I'm a subscriber. Here's the article. I hope it convinces you,too, to subscribe.
AMD's New Opteron Chips
Are Tapped for Red Storm
By DON CLARK
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Endorsing the technology of one of Intel Corp.'s key rivals, Sandia National Laboratories and Cray Inc. plan to build a massive supercomputer using a soon-to-be-introduced line of microprocessor chips from Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
The development project, estimated in June to cost $90 million, is a high-profile vote of confidence for AMD's new Opteron chip, in a small but prestigious market long dominated by other chip suppliers. It represents a missed opportunity for Intel, which has been targeting its new Itanium line at high-performance computing applications.
Red Storm, Sandia's name for the new supercomputer, also marks a step forward for the U.S. effort at leadership in supercomputers, which suffered a blow this year with the completion of a huge machine called the Earth Simulator by Japanese government agencies and NEC Corp. Where recent U.S. machines have largely been constructed out of components used in commercial computers, Cray is expected to develop special technology for connecting the AMD chips that should make Red Storm suited for more-complex scientific problems.
"This is a move away from commodity components," said Horst Simon, division director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a supercomputer facility affiliated with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "It's very exciting."
Sandia, which does research for the U.S. Department of Energy in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., has a performance goal of 100 trillion operations per second for Red Storm. It hasn't disclosed most technical details, including the chip selection. But Mr. Simon estimated that the machine will require 16,000 or more microprocessors to hit its speed target, which would appear to surpass the Earth Simulator's current performance.
Sandia said in June that it had selected Cray, a longtime supercomputer maker based in Seattle, to negotiate a development contract. Cray and Sandia officials didn't return calls seeking comment Friday. AMD and Intel officials declined to comment.
AMD could use some good news. The company's Athlon chip line, mainly used in personal computers, has been falling behind the performance of comparable Intel chips. The company reported last week a third-quarter loss of $254 million on sales of $508.2 million, off 34% from the year-earlier period.
Opteron is a high-end member of the new line, code-named Hammer, that is due out next year and viewed by analysts as AMD's best hope for recovery. Like the Itanium, Hammer chips are designed to process 64 bits of information at a time, instead of 32 bits, a capability that helps run huge databases and solve scientific problems.
Intel's Itanium line, developed over eight years with help from Hewlett-Packard Co., is based on an entirely new architecture and achieves its best performance on new 64-bit programs. AMD, by contrast, made 64-bit additions to the original Intel technology used in the past by both companies.
The difference, AMD says, allows Hammer-based computers to run both 32-bit and 64-bit software at high speed. AMD released preliminary test results last week for Opteron -- so far not validated by outside researchers -- that show the chip exceeding Intel's latest Itanium 2 model on one of two widely-used speed measures, AMD said.
Itanium 2, introduced last summer, has already been selected for at least a half-dozen high-performance installations. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, another Department of Energy facility, is building a $24.5 million system based on 1,400 Itanium 2 chips. Based on past Sandia announcements, the Red Storm project's stated performance goal is more than 10 times that of the Pacific Northwest project.
What a crap DVD writer. A much faster and probably much less expensive version is the HP DVD writer.
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid= 40&threadid=894687&highlight_key=y&keyword1=dv d
Yeah - I just moded you two both up a point. Some/. moderators are total assholes. In fact, 90% of them are total assholes. For example, note that this post will be moded down to -1 or so, rather than saving those points to mod something worthwhile up to a 5. These freaks would rather urinate on themselves than ask to use the restroom of someone with a different opinion than their libertine/anarchist fascism.
I, too, was once impressed by the slick talk of ATI marketing. Yet today I strongly discourage anyone from buying an ATI chip. Here are two solid reasons.
1) ATI has a history of lying about driver support. The Rage Fury MAXX was released around the same time as Windows2000. I, like many other people, believed ATI when they said that they would develop drivers for the platform, that they were just around the corner, so that buying this card over the already-Win2K compatable NV cards would not be a waste of money. HOWEVER, ATI left the Maxx buyers high and dry when they announced, several months later, that they were incapable of producing Win2K drivers and had given up trying.
2) They consistently LAG the cards produced by NVIdiea by wide margins and, while trying to stuff a bunch of useless features down dev's throats, lack the freedom of a programable GPU that the Geforce3 (and higher) cards offer... the cards that game developers are all optimizing their hottest new titles for.
Want a little evidence of how badly ATI stinks? Tom's hardware did a great job testing all of the cards in one huge benchmark here.
Whoever wrote this article is way behind the curve. Fancy little free and advert free program called Trillian works great for me - tying Yahoo, MSN, AOL, ICQ and even IRC into one neat little app. http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/
you guys are misunderstanding all of this
on
Blogspace vs. NPR
·
· Score: 1
They aren't talking about linking to a PAGE on NPR, they are talking about linking to an image hosted on NPR and stuff like that. For example, I can do this without any trouble.
I realize this UPI story is off-topic, but the sixth paragraph exhibits extreme ignorance of economics on behalf of the UPI wire service
Some part-time students may convert to full-time status to continue their education but at a heavy price. Canadian students pay nearly $2 Canadian for every $1 in American funds.
That there is a conversion rate difference does not impact financial burden. For example, Japanese currency is around 150 (?) yen per dollar, but they find US colleges inexpensive.
Yes, Canada dollars may have a 2 to 1 ratio to US dollars, but they earn more dollars to balance for it. The best way to determine the real impact of different currencies is a purchasing parity index. A popular one is the the Big Mac index. Read more here.
Here is a simple way to demonstrate that the earth will never run out of oil. Over time, it will become harder to find and substitutes/replacements will become more competetive. Oil will always be had - but at a very high price.
An analogy I read once was that think about being in a room full of peanuts - up to your knees. You will be able to eat peanuts for food but, over time, it will be harder and harder to find peanuts among all the empty shells. So you will gradually find substitutions - but you will never find all of the peanuts in the room, just the amount of time to find one will gradually increase.
This is unecessary and overly costly. I think that the damage that the restriction will do will harm the economy to the extent that it will make the net return on investments to determine greater energy efficiency negative - and not undertaken.
Oil will never 'run out.' An article in the Washington Times today tries to demonstrate this: http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20020529-43772 260.htm.
Regarding environmental concern, greater access to fuels today will result in even greater economic and energy efficiency tomorrow - levels that never would have been reached had acces to fuels been restricted.
I think the beneficents of this will be lawyers who target the deep pockets - ISPs - and try to hold them liable.
Spam is nearly impossible to stop via laws - I think the market will and is solving this problem with more intelligent filters that will make it un-rewarding.
In order for less conformist music to be heard and gain popularity and record sales, the artists/composers/label may choose to prime the pump a little bit and pay the radio stations for some air play.
Oh wait, that was made illegal.
See what happens when you interfere in the free market?
I realize that Lucas had a vision for these movies, and that technology and budget limited this vision for the first three films.
That he is now able to bring the original three films closer to this vision, I think, is wonderful. It may inspire others who were limited by budget and technology to go make re-releases of their films. Good example: ET
I understand the arguments of the purist who would prefer to leave things as they are. I think the people who made ET got it right - they made the DVD with both the completely un-retouched version and the 'updated' version that is closer to the creator's vision.
See, normally I am a complete opponent of piracy. But I strongly dislike Eminem. So I really am not bothered by people stealing from him, as he fosters an attitude of disrespect for the law I can't help but enjoy the irony of him suffering because of it.
Only a dedicated fan who has watched many episodes can come to that conclusion.
Short term, the radio waves will be *more crowded*
on
Unlimited Airwaves
·
· Score: 1
As many radio commercial radio stations within the year are changing to digital audio (along with their analog signal), the signal will be bifurcated.
As it stands, radio stations only occupy a narrow band of their assigned frequency, so you can stack many stations close together, especially at the bottom of the band where a lot of non-commercial and religios type stations are (like wfmu.org).
When the commercial stations go to digital audio, along with better reception and CD quality sound, the signal will take up more of the band that they are assigned and cause them to 'bleed' a little bit.
The unfortunate result is that a lot of the smaller, non-commercial and religious stations who can't afford the $100k-200k upgrade to digital audio will have thier signal squelched.
Slashdot Mirror
AMD's New Opteron Chips
Are Tapped for Red Storm
By DON CLARK
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Endorsing the technology of one of Intel Corp.'s key rivals, Sandia National Laboratories and Cray Inc. plan to build a massive supercomputer using a soon-to-be-introduced line of microprocessor chips from Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
The development project, estimated in June to cost $90 million, is a high-profile vote of confidence for AMD's new Opteron chip, in a small but prestigious market long dominated by other chip suppliers. It represents a missed opportunity for Intel, which has been targeting its new Itanium line at high-performance computing applications.
Red Storm, Sandia's name for the new supercomputer, also marks a step forward for the U.S. effort at leadership in supercomputers, which suffered a blow this year with the completion of a huge machine called the Earth Simulator by Japanese government agencies and NEC Corp. Where recent U.S. machines have largely been constructed out of components used in commercial computers, Cray is expected to develop special technology for connecting the AMD chips that should make Red Storm suited for more-complex scientific problems.
"This is a move away from commodity components," said Horst Simon, division director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a supercomputer facility affiliated with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "It's very exciting."
Sandia, which does research for the U.S. Department of Energy in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., has a performance goal of 100 trillion operations per second for Red Storm. It hasn't disclosed most technical details, including the chip selection. But Mr. Simon estimated that the machine will require 16,000 or more microprocessors to hit its speed target, which would appear to surpass the Earth Simulator's current performance.
Sandia said in June that it had selected Cray, a longtime supercomputer maker based in Seattle, to negotiate a development contract. Cray and Sandia officials didn't return calls seeking comment Friday. AMD and Intel officials declined to comment.
AMD could use some good news. The company's Athlon chip line, mainly used in personal computers, has been falling behind the performance of comparable Intel chips. The company reported last week a third-quarter loss of $254 million on sales of $508.2 million, off 34% from the year-earlier period.
Opteron is a high-end member of the new line, code-named Hammer, that is due out next year and viewed by analysts as AMD's best hope for recovery. Like the Itanium, Hammer chips are designed to process 64 bits of information at a time, instead of 32 bits, a capability that helps run huge databases and solve scientific problems.
Intel's Itanium line, developed over eight years with help from Hewlett-Packard Co., is based on an entirely new architecture and achieves its best performance on new 64-bit programs. AMD, by contrast, made 64-bit additions to the original Intel technology used in the past by both companies.
The difference, AMD says, allows Hammer-based computers to run both 32-bit and 64-bit software at high speed. AMD released preliminary test results last week for Opteron -- so far not validated by outside researchers -- that show the chip exceeding Intel's latest Itanium 2 model on one of two widely-used speed measures, AMD said.
Itanium 2, introduced last summer, has already been selected for at least a half-dozen high-performance installations. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, another Department of Energy facility, is building a $24.5 million system based on 1,400 Itanium 2 chips. Based on past Sandia announcements, the Red Storm project's stated performance goal is more than 10 times that of the Pacific Northwest project.
Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com
Do you shave down there? Are you a Muffy Fluffy or a Shaven Maven? Or something inbetween.
What a crap DVD writer. A much faster and probably much less expensive version is the HP DVD writer.= 40&threadid=894687&highlight_key=y&keyword1=dv d
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid
Yeah - I just moded you two both up a point. Some /. moderators are total assholes. In fact, 90% of them are total assholes.
For example, note that this post will be moded down to -1 or so, rather than saving those points to mod something worthwhile up to a 5.
These freaks would rather urinate on themselves than ask to use the restroom of someone with a different opinion than their libertine/anarchist fascism.
and this game is doing it's best to go for the latter. Three cheers for corporations taking responsibility for their products.
Not like anyone here actually pays for content. Unless the net is down and Joe Slashdot has rent his weekend hobby (pr0n) from Blockbuster.
And was CowboyN paid in cash or oral sex?
1) ATI has a history of lying about driver support. The Rage Fury MAXX was released around the same time as Windows2000. I, like many other people, believed ATI when they said that they would develop drivers for the platform, that they were just around the corner, so that buying this card over the already-Win2K compatable NV cards would not be a waste of money. HOWEVER, ATI left the Maxx buyers high and dry when they announced, several months later, that they were incapable of producing Win2K drivers and had given up trying.
2) They consistently LAG the cards produced by NVIdiea by wide margins and, while trying to stuff a bunch of useless features down dev's throats, lack the freedom of a programable GPU that the Geforce3 (and higher) cards offer... the cards that game developers are all optimizing their hottest new titles for.
Want a little evidence of how badly ATI stinks? Tom's hardware did a great job testing all of the cards in one huge benchmark here.
Whoever wrote this article is way behind the curve. Fancy little free and advert free program called Trillian works great for me - tying Yahoo, MSN, AOL, ICQ and even IRC into one neat little app. http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/
They aren't talking about linking to a PAGE on NPR, they are talking about linking to an image hosted on NPR and stuff like that. For example, I can do this without any trouble.
why in hell would anyone waste a mod point on a comment to an off-topic post? Sheesh.
Some part-time students may convert to full-time status to continue their education but at a heavy price. Canadian students pay nearly $2 Canadian for every $1 in American funds.
That there is a conversion rate difference does not impact financial burden. For example, Japanese currency is around 150 (?) yen per dollar, but they find US colleges inexpensive.
Yes, Canada dollars may have a 2 to 1 ratio to US dollars, but they earn more dollars to balance for it. The best way to determine the real impact of different currencies is a purchasing parity index. A popular one is the the Big Mac index. Read more here.
In general, eventually all phones will come heavy with PDA features, as discussed on Cnet here.
You didn't read my analogy. It got modded up. Oddly, you have a phat zero on your post. Kiss my ass, honkey!
An analogy I read once was that think about being in a room full of peanuts - up to your knees. You will be able to eat peanuts for food but, over time, it will be harder and harder to find peanuts among all the empty shells. So you will gradually find substitutions - but you will never find all of the peanuts in the room, just the amount of time to find one will gradually increase.
It has an incredible amount of depth on every known DSL provider in the country. And it's by USERS!
Oil will never 'run out.' An article in the Washington Times today tries to demonstrate this: http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20020529-43772 260.htm.
Regarding environmental concern, greater access to fuels today will result in even greater economic and energy efficiency tomorrow - levels that never would have been reached had acces to fuels been restricted.
Spam is nearly impossible to stop via laws - I think the market will and is solving this problem with more intelligent filters that will make it un-rewarding.
Oh wait, that was made illegal.
See what happens when you interfere in the free market?
That he is now able to bring the original three films closer to this vision, I think, is wonderful. It may inspire others who were limited by budget and technology to go make re-releases of their films. Good example: ET
I understand the arguments of the purist who would prefer to leave things as they are. I think the people who made ET got it right - they made the DVD with both the completely un-retouched version and the 'updated' version that is closer to the creator's vision.
I guess another faggot fan saw my post. What a total abuse of moderation power.
See, normally I am a complete opponent of piracy. But I strongly dislike Eminem. So I really am not bothered by people stealing from him, as he fosters an attitude of disrespect for the law I can't help but enjoy the irony of him suffering because of it.
Only a dedicated fan who has watched many episodes can come to that conclusion.
As it stands, radio stations only occupy a narrow band of their assigned frequency, so you can stack many stations close together, especially at the bottom of the band where a lot of non-commercial and religios type stations are (like wfmu.org).
When the commercial stations go to digital audio, along with better reception and CD quality sound, the signal will take up more of the band that they are assigned and cause them to 'bleed' a little bit.
The unfortunate result is that a lot of the smaller, non-commercial and religious stations who can't afford the $100k-200k upgrade to digital audio will have thier signal squelched.
Oddly enough, treckies chances of getting laid at this convention are identical to those of getting laid at a real convention.