...so would it be ok then if they used completely different disk arrays? Because, you know, some AMD boards might support RAID differently than Intel, and it's not like the test is balanced anyway, so let's just pick our peripherals out of a hat...
Seriously though, as someone who has had to recommend server purchases in the past, a benchmark like this is much more useful than a benchmark that starts using different parameters. Also consider that server memory isn't cheap, and DDR333 is likely to be in widespread use already. This really improves the ability of interested parties to apply the results to their own systems.
It seems that many disagree, but the main point of my post was that Opteron already wins this benchmark and Anand says so, so I refuse to believe that the choice of memory was meant to unfairly benefit the Xeon solution.
in the 4 CPU configurations (and more), AMD scales much better because of the hyperlink and memory controllers on each die....which becomes evident no matter what speed of memory one uses, and was indeed concluded in the article.
if there is a memory configuration that AMD supports, and leads to better performance, why not use it?
Because it makes it harder to directly compare the results of the AMD chips to the results of the Intel chips. The purpose of a benchmark like this is to say "all other things being equal, x is faster than y in situations {z}". This lets an interested IT professional look at the results and say, "ok, Opteron is faster than Xeon, now lets figure out what speed memory we can afford."
Honestly I don't see what the problem is here... it is obvious from the article that Opteron wins this contest overall, and anybody who is in the market to buy a dual or quad cpu server is probably going to know something about memory as well.
I bought DDR333 RAM in Jan last year, when it was significantly higher than it was in 2002, and it was back down below half that a few months later. Did they do the same thing here, or was that just bad luck for me?
The purpose of the test is not to test the memory, but to test the processors. Thus, they used the same memory in testing each processor configuration.
One of the purposes of the test was to show how the memory bandwidth bottleneck of the Xeons limits their effectiveness in 4-way configurations, which the Opterons do not have that problem. Doing this comparison with different memories would make things more complicated.
Additionally, you'll notice that Anand's final words recommend the Opteron for being at least equivalent and much cheaper than Xeon. This was also the selection process for their new forum servers, so you can bet that they aren't getting any kickback from Intel, or those would be Xeons.
If you still have doubts about the validity of Anandtech's testing, check out the benchmarks from their AMD vs. Intel web server test in December: http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1935&p= 9. All on dual processor configurations. There is definitely no Intel bias in that test.
Really, I think some people ought to think before they flame like this. The benchmarks are showing the Opterons to be equivalent or faster in 2-way configurations and definitely faster in 4-way configurations, so what is there to complain about? The fact that Anandtech has consistently recommended AMD's processors just makes it doubly silly.
Yes, but that was following a severe downturn. A company isn't necessarily home-free the instant revenues go up again, depending on how well they did during the slump. As such, I don't think that parent's statement was invalid.
I remember seeing a bit on this on one of the documentary shows... 60 minutes, I think.
What struck me more than anything else was just how stupid the employees were. There was one woman who said that a certain chemical she used had a tendency to corrode her rubber gloves. They asked her what she did when that happened. She just kept on working with her bare hands instead.
It seemed very irresponsible for the workers to only start wondering about this AFTER they started getting cancer statistics.
However, I still think that IBM must have had some idea this was going on... There were some shady memos uncovered by the documentary, and at some stages the workers did ask IBM's health officials to look into the problem. At which point they bought some doctors to tell the employees that there was no risk. That's not behaviour of a party that really wanted the truth to be discovered.
Here in Ontario, the responsibility for safety is balanced between both parties. Basically, if a worker thinks there is anything unsafe going on, the worker has a right to refuse to work until it has been proven to be safe. So the responsibility for a safe environment is still on the employer, but the worker needs to recognize when something might be unsafe. To that end, all employees are educated in this either during their higher education or when they start a job.
You'll noticed that he mentioned Centrino (actually the processor is the Pentium M). A 2.4 GHz machine is going to be slower than a 1.6 GHz Pentium M on certain applications, because of its short pipeline and larger cache.
The thing with spam is that it's supposed to be a way for somebody to make money... i.e. they are trying to sell you something, be it directly or indirectly. I can't think offhand of an email I have recently received that could be misconstrued as trying to sell me something. From that simple viewpoint, spam can never look exactly like regular mail, because it has a different purpose.
Mod me offtopic if you must, but is anyone else sick of all these acronyms that were probably thought up before the words they would represent? As soon as I see any of these kinds of acronyms I immediately stop taking the project seriously.
It's not always like that. My university has free hookups in all the dorm rooms, with true 10mbit connections to the internet. Only gets bogged down during the busiest times of day, and dorm connections are lowest priority, but it's still always fast.
There are tons of posts here questioning whether Google is losing their way by doing this, but I don't see what the problem is... Mail doesn't have to be complicated, even with integrated virus checking and spam killing software. Just because hotmail and yahoo are extremely bloated, doesn't mean that Google's will be the same way.
Personally, I hope that they will allow free POP access. That's what got me to open my Geocities mail account, which later turned into Yahoo. Then they made it a pay service and I stopped using it.
How is Intel the 800lb gorilla when it comes to this kind of wireless communication? Does Intel design wireless desktops? Wireless printers? Mobile phones? Headsets? PDAs? That's where Bluetooth is killing, and will continue to until there is a replacement that is sufficiently better to prompt a switch.
The only wireless communication Intel has a part in is wireless networking, and that's not what Bluetooth is for.
Exactly, so the system just drives the thought process in circles.
The way I see it, there are two basic types of wars... The first type is where you kill the other people for the sake of taking what they have. The second is killing for the sake of ridding the world of a certain kind of people. I think that religion has little influence on the first kind, but much influence on the second kind. People aren't automatically racist and hateful at birth, in fact children are usually the best at getting along regardless of race. So it's the belief system that shapes those things, and religion is usually at the core.
It's different because it shifts accountability onto others. Being able to say "God told me to" makes it God's fault, whereas other excuses invariably come back to humans at some point.
Did eBay ever take game item auctions off while they evaluated if they really belonged to the sellers or not? From my understanding, Blizzard wasn't too crazy about people selling Diablo II items online, since it's basically just moving data around on their servers, nothing more. I don't have any specifics though, but this situation seems to parallel that one very well.
Yeah, but each one of those floppies contains a stripped down hybrid of DOS/Win98. I can make as many copies of my Windows XP CD as I want, but it doesn't make that legal either. And I don't have to accept an EULA to run my burning software either.
It is directly compatible with AMD's 64-bit implementation. Intel and AMD have a sharing arrangement with x86 dating back to when AMD first licensed x86 from Intel, which basically allows Intel to use whatever AMD adds to the instruction set. And vice versa of course. Generally whoever implements it first gets in a generation ahead (Intel with the SSEs, AMD with x86-64).
On another note, these new Xeons are based on the Prescott core, so it is now extremely likely that the existing Prescott cores all have the capability, just not turned on, like what Intel did with hyperthreading on the Northwoods. It's been clear from the start that Prescott is hiding some functions up its sleeve, as there are at least 10 million transistors that can't be accounted for with the increased cache and other added functionality, even when being very generous with the estimations.
That whole string of stuff you listed is almost completely software-based, while the posting asks about hardware. Besides Sandra and memtest86, you've got nothing there that would be of any use... Software problems are generally easier to solve since you can always format the disk and start over anyway.
Besides, is it legal to have a Win98 boot disk without having purchased Win98? I wouldn't think so, and this makes your $20 price tag inaccurate, especially since you're implying that you have other Windows boot disks as well.
In fact, the opposite of what you are saying is true. The original posting erroneously states that ATI won't be making AGP cards, but they will be doing so throughout 2004. However, only the next chipsets from VIA will be supporting AGP; Intel and SIS are both dropping it for PCI Express. No word on NVidia yet.
So basically, the AGP cards will be out there, but next-gen mainboards won't have AGP slots.
They would have to have some sort of bridge between the interfaces in order to do this. This is simply because the north and south bridges on the chipset are not going to have PCI or AGP support, just PCI Express. If there is some way to translate the schemes in between, then yeah, a mobo manufacturer could do it, but it'd probably either be expensive or a pretty ugly hack job.
Many people have pointed out that it really doesn't matter if one has just purchased an AGP card just because PCI Express versions are coming out this year... However, it may be influenced by the chipset support.
Intel's roadmaps reveal that none of their next-gen chipsets will have AGP support.
Similarly, SIS' roadmaps reveal that none of their chipsets will have AGP support either. That's for both Intel and AMD processors.
However, VIA's roadmaps show support for AGP throughout 2004 for both Intel and AMD processors.
So there's all the major players in the Intel game, and two for AMD. I would theorize that NVidia will go with whatever solution lets them pimp their high-end GPUs most effectively for their next NForce boards, but I don't remember seeing anything official about this. Anyone got a link?
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...so would it be ok then if they used completely different disk arrays? Because, you know, some AMD boards might support RAID differently than Intel, and it's not like the test is balanced anyway, so let's just pick our peripherals out of a hat...
Seriously though, as someone who has had to recommend server purchases in the past, a benchmark like this is much more useful than a benchmark that starts using different parameters. Also consider that server memory isn't cheap, and DDR333 is likely to be in widespread use already. This really improves the ability of interested parties to apply the results to their own systems.
It seems that many disagree, but the main point of my post was that Opteron already wins this benchmark and Anand says so, so I refuse to believe that the choice of memory was meant to unfairly benefit the Xeon solution.
in the 4 CPU configurations (and more), AMD scales much better because of the hyperlink and memory controllers on each die. ...which becomes evident no matter what speed of memory one uses, and was indeed concluded in the article.
if there is a memory configuration that AMD supports, and leads to better performance, why not use it?
Because it makes it harder to directly compare the results of the AMD chips to the results of the Intel chips. The purpose of a benchmark like this is to say "all other things being equal, x is faster than y in situations {z}". This lets an interested IT professional look at the results and say, "ok, Opteron is faster than Xeon, now lets figure out what speed memory we can afford."
Honestly I don't see what the problem is here... it is obvious from the article that Opteron wins this contest overall, and anybody who is in the market to buy a dual or quad cpu server is probably going to know something about memory as well.
I bought DDR333 RAM in Jan last year, when it was significantly higher than it was in 2002, and it was back down below half that a few months later. Did they do the same thing here, or was that just bad luck for me?
The purpose of the test is not to test the memory, but to test the processors. Thus, they used the same memory in testing each processor configuration.
= 9. All on dual processor configurations. There is definitely no Intel bias in that test.
One of the purposes of the test was to show how the memory bandwidth bottleneck of the Xeons limits their effectiveness in 4-way configurations, which the Opterons do not have that problem. Doing this comparison with different memories would make things more complicated.
Additionally, you'll notice that Anand's final words recommend the Opteron for being at least equivalent and much cheaper than Xeon. This was also the selection process for their new forum servers, so you can bet that they aren't getting any kickback from Intel, or those would be Xeons.
If you still have doubts about the validity of Anandtech's testing, check out the benchmarks from their AMD vs. Intel web server test in December: http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1935&p
Really, I think some people ought to think before they flame like this. The benchmarks are showing the Opterons to be equivalent or faster in 2-way configurations and definitely faster in 4-way configurations, so what is there to complain about? The fact that Anandtech has consistently recommended AMD's processors just makes it doubly silly.
Yes, but that was following a severe downturn. A company isn't necessarily home-free the instant revenues go up again, depending on how well they did during the slump. As such, I don't think that parent's statement was invalid.
Would this kind of vehicle actually be able to travel against the prevailing winds? Or would a NY to LA flight be really really long?
I remember seeing a bit on this on one of the documentary shows... 60 minutes, I think.
What struck me more than anything else was just how stupid the employees were. There was one woman who said that a certain chemical she used had a tendency to corrode her rubber gloves. They asked her what she did when that happened. She just kept on working with her bare hands instead.
It seemed very irresponsible for the workers to only start wondering about this AFTER they started getting cancer statistics.
However, I still think that IBM must have had some idea this was going on... There were some shady memos uncovered by the documentary, and at some stages the workers did ask IBM's health officials to look into the problem. At which point they bought some doctors to tell the employees that there was no risk. That's not behaviour of a party that really wanted the truth to be discovered.
Here in Ontario, the responsibility for safety is balanced between both parties. Basically, if a worker thinks there is anything unsafe going on, the worker has a right to refuse to work until it has been proven to be safe. So the responsibility for a safe environment is still on the employer, but the worker needs to recognize when something might be unsafe. To that end, all employees are educated in this either during their higher education or when they start a job.
You'll noticed that he mentioned Centrino (actually the processor is the Pentium M). A 2.4 GHz machine is going to be slower than a 1.6 GHz Pentium M on certain applications, because of its short pipeline and larger cache.
The thing with spam is that it's supposed to be a way for somebody to make money... i.e. they are trying to sell you something, be it directly or indirectly. I can't think offhand of an email I have recently received that could be misconstrued as trying to sell me something. From that simple viewpoint, spam can never look exactly like regular mail, because it has a different purpose.
Mod me offtopic if you must, but is anyone else sick of all these acronyms that were probably thought up before the words they would represent? As soon as I see any of these kinds of acronyms I immediately stop taking the project seriously.
It's not always like that. My university has free hookups in all the dorm rooms, with true 10mbit connections to the internet. Only gets bogged down during the busiest times of day, and dorm connections are lowest priority, but it's still always fast.
There are tons of posts here questioning whether Google is losing their way by doing this, but I don't see what the problem is... Mail doesn't have to be complicated, even with integrated virus checking and spam killing software. Just because hotmail and yahoo are extremely bloated, doesn't mean that Google's will be the same way.
Personally, I hope that they will allow free POP access. That's what got me to open my Geocities mail account, which later turned into Yahoo. Then they made it a pay service and I stopped using it.
How is Intel the 800lb gorilla when it comes to this kind of wireless communication? Does Intel design wireless desktops? Wireless printers? Mobile phones? Headsets? PDAs? That's where Bluetooth is killing, and will continue to until there is a replacement that is sufficiently better to prompt a switch.
The only wireless communication Intel has a part in is wireless networking, and that's not what Bluetooth is for.
You should fix your sig, seeing as how it contains flawed logic. "P implies Q" does not necessarily mean "Q implies P".
Exactly, so the system just drives the thought process in circles.
The way I see it, there are two basic types of wars... The first type is where you kill the other people for the sake of taking what they have. The second is killing for the sake of ridding the world of a certain kind of people. I think that religion has little influence on the first kind, but much influence on the second kind. People aren't automatically racist and hateful at birth, in fact children are usually the best at getting along regardless of race. So it's the belief system that shapes those things, and religion is usually at the core.
It's different because it shifts accountability onto others. Being able to say "God told me to" makes it God's fault, whereas other excuses invariably come back to humans at some point.
Did eBay ever take game item auctions off while they evaluated if they really belonged to the sellers or not? From my understanding, Blizzard wasn't too crazy about people selling Diablo II items online, since it's basically just moving data around on their servers, nothing more. I don't have any specifics though, but this situation seems to parallel that one very well.
Yeah, but each one of those floppies contains a stripped down hybrid of DOS/Win98. I can make as many copies of my Windows XP CD as I want, but it doesn't make that legal either. And I don't have to accept an EULA to run my burning software either.
The premise of PC diagnostics software is simple: provide an easy way to test for PC hardware problems, independent of software configuration.
Did you read the posting?
It is directly compatible with AMD's 64-bit implementation. Intel and AMD have a sharing arrangement with x86 dating back to when AMD first licensed x86 from Intel, which basically allows Intel to use whatever AMD adds to the instruction set. And vice versa of course. Generally whoever implements it first gets in a generation ahead (Intel with the SSEs, AMD with x86-64).
On another note, these new Xeons are based on the Prescott core, so it is now extremely likely that the existing Prescott cores all have the capability, just not turned on, like what Intel did with hyperthreading on the Northwoods. It's been clear from the start that Prescott is hiding some functions up its sleeve, as there are at least 10 million transistors that can't be accounted for with the increased cache and other added functionality, even when being very generous with the estimations.
That whole string of stuff you listed is almost completely software-based, while the posting asks about hardware. Besides Sandra and memtest86, you've got nothing there that would be of any use... Software problems are generally easier to solve since you can always format the disk and start over anyway.
Besides, is it legal to have a Win98 boot disk without having purchased Win98? I wouldn't think so, and this makes your $20 price tag inaccurate, especially since you're implying that you have other Windows boot disks as well.
In fact, the opposite of what you are saying is true. The original posting erroneously states that ATI won't be making AGP cards, but they will be doing so throughout 2004. However, only the next chipsets from VIA will be supporting AGP; Intel and SIS are both dropping it for PCI Express. No word on NVidia yet.
So basically, the AGP cards will be out there, but next-gen mainboards won't have AGP slots.
No, high-end cards are 256MB, and have been for a while.
They would have to have some sort of bridge between the interfaces in order to do this. This is simply because the north and south bridges on the chipset are not going to have PCI or AGP support, just PCI Express. If there is some way to translate the schemes in between, then yeah, a mobo manufacturer could do it, but it'd probably either be expensive or a pretty ugly hack job.
Many people have pointed out that it really doesn't matter if one has just purchased an AGP card just because PCI Express versions are coming out this year... However, it may be influenced by the chipset support.
Intel's roadmaps reveal that none of their next-gen chipsets will have AGP support.
Similarly, SIS' roadmaps reveal that none of their chipsets will have AGP support either. That's for both Intel and AMD processors.
However, VIA's roadmaps show support for AGP throughout 2004 for both Intel and AMD processors.
So there's all the major players in the Intel game, and two for AMD. I would theorize that NVidia will go with whatever solution lets them pimp their high-end GPUs most effectively for their next NForce boards, but I don't remember seeing anything official about this. Anyone got a link?