Most foreign slashdoters, and even most local, have no clue how the U.S. government works. Most of them think of the President as a king or dictator. His word is law. That isn't the way it is. Outside the scope of his office the president has no more power than a normal citizen of the United States. Granted the power inside his office is vast but it is limited.
When it comes to shaping public policy the president can only really issue decrees called executive orders. Inside the executive branch, the presidents branch, those orders have a lot of weight. But outside they are usually not worth the paper they are printed on. Like the latest executive order stating that transgenders can use any bathroom in they want to in any public school. There are lots of schools setting this order aside. Other than punitive funding actions there is little the president can do to enforce this order. Even those actions can be over ruled by congress that really holds the purse strings.
Also any order that the president gives to the public can be cancelled by the Judiciary or the Legislative branches.
Trump may come in on a wave of fear and flag waving but his power will be limited by his office. I predict that once he is in office he will accomplish little to nothing because the other branches will reign him in. I predict that trump will be a one time president who's term in office will be little more than a foot note on history.
Oh look. One of the hippies has popped up and he is just as uneducated as the rest of his pot smoking tribe. Like the rest of them he hasn't a clue what he is talking about. Looks like some other posters have beating me to showing you the fool you are, but let me add to your education.
All coal contain natural radioactive components. When this coal is burned in a power plant that radioactive component is released right into the environment. Coal burning power plants also are a major cause of green house gases, something nuclear power plants are not. If man made climate change is a reality coal burning plants are a major cause of that. Nuclear power is not. Burning coal in unclean plants release tons of sulfur into the atmosphere which turns into acid rain. This acid rain kill millions of acre of trees and plant life each year. Coal also is a major cause of human repertory problems too. Nuclear power plants cause none of this.
Releasing radioactivity for hundreds of millions of years? What is in that weed you are smoking? Seriously, you really should attempt to educate yourself on a subject before you speak. Even the worse nuclear disaster in history, Chernobyl, will not continue to radiate for hundreds of millions of years. As for the Fukushima, those power plants where hit with a disaster clearly they where not designed for. But if you hippies had shut your bong holes those plants would have been long retired and replace with a much safer design.
Yes, eliminated, as in nuclear waste. The only reason its waste is because we can't do anything with it because you fucking hippies had to keep protesting and the research stopped. That left us with the only option to store it on site. When we try to move to a safer site, you fools line the roads to stop the shipments.
If the research could have continued we could have be re-manufacturing the wastes instead of storing it. In spent fuel rods over 80% of it is still usable if the spent part is processed out. That fuel rod could be reintroduced and the used again. As for the remaining wastes, if research could have continued we might have a productive use for it too.
If fools like you had kept your mouth shut about thing you know nothing about, as you clearly do not, we might have had reactors that are 100 times as efficient as the crap we have today. We might have reactors in use who's design would have made events like fukushima and chernobyl impossible because of the way they are designed..
And finally you god damn fucking hippie. We might have fusion working today. Fusion you god damn pot headed bastard. Fusion, the cleanest source of power there is. If uneducated fools like you had kept your mouths shut there would be no fission, no coal plants, no rivers damned, no fossil fuels, and no green house gases. We might have had a clean and unlimited source of energy. There would be no fighting in the middle east over oil resources. None of that would exist. With that source of energy we could have turned this god forsaken mud ball in to a paradise.
But you fucking hippies had to fuck it all up because you where to damn stupid to try to understand what you where protesting. Thank you very fucking much.
Thank the gods someone else sees this too. I have been saying for decades that anti nuke movement from the 60's has done more damage to the planet then all the corporate greed and environmental disasters put together. But try to tell that to a hippie, most can't see past the haze of pot that surrounds them.
For those of you that are not on the same page with me, let me explain why. In 1945 we built two nuclear bombs and nuked Japan. Now, I'm not going to say that was a good thing or a bad thing, but it did tarnish nuclear power forever. Over the next several decades we spent lots of money and time developing better and better ways to use nuclear energy to exterminate ourselves. A few times we came really close to it.
Don't get me wrong, protesting the use of nuclear power for bombs was a good thing. I'm all for that. But the hippies didn't stop longer than it took to load new pot in their bongs. They tared all nuclear energy with the same brush, nuclear medicine, nuclear research, and nuclear power. Things that most of them knew nothing about, all they heard is nuclear, and they went nuclear on it.
Thanks to the hippie anti nuke movement all research into peaceful nuclear power ground to a halt in the early 70's. That is why we are suck with all the nuclear problems we have today with the current generation of nuclear power plants. All the technology is from the late 60's and early 70's.
Because of the movement there have no real advancements since then and no new power plants have been built. Instead we have built new coal plants which are hundreds of times more destructive to the environment than nuclear power. Even the primitive plants we have today.
If the hippie movement would have just stuck to nuclear weapons, nuclear research into peaceful power would have continued. If that would have happened the nuclear plants today would be hundreds of times safer and more efficient. We might have even eliminated the nuclear waste problem itself
More importantly, if research would have continued into nuclear power we would have had lots more funding into fusion research. If the hippies had stuck to nuclear weapons we might have had the fusion problems solved. That would have lead to the cleanest energy source ever. That would have eliminated all the coal plants, all the hydro, and all the fission plants. It would practically eliminated all uses of fossil fuels on the planet.
if the hippies of the '60's had paid attention and protest the wrongful uses of nuclear power instead of all of them, Earth might be a paradise today.
Any other "earth like" planets will have other names. So yes there is only one Earth.
On a more serous note. If the computer model doesn't predict the one that actually exists then how can we trust the rest of the data. Seems to me the computer model is wrong.
The first paragraph refers to the worse kind of people, scammers and terrorist.
Second paragraph, relief agencies that are not counted as "the worse kind of people', nor are the people they are trying to help. The relief agencies that I'm talking about don't have the large budgets for non-essential stuff, like up to date computers. They have to rely on handed down computers. Most of these computers are really outdated, 200 MHz pentums or lower.
Most of the places that they say do not update are home of some of the worse kinds of people. I'm talking about terrorist that use social media and scammers that use the internet to steal from people using social media. By cutting them off from using Facebook at least that would slow them down some.
The only thing that I'm concerned about is agencies that use those services to help refugees and other people that actually need help. They would be hindered by this process. And most of those relief agences are the ones that need it the most and can't afford to upgrade.
Oh no, I don't think we want to do that. You see I've done some math here and I estimate if we did that with the amount of hard vacuum that is in there, it would suck up all the air and we would all die.
I propose when someone wants to run for congress we give them this test.
How many people can we put on Guam before it tips over?
Why would we look strange at you for using edge? I went through your history for the past few months. Short of disliking silverlight, you seem to very much like windows. Why would we expect you not to like this?
Well I do like windows but I also like linux. I run windows on my home workstation because when because with what I do at home windows works better the. Mainly games.
I run linux, centos 6.7, on my server. It works best for that what I use it for. Basically a big ass file server.
I run fedora at work because I view it as the best OS to use when working in a linux environment.
I don't understand why this is even in the core code. The core code should contain only the essentials to make the browser function. Anything else such as themes, adblockers, chat clients, and fucking social buttons should be downloadable add ins.
If you want a fast and sleek broswer just keep the core code. You want to customize the hell out of it go fo it,and enjoy your lumbering hippo.
People are going to look strange at me for saying this but i've been rather impressed with the edge browser that came with windows 10. It's fast for casual browsing. I still load firefox when I need with more muscle but just quick look ups edge seems to be what I go with.
I'm sorry that you feel that way but I've been doing this for a very long time. I've had numerous AMD chips over the years and I can say only for that short span of period AMD chips have always trailed behind Intel in performance. That performance gap was only around 5% to 10% on average.
The last figures I ran put my old phenom II 965 at 3.4 ghz against a 3.2 Ghz I5 with 4 cores. The result was exactly what I expected. The AMD 965 inched out the i5 by a very small margin, about 3%, due to higher clock rate. I estimated at the time if I slowed the 965 down to 3.2Ghz it would fit nicely with in the standard model 5% to 10% gap.
We tested my FX-8150 at 3.6 ghz against a 3.6 ghz i7. I don't remember the model number of the i7. The performance gap stunned us. A 20% fo 40% gap on performance in the i7 favor.
AMD has made great chips before, and thier chips are still good. But you just can't compare them to what intel offers now in terms of performance.
Yes. I did some quick research looking for that $7 VIA cpu. I didn't find it. What I did find was the specs for current VIA CPU's. From what I read they are worse than AMD. S
So the choice between cheap crap and a reliable working system? You see cost alone doesn't just always seal the deal. Spend the extra money and get quality.
Ah yes, yepping of the disbeliever. We'll I guess I'm not. I guess the fact that my workstation is a fx-8150 and my linux box is a fx-8350. I have a A-5350 in my htpc and my old workstation is a Phenom II 965. The rig I build for my daughter is only a AMD 6300. I won't talk about the 9950, 9850, 1440XP, and the T'bird 950 before that. Yup your correct, I've never been a AMD fanboy.
Look, your little toy box is nice but if you want to run with the big dogs you best know what you're talking about. I'm glad it works for you but some of us don't live in denial. When I upgrade I plan to go Intel. I will give AMD a chance with its new platform but I'm expecting disappointment.
I built a few workstations a few years back out of those VIA parts. God what a piece of shit. These where for low end office work too. We couldn't get off those things fast enough.
I don't see how this issue can affect PS-4 and Xbox One consoles. Both those are marketed with out disclosure to the public on how many cores their processors have. Most people that buy games consoles don't care about that as long as their a radical performance increase over their last console.
I doubt that ether microsoft or sony will have anything to say ether. Both their engineering teams crawled all over the cpu designs they where planning to put in the console. They didn't just point at a cpu and said that one is good. They knew exactly what they where putting into those consoles.
Well, there was the Athlon - era where they were sweeping the floors with Intel
Those where glorious days, where they not? I remember the race to 1 ghz and AMD beat Intel to that mark. AMD didn't just inch ahead there ether, they rode Intel hard and put them away wet. Those where good days.
Then Intel caught up and stayed ahead most of the time but AMD was still able to maintain a competitive edge in price. The performance for a Intel chip vs AMD was about 5% to 10% in most areas but AMD's prices where a hundred or more dollars cheaper than Intel. For that much of a difference a 5% gap in performance didn't matter.
We still see that much of a price difference but the performance gap is like 40% or greater. That is not worth the discount of a AMD part. There there are other technological gaps like DDR4, USB3, and PCI 3.0 support.
I looked at what AM4 was bringing to the table next year in 2016. Problem is, everything its bringing Intel had out last year. I think things are looking pretty bleak for AMD in 2016.
99% of software out there is still single threaded. that makes a old pentium 4 single core running at 4GHZ will beat the hell out of a i7 3ghz 8 core processor brutally if that i7 has hyperthreading turned on essentially cutting the processor speeds in 1/2 to emulate more cores.
Truth. If you have been reading the design and theoretical papers about 20 years ago it was widely known the mhz race was going to come to an end in the 3-4 ghz range. An that is pretty much what has happened. I've not seen a real cpu in the field faster than 4 ghz. Most servers that I work with run at 2-3ghz. Sure you see some "gimmicks" that make cpu's run at 5+ ghz but would you truly put one of those 220W beasts in your desktop?
We have his the limits imposed by the laws of physics. The gate technology just can't switch any faster. It's impossible. We may see some other material like graphine or something in the future but we won't see the performance increase in CPU's that we saw in the late '90s and early 20's.
Fortunately, modern CPU's are extremely powerful. Not many people realize how powerful a 3.2 ghz quad core cpu is, or even a dual core. Fifteen years ago I made a prediction that 1.5 ghz dual core will be plenty for normal office work. So far my theory has proven to be true. In the office area there was a ramp up to the extremely fast quad core cpu's for general office work. But lately that trend has reversed. Around the offices that I have been in new hardware tends to consist of dual core 1.5 to 2.x ghz CPU's.
I guess what I'm saying people is get used to what you have because its not going to get much better or faster. Baring any radical advancement in technology like affordable quantum computers, 4 ghz is about it.
Your observations on the AMD vs Intel performance gap seem to match my own observations.
I have a 3.6 ghz fx-8150 and my friend bought a Intel i7 also at 3.6 ghz. On most desktop operations you can't tell the difference. When we start operations like video encoding the difference in performance is staggering. On the average he gets over a 40% performance increase over my AMD system.
No, the better option is that AMD gets their shit together, never giving Intel full monopoly on the x86-market even for a bit.
Myself and a friend have been AMD fanboys for 20 years. I built my first system on AMD 133mhz '486. Since then he abandoned AMD on his last workstation build and went all Intel. I have a FX-8150 and a FX-8350 in my builds right now. He has given up on AMD and I'm not far behind. I'm looking at my next workstation build sometime in 2016. I'm not ready to completely abandon AMD. I'm gong to wait and see what the specs on the AM4 bring to the table but I expect to be disappointed.
A few months back we looked to see who might be interested in buying AMD and keeping as a whole. We didn't come up with any one. What we got was a list of people that might be interested in parts of AMD. Sony or Microsoft might buy their chip facilities since they do use AMD chips as the CPU/GPU in their consoles. AMD has a few patents that both Nvidia and Intel might be interested in picking up.
Realistically AMD is to far behind the technological curve in so many areas. Even looking at the specs to the new AM4 systems I can tell they are behind Intel in almost every aspect. AMD has always been behind Intel in the performance area for most of its life. But they where never so far behind that their lower prices didn't make up for. That is not true with the FX chips. The performance gap is not worth the lower cost.
Lets hope AMD gets their shit together. As I've said before. The fat lady hasn't sung yet on AMD but she is warming up in the bullpit. Lets hope that as she waddles up on stage AMD pulls a rabbit out of the hat and she falls off the stage into a tuba.
Slashdot Mirror
Most foreign slashdoters, and even most local, have no clue how the U.S. government works. Most of them think of the President as a king or dictator. His word is law. That isn't the way it is. Outside the scope of his office the president has no more power than a normal citizen of the United States. Granted the power inside his office is vast but it is limited.
When it comes to shaping public policy the president can only really issue decrees called executive orders. Inside the executive branch, the presidents branch, those orders have a lot of weight. But outside they are usually not worth the paper they are printed on. Like the latest executive order stating that transgenders can use any bathroom in they want to in any public school. There are lots of schools setting this order aside. Other than punitive funding actions there is little the president can do to enforce this order. Even those actions can be over ruled by congress that really holds the purse strings.
Also any order that the president gives to the public can be cancelled by the Judiciary or the Legislative branches.
Trump may come in on a wave of fear and flag waving but his power will be limited by his office. I predict that once he is in office he will accomplish little to nothing because the other branches will reign him in. I predict that trump will be a one time president who's term in office will be little more than a foot note on history.
Oh look. One of the hippies has popped up and he is just as uneducated as the rest of his pot smoking tribe. Like the rest of them he hasn't a clue what he is talking about. Looks like some other posters have beating me to showing you the fool you are, but let me add to your education.
All coal contain natural radioactive components. When this coal is burned in a power plant that radioactive component is released right into the environment. Coal burning power plants also are a major cause of green house gases, something nuclear power plants are not. If man made climate change is a reality coal burning plants are a major cause of that. Nuclear power is not. Burning coal in unclean plants release tons of sulfur into the atmosphere which turns into acid rain. This acid rain kill millions of acre of trees and plant life each year. Coal also is a major cause of human repertory problems too. Nuclear power plants cause none of this.
Releasing radioactivity for hundreds of millions of years? What is in that weed you are smoking? Seriously, you really should attempt to educate yourself on a subject before you speak. Even the worse nuclear disaster in history, Chernobyl, will not continue to radiate for hundreds of millions of years. As for the Fukushima, those power plants where hit with a disaster clearly they where not designed for. But if you hippies had shut your bong holes those plants would have been long retired and replace with a much safer design.
Yes, eliminated, as in nuclear waste. The only reason its waste is because we can't do anything with it because you fucking hippies had to keep protesting and the research stopped. That left us with the only option to store it on site. When we try to move to a safer site, you fools line the roads to stop the shipments.
If the research could have continued we could have be re-manufacturing the wastes instead of storing it. In spent fuel rods over 80% of it is still usable if the spent part is processed out. That fuel rod could be reintroduced and the used again. As for the remaining wastes, if research could have continued we might have a productive use for it too.
If fools like you had kept your mouth shut about thing you know nothing about, as you clearly do not, we might have had reactors that are 100 times as efficient as the crap we have today. We might have reactors in use who's design would have made events like fukushima and chernobyl impossible because of the way they are designed..
And finally you god damn fucking hippie. We might have fusion working today. Fusion you god damn pot headed bastard. Fusion, the cleanest source of power there is. If uneducated fools like you had kept your mouths shut there would be no fission, no coal plants, no rivers damned, no fossil fuels, and no green house gases. We might have had a clean and unlimited source of energy. There would be no fighting in the middle east over oil resources. None of that would exist. With that source of energy we could have turned this god forsaken mud ball in to a paradise.
But you fucking hippies had to fuck it all up because you where to damn stupid to try to understand what you where protesting. Thank you very fucking much.
Thank the gods someone else sees this too. I have been saying for decades that anti nuke movement from the 60's has done more damage to the planet then all the corporate greed and environmental disasters put together. But try to tell that to a hippie, most can't see past the haze of pot that surrounds them.
For those of you that are not on the same page with me, let me explain why. In 1945 we built two nuclear bombs and nuked Japan. Now, I'm not going to say that was a good thing or a bad thing, but it did tarnish nuclear power forever. Over the next several decades we spent lots of money and time developing better and better ways to use nuclear energy to exterminate ourselves. A few times we came really close to it.
Don't get me wrong, protesting the use of nuclear power for bombs was a good thing. I'm all for that. But the hippies didn't stop longer than it took to load new pot in their bongs. They tared all nuclear energy with the same brush, nuclear medicine, nuclear research, and nuclear power. Things that most of them knew nothing about, all they heard is nuclear, and they went nuclear on it.
Thanks to the hippie anti nuke movement all research into peaceful nuclear power ground to a halt in the early 70's. That is why we are suck with all the nuclear problems we have today with the current generation of nuclear power plants. All the technology is from the late 60's and early 70's.
Because of the movement there have no real advancements since then and no new power plants have been built. Instead we have built new coal plants which are hundreds of times more destructive to the environment than nuclear power. Even the primitive plants we have today.
If the hippie movement would have just stuck to nuclear weapons, nuclear research into peaceful power would have continued. If that would have happened the nuclear plants today would be hundreds of times safer and more efficient. We might have even eliminated the nuclear waste problem itself
More importantly, if research would have continued into nuclear power we would have had lots more funding into fusion research. If the hippies had stuck to nuclear weapons we might have had the fusion problems solved. That would have lead to the cleanest energy source ever. That would have eliminated all the coal plants, all the hydro, and all the fission plants. It would practically eliminated all uses of fossil fuels on the planet.
if the hippies of the '60's had paid attention and protest the wrongful uses of nuclear power instead of all of them, Earth might be a paradise today.
I've been on many public train systems but I have yet to see any signs that indicate that pissing on the seats isn't allowed.
Any other "earth like" planets will have other names. So yes there is only one Earth.
On a more serous note. If the computer model doesn't predict the one that actually exists then how can we trust the rest of the data. Seems to me the computer model is wrong.
So it happened under Bush but Obama had the power to stop it. Instead he chose to let it go forward.
The tighter they close their fist the more webpages will slip from their grasp.
Or something like that.
Two paragraphs dumbass.
The first paragraph refers to the worse kind of people, scammers and terrorist.
Second paragraph, relief agencies that are not counted as "the worse kind of people', nor are the people they are trying to help. The relief agencies that I'm talking about don't have the large budgets for non-essential stuff, like up to date computers. They have to rely on handed down computers. Most of these computers are really outdated, 200 MHz pentums or lower.
Most of the places that they say do not update are home of some of the worse kinds of people. I'm talking about terrorist that use social media and scammers that use the internet to steal from people using social media. By cutting them off from using Facebook at least that would slow them down some.
The only thing that I'm concerned about is agencies that use those services to help refugees and other people that actually need help. They would be hindered by this process. And most of those relief agences are the ones that need it the most and can't afford to upgrade.
This is going to go over well.
Oh no, I don't think we want to do that. You see I've done some math here and I estimate if we did that with the amount of hard vacuum that is in there, it would suck up all the air and we would all die.
I propose when someone wants to run for congress we give them this test.
Why would we look strange at you for using edge? I went through your history for the past few months. Short of disliking silverlight, you seem to very much like windows. Why would we expect you not to like this?
Well I do like windows but I also like linux. I run windows on my home workstation because when because with what I do at home windows works better the. Mainly games.
I run linux, centos 6.7, on my server. It works best for that what I use it for. Basically a big ass file server.
I run fedora at work because I view it as the best OS to use when working in a linux environment.
I can't argue with that logic. Agree.
I don't understand why this is even in the core code. The core code should contain only the essentials to make the browser function. Anything else such as themes, adblockers, chat clients, and fucking social buttons should be downloadable add ins.
If you want a fast and sleek broswer just keep the core code. You want to customize the hell out of it go fo it,and enjoy your lumbering hippo.
People are going to look strange at me for saying this but i've been rather impressed with the edge browser that came with windows 10. It's fast for casual browsing. I still load firefox when I need with more muscle but just quick look ups edge seems to be what I go with.
I'm sorry that you feel that way but I've been doing this for a very long time. I've had numerous AMD chips over the years and I can say only for that short span of period AMD chips have always trailed behind Intel in performance. That performance gap was only around 5% to 10% on average.
The last figures I ran put my old phenom II 965 at 3.4 ghz against a 3.2 Ghz I5 with 4 cores. The result was exactly what I expected. The AMD 965 inched out the i5 by a very small margin, about 3%, due to higher clock rate. I estimated at the time if I slowed the 965 down to 3.2Ghz it would fit nicely with in the standard model 5% to 10% gap.
We tested my FX-8150 at 3.6 ghz against a 3.6 ghz i7. I don't remember the model number of the i7. The performance gap stunned us. A 20% fo 40% gap on performance in the i7 favor.
AMD has made great chips before, and thier chips are still good. But you just can't compare them to what intel offers now in terms of performance.
Yes. I did some quick research looking for that $7 VIA cpu. I didn't find it. What I did find was the specs for current VIA CPU's. From what I read they are worse than AMD. S
So the choice between cheap crap and a reliable working system? You see cost alone doesn't just always seal the deal. Spend the extra money and get quality.
If you need x86 in a embedded application you should look at a atom processor.
Ah yes, yepping of the disbeliever. We'll I guess I'm not. I guess the fact that my workstation is a fx-8150 and my linux box is a fx-8350. I have a A-5350 in my htpc and my old workstation is a Phenom II 965. The rig I build for my daughter is only a AMD 6300. I won't talk about the 9950, 9850, 1440XP, and the T'bird 950 before that. Yup your correct, I've never been a AMD fanboy.
Look, your little toy box is nice but if you want to run with the big dogs you best know what you're talking about. I'm glad it works for you but some of us don't live in denial. When I upgrade I plan to go Intel. I will give AMD a chance with its new platform but I'm expecting disappointment.
I built a few workstations a few years back out of those VIA parts. God what a piece of shit. These where for low end office work too. We couldn't get off those things fast enough.
I don't see how this issue can affect PS-4 and Xbox One consoles. Both those are marketed with out disclosure to the public on how many cores their processors have. Most people that buy games consoles don't care about that as long as their a radical performance increase over their last console.
I doubt that ether microsoft or sony will have anything to say ether. Both their engineering teams crawled all over the cpu designs they where planning to put in the console. They didn't just point at a cpu and said that one is good. They knew exactly what they where putting into those consoles.
Well, there was the Athlon - era where they were sweeping the floors with Intel
Those where glorious days, where they not? I remember the race to 1 ghz and AMD beat Intel to that mark. AMD didn't just inch ahead there ether, they rode Intel hard and put them away wet. Those where good days.
Then Intel caught up and stayed ahead most of the time but AMD was still able to maintain a competitive edge in price. The performance for a Intel chip vs AMD was about 5% to 10% in most areas but AMD's prices where a hundred or more dollars cheaper than Intel. For that much of a difference a 5% gap in performance didn't matter.
We still see that much of a price difference but the performance gap is like 40% or greater. That is not worth the discount of a AMD part. There there are other technological gaps like DDR4, USB3, and PCI 3.0 support.
I looked at what AM4 was bringing to the table next year in 2016. Problem is, everything its bringing Intel had out last year. I think things are looking pretty bleak for AMD in 2016.
99% of software out there is still single threaded. that makes a old pentium 4 single core running at 4GHZ will beat the hell out of a i7 3ghz 8 core processor brutally if that i7 has hyperthreading turned on essentially cutting the processor speeds in 1/2 to emulate more cores.
Truth. If you have been reading the design and theoretical papers about 20 years ago it was widely known the mhz race was going to come to an end in the 3-4 ghz range. An that is pretty much what has happened. I've not seen a real cpu in the field faster than 4 ghz. Most servers that I work with run at 2-3ghz. Sure you see some "gimmicks" that make cpu's run at 5+ ghz but would you truly put one of those 220W beasts in your desktop?
We have his the limits imposed by the laws of physics. The gate technology just can't switch any faster. It's impossible. We may see some other material like graphine or something in the future but we won't see the performance increase in CPU's that we saw in the late '90s and early 20's.
Fortunately, modern CPU's are extremely powerful. Not many people realize how powerful a 3.2 ghz quad core cpu is, or even a dual core. Fifteen years ago I made a prediction that 1.5 ghz dual core will be plenty for normal office work. So far my theory has proven to be true. In the office area there was a ramp up to the extremely fast quad core cpu's for general office work. But lately that trend has reversed. Around the offices that I have been in new hardware tends to consist of dual core 1.5 to 2.x ghz CPU's.
I guess what I'm saying people is get used to what you have because its not going to get much better or faster. Baring any radical advancement in technology like affordable quantum computers, 4 ghz is about it.
Your observations on the AMD vs Intel performance gap seem to match my own observations.
I have a 3.6 ghz fx-8150 and my friend bought a Intel i7 also at 3.6 ghz. On most desktop operations you can't tell the difference. When we start operations like video encoding the difference in performance is staggering. On the average he gets over a 40% performance increase over my AMD system.
That is a hell of a performance gap.
No, the better option is that AMD gets their shit together, never giving Intel full monopoly on the x86-market even for a bit.
Myself and a friend have been AMD fanboys for 20 years. I built my first system on AMD 133mhz '486. Since then he abandoned AMD on his last workstation build and went all Intel. I have a FX-8150 and a FX-8350 in my builds right now. He has given up on AMD and I'm not far behind. I'm looking at my next workstation build sometime in 2016. I'm not ready to completely abandon AMD. I'm gong to wait and see what the specs on the AM4 bring to the table but I expect to be disappointed.
A few months back we looked to see who might be interested in buying AMD and keeping as a whole. We didn't come up with any one. What we got was a list of people that might be interested in parts of AMD. Sony or Microsoft might buy their chip facilities since they do use AMD chips as the CPU/GPU in their consoles. AMD has a few patents that both Nvidia and Intel might be interested in picking up.
Realistically AMD is to far behind the technological curve in so many areas. Even looking at the specs to the new AM4 systems I can tell they are behind Intel in almost every aspect. AMD has always been behind Intel in the performance area for most of its life. But they where never so far behind that their lower prices didn't make up for. That is not true with the FX chips. The performance gap is not worth the lower cost.
Lets hope AMD gets their shit together. As I've said before. The fat lady hasn't sung yet on AMD but she is warming up in the bullpit. Lets hope that as she waddles up on stage AMD pulls a rabbit out of the hat and she falls off the stage into a tuba.