Well, that's the problem... since hitting the MHz wall, it's taking more and more heroic efforts to achieve any speedup in single-core performance. (In fact if I'm not mistaken, the most-productive-per-cycle core on that chart is a couple years old.) But I agree, it's not that engineers are getting dumber or anything like that. It's getting harder, and progress has become slow.
So clock speed means everything when comparing different CPUs and not their raw performance. Got it.
Not exactly, but close for single-core performance. The "MHz Myth" is largely a myth itself. As this table shows, per-MHz single-core performance between the infamously bad (even at the time) P4 and the current best (Core i7) has only improved by a factor of less than 2.6, since October 2004! (When the Pentium 3.6 EE was released).
Perhaps more importantly, the ratio between the most productive (per-mhz) chip from 2004 (Athlon64 2.6) and the most productive on the chart now is a mere 1.6! That's a 60% improvement in almost 7 years!
That is a joke. For reference, we went from the Pentium 100 (March 1994) to the Pentium 200 (June 1996) - approximately a 100% improvement in a little over 2 years.
So, no, improvements in instructions per cycle are not even close to keeping pace with what improvements in MHz used to give us. (And if you looked at instructions per cycle per transistor, it would be abysmal - which is another way of saying Moore's law is hardly helping single-threaded performance any more).
Can the simple tasks required of a smartphone (e.g. AngryBirds) really benefit from that many cores?
Most of the computation in Angry Birds is filling in pixel values, and that's certainly parallelizable. (But that's why phones already have GPUs with fine-grained parallelism for such tasks).
Second would be the physics simulation of falling pillars and such. I guess the question there is, do you think the falling blocks in a real-life Jenga game are taking turns?
Nah, the total number of transistors in those 64 cores is probably a small fraction of the transistors in one modern CPU - more like stream processing units in a GPU (a GPU has several hundred).
Modern CPUs use huge numbers of transistors for small increases in speed, so there's no question such a chip would be much more efficient for tasks that fit it - again, like GPUs.
Actually evolution can produce altruistic traits even in situations where it detrimental to the altruistic individual. The specific conditions for this are defined by Sober and Wilson in the book "Unto Others." But the basic reason is because natural selection occurs at all levels - genes, cells, individuals, and populations. But, yes, evolution can result in individuals who go against their own best interests ("enlightened" or otherwise), just as the cells in your body normally die "voluntarily" in response to signals from other cells instead of multiplying out of control (unless they are cancerous).
Of course, just because something results from natural selection doesn't mean it is "good." Objectivists object to collectivism just as collectivists object to "social darwinism" - because they think it makes people unhappy, not because it wouldn't arise from evolution.
Virtually nobody will want to use a phone that requires something like that. I say that as somebody who just dumped Windows 7 at work because the corporate setup is so laden with virus scanners, encryption software, and Corporate Big Brother spyware that it's virtually unusable - both the computer and the user do little else than maintain the computer!
If google doesn't figure out a way to make this unnecessary, it will be a huge advantage for Apple, because their "walled garden" reduces the need dramatically. Hey, I don't like the idea of gated communities, but I sooner live there than put bars on all my windows and sleep with a.45 under my pillow every night.
We can debate whether my ideas make me a bad person etc., but I am simply observing that virtually nobody will be willing to use a phone that requires this level of babysitting, and android will fail in the market if this really becomes necessary.
TFA cites 4 examples, none of which reached the level of self-sufficiency
Data centers would be among the last places to ever be 100% local solar, for several reasons:
They use a massive amount of electricity in a small area
They are 24 hour operations
They require high availability (i.e., even the regular electric is not reliable enough without backups)
None of this is really a knock on solar, data centers just happen to be one of the more demanding consumers of electricity out there. But blunting their impact with solar seems like a good idea, since no matter when the sun is shining, or how much, there will be a need for it right then and there.
Climategate wasn't a hoax, it was a political ploy. The difference is, a hoax shows how far within the scientific community an idea can go without merit. That's a good internal check.
Mostly because they wouldn't mind voting some older people's money into their pockets, which is (to circle back) what the old people are worried about in the first place.
When actually it's the old who are robbing the young. For decades, everybody saw the shortfall in Social Security coming. People like Ross Perot and Al Gore campaigned on shoring it up. But by in large, the boomers voted for candidates who promised (and delivered) lower taxes (and deficits) instead.
So what if we don't fully fund Social Security? So what if we don't fully fund state and federal pension plans? Let's just vote for Reagonomics and hopefully everything will be solved by skyrocketing economic growth by the time we get old. Oops, that didn't happen. So how can we keep our taxes low and our government checks rolling in? Well, we could fill 0.001% of the gap by cutting head-start, children's food supplements, and all that other crap that doesn't affect us any more. Hey I know, we own all the real estate, let's inflate real estate prices by using borrowed money to make interest rates ridiculously low. Hey all you brown people, get out of my country... wait, not until after you mow my lawn... ok, now get out.
Interns really are one of the harder situations. It's hard to justify a new computer for somebody who will only be there for 3 months, especially since nobody is even coming to replace them (until 9 months later, if then).
So you keep around spares you don't need anymore... which is what reapp is.
I wonder if you could make a high gain steerable antenna to track the dish on the cell tower while you're transmitting? Or, if it *really* tracked accurately, how much power would be needed to transmit the signal over the same range with a laser?
I MUST use MS Office for work, so for me, rebooting meant rebooting Linux *plus* rebooting the Windows VM. And our corporate Windows setup is so larded down with virus scanners etc that it is a complete dog, and takes a while to be usable after booting up. So, merely opening Outlook to check email would take several minutes.
Part of what resulted in the Mac purchase is they finally got an updated version of MS Office, including (and most importantly) Outlook - so Windows is out of the picture.
Migrating from that cumbersome stack to the MacBook, which wakes up within 2-3 seconds (with my applications still running and ready to) was a really big improvement.
I like the Linux userspace. The first thing I did to my new Mac put on fink (emacs, gimp, octave...) and a linux install under VMWare Fusion (for some things I haven't figured out under OSX, like mounting CIFS through an SSH tunnel).
But I have tired of dealing with hardware issues on Linux. If you never have any, great, I am happy for you. I still hope Linux gets such widespread adoption that the issue goes away. But if anything, I sense a plateau, and this move by Ubuntu is the first case in point. I hate to see them wasting time on "putting music at the forefront of the Ubuntu experience" when there are far more basic issues driving me away. Of course, I've never paid them a dime, so they owe me nothing.
I'm hoping you'll write a howto on "running fvwm over gnome or kde". Only a real expert linux user could do that!
I didn't say that as proof of my expertise. I said it to clarify what WASN'T the reason for my switch to Apple - I don't like the Apple eye candy, I don't care for the over-simplicity, and I certainly don't like their media-empire integration. I don't know why people buy iPads.
But at the same time, I couldn't justify work hours fiddling with stuff any more, or waiting for reboots due to non-working power management.
At home, I do still run linux. My main home computer for my family is a multi-seat setup with two independent displays, one of which serves as a PVR. I value that sort of flexibility.
But I've realized linux has reached a plateau in supporting hardware and obscure setups - it's always progressing, but never quite catching up. The first thing I did with my new MacBook Pro is insert a bootable GNU Parted disc to make room for a linux partition for Boot Camp, but it wouldn't even boot, presumably because it's an I7 model. Is that fixable? Sure, probably. But life is short, so I skipped it. Maybe one day.
You *did* check your choices against the lists of supported hardware before spending, right?
In my personal experience, the accuracy of those lists is very spotty. New hardware revisions come out all the time and break things; some functions on a device work, but others don't; whoever checked the box didn't happen to try the use case that's important to you.
I've run Linux on a T60. And a T40. And a T400. And various Dells. I always got it to kinda sorta work. It would work the first 5 or 6 or 10 times and then crash. Or it would work, but not in combination with 3d acceleration, or the DVI outputs on the docking station wouldn't work after suspend/resume, or the wireless card would stop working. There's always a catch.
No, I am actually an expert Linux user. The fact is, power management on Linux does not normally work, and hasn't progressed in the last 7 years. I know, I was there.
It's sad to see further evidence that the PC party is over, and everybody is jumping the bandwagon of services, content, and flashy UIs (i.e. chasing Apple).
I was a Linux desktop user for 10 years and just switched to Mac - not because of some nebulous "experience" (I still run fvwm over gnome or kde when given the choice), but I was sick of waiting for my laptop to reboot all the time, and the MacBook is the first computer I've ever used where power management actually, really works. For me it's all about nuts and bolts.
You need a backup of home regardless of partitioning strategy, so there's no advantage there.
If anything, it's having to futz with partitions in the first place that leads to mistakes involving them. And there's less futzing if you keep it simple. (An example would be resizing partitions because you need more on/var and have empty space on/home).
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Well, that's the problem... since hitting the MHz wall, it's taking more and more heroic efforts to achieve any speedup in single-core performance. (In fact if I'm not mistaken, the most-productive-per-cycle core on that chart is a couple years old.) But I agree, it's not that engineers are getting dumber or anything like that. It's getting harder, and progress has become slow.
Not exactly, but close for single-core performance. The "MHz Myth" is largely a myth itself. As this table shows, per-MHz single-core performance between the infamously bad (even at the time) P4 and the current best (Core i7) has only improved by a factor of less than 2.6, since October 2004! (When the Pentium 3.6 EE was released).
Perhaps more importantly, the ratio between the most productive (per-mhz) chip from 2004 (Athlon64 2.6) and the most productive on the chart now is a mere 1.6! That's a 60% improvement in almost 7 years!
That is a joke. For reference, we went from the Pentium 100 (March 1994) to the Pentium 200 (June 1996) - approximately a 100% improvement in a little over 2 years.
So, no, improvements in instructions per cycle are not even close to keeping pace with what improvements in MHz used to give us. (And if you looked at instructions per cycle per transistor, it would be abysmal - which is another way of saying Moore's law is hardly helping single-threaded performance any more).
Most of the computation in Angry Birds is filling in pixel values, and that's certainly parallelizable. (But that's why phones already have GPUs with fine-grained parallelism for such tasks).
Second would be the physics simulation of falling pillars and such. I guess the question there is, do you think the falling blocks in a real-life Jenga game are taking turns?
Modern CPUs use huge numbers of transistors for small increases in speed, so there's no question such a chip would be much more efficient for tasks that fit it - again, like GPUs.
Of course, just because something results from natural selection doesn't mean it is "good." Objectivists object to collectivism just as collectivists object to "social darwinism" - because they think it makes people unhappy, not because it wouldn't arise from evolution.
If google doesn't figure out a way to make this unnecessary, it will be a huge advantage for Apple, because their "walled garden" reduces the need dramatically. Hey, I don't like the idea of gated communities, but I sooner live there than put bars on all my windows and sleep with a .45 under my pillow every night.
We can debate whether my ideas make me a bad person etc., but I am simply observing that virtually nobody will be willing to use a phone that requires this level of babysitting, and android will fail in the market if this really becomes necessary.
I suppose if somebody (somehow) raided the White House they would find some secrets, too. Except a lot of them are on wikileaks anyways.
Good point, I wonder if any Pakistani officials are sweating right now.
Data centers would be among the last places to ever be 100% local solar, for several reasons:
None of this is really a knock on solar, data centers just happen to be one of the more demanding consumers of electricity out there. But blunting their impact with solar seems like a good idea, since no matter when the sun is shining, or how much, there will be a need for it right then and there.
Climategate wasn't a hoax, it was a political ploy. The difference is, a hoax shows how far within the scientific community an idea can go without merit. That's a good internal check.
When actually it's the old who are robbing the young. For decades, everybody saw the shortfall in Social Security coming. People like Ross Perot and Al Gore campaigned on shoring it up. But by in large, the boomers voted for candidates who promised (and delivered) lower taxes (and deficits) instead.
So what if we don't fully fund Social Security? So what if we don't fully fund state and federal pension plans? Let's just vote for Reagonomics and hopefully everything will be solved by skyrocketing economic growth by the time we get old. Oops, that didn't happen. So how can we keep our taxes low and our government checks rolling in? Well, we could fill 0.001% of the gap by cutting head-start, children's food supplements, and all that other crap that doesn't affect us any more. Hey I know, we own all the real estate, let's inflate real estate prices by using borrowed money to make interest rates ridiculously low. Hey all you brown people, get out of my country... wait, not until after you mow my lawn... ok, now get out.
Interns really are one of the harder situations. It's hard to justify a new computer for somebody who will only be there for 3 months, especially since nobody is even coming to replace them (until 9 months later, if then). So you keep around spares you don't need anymore... which is what reapp is.
The Linyx-compatible Web no longer exists. There will be a whole lot you won't see, and quite a few places you can't even go.
I wonder if you could make a high gain steerable antenna to track the dish on the cell tower while you're transmitting? Or, if it *really* tracked accurately, how much power would be needed to transmit the signal over the same range with a laser?
Part of what resulted in the Mac purchase is they finally got an updated version of MS Office, including (and most importantly) Outlook - so Windows is out of the picture.
Migrating from that cumbersome stack to the MacBook, which wakes up within 2-3 seconds (with my applications still running and ready to) was a really big improvement.
But I have tired of dealing with hardware issues on Linux. If you never have any, great, I am happy for you. I still hope Linux gets such widespread adoption that the issue goes away. But if anything, I sense a plateau, and this move by Ubuntu is the first case in point. I hate to see them wasting time on "putting music at the forefront of the Ubuntu experience" when there are far more basic issues driving me away. Of course, I've never paid them a dime, so they owe me nothing.
I didn't say that as proof of my expertise. I said it to clarify what WASN'T the reason for my switch to Apple - I don't like the Apple eye candy, I don't care for the over-simplicity, and I certainly don't like their media-empire integration. I don't know why people buy iPads.
But at the same time, I couldn't justify work hours fiddling with stuff any more, or waiting for reboots due to non-working power management.
At home, I do still run linux. My main home computer for my family is a multi-seat setup with two independent displays, one of which serves as a PVR. I value that sort of flexibility.
But I've realized linux has reached a plateau in supporting hardware and obscure setups - it's always progressing, but never quite catching up. The first thing I did with my new MacBook Pro is insert a bootable GNU Parted disc to make room for a linux partition for Boot Camp, but it wouldn't even boot, presumably because it's an I7 model. Is that fixable? Sure, probably. But life is short, so I skipped it. Maybe one day.
In my personal experience, the accuracy of those lists is very spotty. New hardware revisions come out all the time and break things; some functions on a device work, but others don't; whoever checked the box didn't happen to try the use case that's important to you.
I've run Linux on a T60. And a T40. And a T400. And various Dells. I always got it to kinda sorta work. It would work the first 5 or 6 or 10 times and then crash. Or it would work, but not in combination with 3d acceleration, or the DVI outputs on the docking station wouldn't work after suspend/resume, or the wireless card would stop working. There's always a catch.
No, I am actually an expert Linux user. The fact is, power management on Linux does not normally work, and hasn't progressed in the last 7 years. I know, I was there.
I was a Linux desktop user for 10 years and just switched to Mac - not because of some nebulous "experience" (I still run fvwm over gnome or kde when given the choice), but I was sick of waiting for my laptop to reboot all the time, and the MacBook is the first computer I've ever used where power management actually, really works. For me it's all about nuts and bolts.
I just looked up the FIT-PC2 which does look kind of cool. Is it fast enough to play youtube videos?
It costs around $100/year to power a headless PC 24/7 though, vs. 5%-10% of that for a little linksys-type router.
So, it seems obvious to point out that Linux doesn't need to use up all those partitions if that's not how he wants it.
If anything, it's having to futz with partitions in the first place that leads to mistakes involving them. And there's less futzing if you keep it simple. (An example would be resizing partitions because you need more on /var and have empty space on /home).