe myth gets busted a little bit every day.
There is no FSB and the memory is LOCAL to the processor. How would this maintain coherency? The Athlon64 processors also don't allow cHT. Not that they don't physically have support for it, just it's been disabled.
Given where I work, and that I've never heard of this before today... I suspect it's a hoax.
The only way this would work is if the OS was aware of it and manually routed data from one node to another (e.g. like a northbridge DMA device you can pipe info to).
AMD's own slides from the 2006 analyst's presentation backup this information. If you look at the slides, it is pretty clear that AMD has enabled one ccHT link on some of the Athlon 64 X2 series. _slides_
There is a student on campus that was bragging that he could do just as the article describes. A professor put down $100 and bet the student that he couldn't get into his car in 15 min without breaking anything. The student took the bet. Needless to say, the whole class was out in the parking lot 5 min later to watch. It took the student about 5 minutes. The car chirped and the lights flagshed. I assume this meant the doors had been unlocked. Next, the car started, the student opened the door and got it.
This was really cool to see live. There is a something about seeing it done live that is very impressive.
Oh, so it's like USB
Well, I suppose so... if you really want to make an SMP box out of low bandwidth, high latency USB links...
HT enabled FPGA boasts 300x performance gains in some computations
Whoever subimtted the article doesn't understand what the external HT links are for. They are _NOT_ a replacement for USB or any other similar technology. External HT is used to link multiple chassis together to form a large SMP box. This is similar to infiniband, etc. This is NOT designed to be a way to just plug in a CPU to an external port. Read the pdf:
p df
http://www.hypertransport.org/docs/tech/ht30pres.
2) That all changed when AMD released the K6 processor with an excellent floating point unit. Then the war became a Mhz slugfest between AMD and Intel in which Cyrix was marginalized. Intel reached the 1000Mhz mark first with the P3 but AMD wasn't far behind with the Athlon.
That is not true at all. AMD reached 1GHz first by a couple of days. I hate the way these things get turned around. Next you'll try to tell me that Intel was first to dual core because they paper launched it two days before AMD, even though AMD was the first to have actual shipping parts...
Both Intel and AMD are releasing CPUs which support OS partitioning in hardware this year (2006). Does the OpenVZ project support or have plans to support these hardware features?
The human brain's evolution is driven most strongly by social competition. It's actually a leading theory that social competition was one of the primary causes of the human brain as we know it.
Suggested reading:
"Ecological dominence, social competition, and coalitionary arms races: Why humans evolved extraordinary intelegence", Flin, Geary, Ward.
"Machiavellian Intelegence", Richard Byrne.
"How Did Humans Evolve?", Richard Alexander.
"The Social Brain Hypothesis", Robin Dunbar
The most interesting parts for me were the fork() times and IPC benchmarks. 0SX was considerably slower in these areas. Is this an nptl issue?
I think women should be able to kill anything that is living inside them and therefore a risk to their health. It doesn't matter when, or why, it is their body to do with as they please for any reason. Well, at least, that's the way it should be.
The dual-core AMD parts are NOT connected by an HT link. The HT (Hyper-Transport) links only run at 1GHz. They are sloooow compared to the SRQ (System Request Queue). AMD connects the two cores on the K8 by means of the SRQ, which runs at full CPU clockspeed. Go to AMDs site and look at a couple of CPU architecture diagrams before you start spreading this stuff around. Saying AMD connects core by HT is just as bad as saying AMD connects cores by using the FSB. AMD made a nice design. They didn't just slap a couple of cores together.
Since when is breaking the law morally wrong? The reason the US has guns is so that its citizents can break unjust laws and defent themselves from an unreasonable government. There is nothing "wrong" with breaking the law, and I wish peopld would start realizing that.
He is not trying to extract insane amounts of money from them. He just wants them to comply and post the source code. It really isn't hard. It would be like the RIAA going to court to get people to share their mp3s.... You see where I'm going with this, right?
Mod parent up. This article is a waste of time. I know people like to put linux and *BSD on everything, but talking about this as a price/feature advantage is just crazy. When the mini comes with OS X, which supports gcc, gdb, X windows, (almost all gnu software) as well as all the Mac software, why the hell would throwing out all that support somehow become "cost savings" ?
Just because this article mentions that the nForce4 for intel CPUs is unstable and has issues doesn't imply anything about the AMD nForce4 chipset. There are many major server vendors (Tyan comes to mind first) that are using the nVidia chipset. These vendors don't just slap anything into their motherboards you know. A lot of validation and testing going into every part they use. I am very happy with the stability and speed of Tyan's boards. If Tyan says it's good enough for them, then it is probably good enough for me. I don't see why people would even say somthing like: "The nVidia shipset sucks on Intel, I guess it's ok for AMD because people in that market are used to crap!" It just doesn't work that way. The Intel and AMD nVidia chipsets are very different.
I could be wrong, but I bet the reason you get double the performance when you double the number of processors is that they are not adding on more slow processors. They keey adding faster chips. This might be why it seems to scale so well.
I think your right. I have seen benchmarks on the AMDzone forums which show that while AMD gets a speed boost (on average) from 64-bit mode, Intel takes a performance hit (again, on average) when in 64-bit mode.
Intel is just trying to be compatible with AMD64. They won't have a serious product for another quarter or two (or three).
because it is physically impossible to get buffer overruns
That's garbage. Do you really think that MS's VBRUNx.DLL is free of all programming errors? I would argue that VB is less secure because one cannot verify the underlying libraries because they are closed source.