Canada is something of a special case, because of the high degree of integration between us and our closest neighbour, the US. About 90% of our population lives within 160 km of the US border, and at just shy of 9,000 km, it's a rather long border. I live in the second largest city in Canada, and the closest US city is less than an hour's drive away. There is a very high degree of cultural cross-polination due to the proximity and similar languages (less so in Quebec, where the primary language is French).
Because the population of the US outnumbers us 10 to 1, the cultural influence is mostly in one direction. We have a very high degree of exposure to US culture. Basic cable packages in Canada always include the major US networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX), and US television and radio stations close to the border typically cater to a Canadian viewing public as much as American, depending on the relative city sizes (Montreal's GMA is roughly 200x more populous than the closest "major" US city, Plattsburgh, New York).
At the same time, the Canadian transition to metric never really finished. For some units and measurements, it was. Younger Canadians tend to have no real concept of temperatures in Fahrenheit, or volumes in quarts or gallons (excepting the pint, because of beer), or distances in miles. But at the same time, few Canadians could tell you their height in centimeters (I'm 5'10", but have no idea what that is in cm), and many still measure short distances in inches and feet.
Canada's use of the metric system is varied like this in many categories, with metric use being more prevalent in younger Canadians than older ones. This is mostly due to influence from the US.
As long as the dollar is near parity, it doesn't much matter. US and Canadian currency is typically interchangeable at up to the $0.25 level anyhow, in that stores won't care which country they're from. Many vending machines don't seem to care either.
Which is surprising, because it should be a bunch cheaper to make machines that only support coins (as most in Canada do) rather than make machines that support both coins and bills (as most in the US do).
Why would you have a ton of them? You cycle through them. If you have some loonies or toonies, you pay for your coffee with that. If you don't, you break a bill, and get some coins, and pay for the coffee with coins the next time. Since most vending machine payments are with loonies or toonies, that also eats them up pretty fast.
Americans love coming up with reasons why the transition to coins is impractical, except most countries already did the transition and didn't have any of those problems.
The idea isn't to eliminate the unit of currency, but replace the physical form with a more durable one. I fail to see how that changes anything in terms of you giving your children an allowance.
It doesn't matter if anybody wants them or not, the solution is simple. Start making one dollar coins. Stop making one dollar bills. Very quickly, your entire economy has switched.
That's what happened in Canada. What, you think there wasn't resistance when we eliminated our one dollar bill or two dollar bill (which was far more commonly used than in the US)? Of course there was. And it didn't matter, because people didn't get a choice. The government decided they wanted to save money, so they did. It's not an election-level issue, so they could do that sort of thing.
The only reason that the dollar coin has not succeeded in the US is because the US government doesn't know how to do such transitions.
That said, many countries (Canada included) have or are eliminating the penny. The smallest denomination is the nickel, and there are very simple rules in place for stores to do rounding (on the cash registers) that averages out over time.
Intel rates the endurance of the 710 at 1.0 PB and the 330 at 60 TB, so yeah, there's a pretty big difference there.
In Intel's case, specifically, the difference is between using MLC flash and MLC-HET flash. The difference is largely from binning, but it's the difference between 3k to 5k p/e cycles on typical MLC, and 90k p/e cycles on MLC-HET. SLC produces similar improvements. I could explain how they achieve this, but Anandtech and Tom's Hardware have both done pretty good write-ups explaining the difference.
It depends entirely on your workload. If you've got an enterprise workload where you don't do many writes, then a consumer drive will work just fine. And since most drives report their current wear levels, it's actually pretty safe to use a consumer drive if you monitor that.
Anandtech gave one example, when they were short on capacity and were facing a delay in getting some new enterprise SSDs; they walked out to the store, bought a bunch of consumer Intel SSDs, and slapped those into their servers. They were facing a write-heavy workload, so they wouldn't have lasted long, but they only needed them for a few months and kept an eye on the media wear indicator values, so they were fine.
My point overall is that you can't look at SSDs the same way if you're a consumer versus an enterprise user, and if you're an enterprise user, you need to pick an SSD appropriate for your workload.
One thing people don't consider is upgrade cycles. Hanging on to an SSD for ten years doesn't really make sense, because it only takes a few years for them to be replaced by drives enormously cheaper, larger, and faster. They're improving by Moore's Law, unlike HDDs. I paid $700 for a 160GB Intel G1, and three years later, I paid $135 for a much faster 180GB Intel 330. If you're going to replace an SSD in three to five years, does it matter if the lifespan is 10 or 30?
The confusing thing is that they could have done better. Ivy Bridge goes down to 10 watts (which Intel says is intended for tablets and ultrabooks), and Haswell will improve on that even more. Putting a 17 watt processor in a tablet is just a bizarre choice.
If you look at it from the perspective of it replacing an iPad or Android tablet, sure, you lose one thing but gain another.
But if you compare it to comparably priced Ultrabooks, you're losing keyboard, battery life, disk space, and screen size, and gaining pen-based input and a slight portability edge (it's slightly lighter than an Ultrabook).
When you look at it from that perspective, I'm not sure it's worth the tradeoff. Pen-based input on a computer has failed miserably every time anybody has tried to introduce it, so trading a built-in keyboard for a pen doesn't seem worth it. Some people will love it. Artists, for example. But they were just as well served by Tablet PCs, and then Slate PCs after that.
When I look at the Surface Pro, what I really wonder is what differentiates it from the Slate computers. Surface Pro is about the same size, weight, thickness, performance... It's a bit cheaper, but really, I can't tell how the Surface Pro isn't just another Slate.
It competes with ultrabooks. Unfortunately, it doesn't compare all that favourably to ultrabooks either (about the same price, same weight, smaller screen, no keyboard included), and stealing sales from Wintel ultrabooks doesn't really help Microsoft or Intel.
Due to the amount of read writes & the life span of SSD's they are some of the worst drives you can get for a high availability web server.
Only if you're completely ignorant about the difference between consumer and enterprise SSDs. The official rated endurance of a 200GB Intel 710 with random 4K writes (the worst case scenario) with no over-provisioning is 1.0 TB. In order to wear this drive out in a high-load scenario, you could write 100GB of data in 4k chunks to this drive every day for nearly 30 years before you approached even the official endurance.
If you use a consumer SSD in a high-load enterprise scenario, you're going to get bit. If you use an enterprise SSD in a high-load enterprise scenario, you'll have no problems whatsoever with endurance, regardless of what people spreading FUD like you would have you believe.
I haven't upgraded the CPU in a computer for years. Last time was Socket A (Duron 800 -> Athlon XP 1900+). But after that, not once.
However, that's not the problem here. The problem is the reduction in choice. Imagine that you want to buy a high-end motherboard because it has lots of connectivity, but you want to buy a cheap CPU with it. Or perhaps the reverse, you want a fast CPU but don't have very big needs for connectivity, and want a cheap motherboard. What if they don't make the motherboard/CPU combination you're looking for? Or perhaps you want to buy processor A from motherboard manufacturer B, but manufacturer B doesn't carry that processor?
64-bit chrome would be largely useless. It's not large address aware, but being a multi-process browser, every tab/plugin/etc runs in a separate process, and each can independently access up to 2GB of RAM. Chrome's overall memory usage on a 64-bit system can greatly exceed 4GB without any problems.
If they need a bit more RAM per process, they can (without going 64-bit) add large address support, bumping that up to 4GB on 64-bit systems.
This doesn't hurt Windows, only Mozilla. Nobody really cares if their browser is 32-bit or 64-bit, but if they did, it just means they'd ditch Firefox in favour of another browser like Chrome.
Samsung has their own fabs, but the general case for ARM SoC vendors is TSMC. Samsung, though, probably has much less capacity than Intel; Samsung seems to only have one or two non-memory fabs, while Intel has at least three on 22nm alone, and Samsung is only now just starting to put out 28nm chips, so they're getting less chips per wafer. Samsung also has to pay for the ARM licenses, while Intel doesn't. Unless the modern Exynos is a substantially smaller chip than Haswell will be (and remembering that the next Exynos chip to ship in the Galaxy S 4 is a quad-core A15), I'm still not sure how they can have a huge price advantage.
You're talking about how much Intel is willing to sell for, I'm talking about how much Intel is capable of selling for. If they want to capture the market from ARM, they need to price competitively, and they know that.
That's not an accurate cost comparison, though, because that "cheap" missile is going to damage something when it hits. Yeah, a $1k missile being taken out by a $50k interceptor might seem like a waste, but if that $1k missile is going to cause $200k of damage when it hits, suddenly it's not so bad a deal. And that's ignoring the whole "value of human life" issue.
So, Intel, who owns the complete production pipeline including the fabs, producing their own 22nm chips on 300mm wafers, can't price match an ARM SoC vendor, licensing somebody else's chip, and using somebody else's 28nm fab? What you say makes no sense. Intel can put almost twice as many chips of the same size on a wafer, tends to have higher yields, and doesn't have to pay any licensing costs or middle-man costs because of their vertical integration.
If anything, Intel should be able to undercut the SoC pricing and still profit.
The cheapest ChromeBook on the market, at $199 for the whole system, has a Sandy Bridge CPU, the Celeron 847. That CPU has a published tray price of $134.
If they can put a Sandy Bridge chip in a system costing $199, then yeah, they can put Haswell in a similar system.
You don't actually think Acer or Samsung are paying the published customer tray price, do you? When a large company tells Intel "pricematch or we're going ARM", what do you think Intel does?
And end-user systems certainly don't accept that large a skew. ntpd on end-user systems would just have been unable to sync their time while the servers were affected.
Dual core haswell ULV parts are coming in at 8-10W TDP, which is far more interesting than Atom at those power levels. That's too much for a smartphone, but almost in tablet range, and definitely in net book range.
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Canada is something of a special case, because of the high degree of integration between us and our closest neighbour, the US. About 90% of our population lives within 160 km of the US border, and at just shy of 9,000 km, it's a rather long border. I live in the second largest city in Canada, and the closest US city is less than an hour's drive away. There is a very high degree of cultural cross-polination due to the proximity and similar languages (less so in Quebec, where the primary language is French).
Because the population of the US outnumbers us 10 to 1, the cultural influence is mostly in one direction. We have a very high degree of exposure to US culture. Basic cable packages in Canada always include the major US networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX), and US television and radio stations close to the border typically cater to a Canadian viewing public as much as American, depending on the relative city sizes (Montreal's GMA is roughly 200x more populous than the closest "major" US city, Plattsburgh, New York).
At the same time, the Canadian transition to metric never really finished. For some units and measurements, it was. Younger Canadians tend to have no real concept of temperatures in Fahrenheit, or volumes in quarts or gallons (excepting the pint, because of beer), or distances in miles. But at the same time, few Canadians could tell you their height in centimeters (I'm 5'10", but have no idea what that is in cm), and many still measure short distances in inches and feet.
Canada's use of the metric system is varied like this in many categories, with metric use being more prevalent in younger Canadians than older ones. This is mostly due to influence from the US.
As long as the dollar is near parity, it doesn't much matter. US and Canadian currency is typically interchangeable at up to the $0.25 level anyhow, in that stores won't care which country they're from. Many vending machines don't seem to care either.
Which is surprising, because it should be a bunch cheaper to make machines that only support coins (as most in Canada do) rather than make machines that support both coins and bills (as most in the US do).
What, do you regularly take out your wallet, open the change pouch, and shake it around while looking in the other direction?
Why would you have a ton of them? You cycle through them. If you have some loonies or toonies, you pay for your coffee with that. If you don't, you break a bill, and get some coins, and pay for the coffee with coins the next time. Since most vending machine payments are with loonies or toonies, that also eats them up pretty fast.
Americans love coming up with reasons why the transition to coins is impractical, except most countries already did the transition and didn't have any of those problems.
The idea isn't to eliminate the unit of currency, but replace the physical form with a more durable one. I fail to see how that changes anything in terms of you giving your children an allowance.
It doesn't matter if anybody wants them or not, the solution is simple. Start making one dollar coins. Stop making one dollar bills. Very quickly, your entire economy has switched.
That's what happened in Canada. What, you think there wasn't resistance when we eliminated our one dollar bill or two dollar bill (which was far more commonly used than in the US)? Of course there was. And it didn't matter, because people didn't get a choice. The government decided they wanted to save money, so they did. It's not an election-level issue, so they could do that sort of thing.
The only reason that the dollar coin has not succeeded in the US is because the US government doesn't know how to do such transitions.
That said, many countries (Canada included) have or are eliminating the penny. The smallest denomination is the nickel, and there are very simple rules in place for stores to do rounding (on the cash registers) that averages out over time.
Intel rates the endurance of the 710 at 1.0 PB and the 330 at 60 TB, so yeah, there's a pretty big difference there.
In Intel's case, specifically, the difference is between using MLC flash and MLC-HET flash. The difference is largely from binning, but it's the difference between 3k to 5k p/e cycles on typical MLC, and 90k p/e cycles on MLC-HET. SLC produces similar improvements. I could explain how they achieve this, but Anandtech and Tom's Hardware have both done pretty good write-ups explaining the difference.
It depends entirely on your workload. If you've got an enterprise workload where you don't do many writes, then a consumer drive will work just fine. And since most drives report their current wear levels, it's actually pretty safe to use a consumer drive if you monitor that.
Anandtech gave one example, when they were short on capacity and were facing a delay in getting some new enterprise SSDs; they walked out to the store, bought a bunch of consumer Intel SSDs, and slapped those into their servers. They were facing a write-heavy workload, so they wouldn't have lasted long, but they only needed them for a few months and kept an eye on the media wear indicator values, so they were fine.
My point overall is that you can't look at SSDs the same way if you're a consumer versus an enterprise user, and if you're an enterprise user, you need to pick an SSD appropriate for your workload.
One thing people don't consider is upgrade cycles. Hanging on to an SSD for ten years doesn't really make sense, because it only takes a few years for them to be replaced by drives enormously cheaper, larger, and faster. They're improving by Moore's Law, unlike HDDs. I paid $700 for a 160GB Intel G1, and three years later, I paid $135 for a much faster 180GB Intel 330. If you're going to replace an SSD in three to five years, does it matter if the lifespan is 10 or 30?
The confusing thing is that they could have done better. Ivy Bridge goes down to 10 watts (which Intel says is intended for tablets and ultrabooks), and Haswell will improve on that even more. Putting a 17 watt processor in a tablet is just a bizarre choice.
If you look at it from the perspective of it replacing an iPad or Android tablet, sure, you lose one thing but gain another.
But if you compare it to comparably priced Ultrabooks, you're losing keyboard, battery life, disk space, and screen size, and gaining pen-based input and a slight portability edge (it's slightly lighter than an Ultrabook).
When you look at it from that perspective, I'm not sure it's worth the tradeoff. Pen-based input on a computer has failed miserably every time anybody has tried to introduce it, so trading a built-in keyboard for a pen doesn't seem worth it. Some people will love it. Artists, for example. But they were just as well served by Tablet PCs, and then Slate PCs after that.
When I look at the Surface Pro, what I really wonder is what differentiates it from the Slate computers. Surface Pro is about the same size, weight, thickness, performance... It's a bit cheaper, but really, I can't tell how the Surface Pro isn't just another Slate.
Well, yes. I love my Microsoft ComfortCurve 2000, which coincidentally is (or was, anyhow) the cheapest one they make.
Their mice are decent too. I prefer Logitech, but I've never had any major complaints about Microsoft's mice.
It competes with ultrabooks. Unfortunately, it doesn't compare all that favourably to ultrabooks either (about the same price, same weight, smaller screen, no keyboard included), and stealing sales from Wintel ultrabooks doesn't really help Microsoft or Intel.
Shoot, sorry, yes. I meant 1.0 PB.
Due to the amount of read writes & the life span of SSD's they are some of the worst drives you can get for a high availability web server.
Only if you're completely ignorant about the difference between consumer and enterprise SSDs. The official rated endurance of a 200GB Intel 710 with random 4K writes (the worst case scenario) with no over-provisioning is 1.0 TB. In order to wear this drive out in a high-load scenario, you could write 100GB of data in 4k chunks to this drive every day for nearly 30 years before you approached even the official endurance.
If you use a consumer SSD in a high-load enterprise scenario, you're going to get bit. If you use an enterprise SSD in a high-load enterprise scenario, you'll have no problems whatsoever with endurance, regardless of what people spreading FUD like you would have you believe.
I haven't upgraded the CPU in a computer for years. Last time was Socket A (Duron 800 -> Athlon XP 1900+). But after that, not once.
However, that's not the problem here. The problem is the reduction in choice. Imagine that you want to buy a high-end motherboard because it has lots of connectivity, but you want to buy a cheap CPU with it. Or perhaps the reverse, you want a fast CPU but don't have very big needs for connectivity, and want a cheap motherboard. What if they don't make the motherboard/CPU combination you're looking for? Or perhaps you want to buy processor A from motherboard manufacturer B, but manufacturer B doesn't carry that processor?
64-bit chrome would be largely useless. It's not large address aware, but being a multi-process browser, every tab/plugin/etc runs in a separate process, and each can independently access up to 2GB of RAM. Chrome's overall memory usage on a 64-bit system can greatly exceed 4GB without any problems.
If they need a bit more RAM per process, they can (without going 64-bit) add large address support, bumping that up to 4GB on 64-bit systems.
This doesn't hurt Windows, only Mozilla. Nobody really cares if their browser is 32-bit or 64-bit, but if they did, it just means they'd ditch Firefox in favour of another browser like Chrome.
Samsung has their own fabs, but the general case for ARM SoC vendors is TSMC. Samsung, though, probably has much less capacity than Intel; Samsung seems to only have one or two non-memory fabs, while Intel has at least three on 22nm alone, and Samsung is only now just starting to put out 28nm chips, so they're getting less chips per wafer. Samsung also has to pay for the ARM licenses, while Intel doesn't. Unless the modern Exynos is a substantially smaller chip than Haswell will be (and remembering that the next Exynos chip to ship in the Galaxy S 4 is a quad-core A15), I'm still not sure how they can have a huge price advantage.
You're talking about how much Intel is willing to sell for, I'm talking about how much Intel is capable of selling for. If they want to capture the market from ARM, they need to price competitively, and they know that.
That's not an accurate cost comparison, though, because that "cheap" missile is going to damage something when it hits. Yeah, a $1k missile being taken out by a $50k interceptor might seem like a waste, but if that $1k missile is going to cause $200k of damage when it hits, suddenly it's not so bad a deal. And that's ignoring the whole "value of human life" issue.
So, Intel, who owns the complete production pipeline including the fabs, producing their own 22nm chips on 300mm wafers, can't price match an ARM SoC vendor, licensing somebody else's chip, and using somebody else's 28nm fab? What you say makes no sense. Intel can put almost twice as many chips of the same size on a wafer, tends to have higher yields, and doesn't have to pay any licensing costs or middle-man costs because of their vertical integration.
If anything, Intel should be able to undercut the SoC pricing and still profit.
The cheapest ChromeBook on the market, at $199 for the whole system, has a Sandy Bridge CPU, the Celeron 847. That CPU has a published tray price of $134.
If they can put a Sandy Bridge chip in a system costing $199, then yeah, they can put Haswell in a similar system.
You don't actually think Acer or Samsung are paying the published customer tray price, do you? When a large company tells Intel "pricematch or we're going ARM", what do you think Intel does?
And end-user systems certainly don't accept that large a skew. ntpd on end-user systems would just have been unable to sync their time while the servers were affected.
Dual core haswell ULV parts are coming in at 8-10W TDP, which is far more interesting than Atom at those power levels. That's too much for a smartphone, but almost in tablet range, and definitely in net book range.