But the cops test his soap for a date rape drug? Did they bother to stop for a second and consider the likeliness of application? "Oh, honey, why don't you take a drink of this soap, it's delicious."
That's what I was thinking. If you can get your date to eat a bar of soap, I can't imagine you need GHB.
Intel can't copy AMD's advances. They'd have to license some tech to do so, and that's not very likely (I believe HTT for instance belongs to AMD).
Actually Hypertransport is an open standard and anyone can implement it. AMD doesn't have the clout to force proprietary standards on the market, so their only hope to have a standard adopted is to make it open and royalty free.
Which is why Intel will (probably) never implement it. They aren't interested in standards which they don't control. They already don't like the fact that AMD is cross-licensed for all x86 tech, which was part of the motivation for creating the entirely separate IA-64 ISA. When IA-64 failed and Intel was forced to implement x86-64, the only reason they used AMD's spec was because Microsoft said that they would only support one x86-64 ISA, and AMD got their first. Basically it took MS to out-monopoly Intel. So unless they are forced to use HT, they won't, and I can't see any way they could be forced. They may implement something similar -- they will have to in order to address multi-socket scalability -- but it will not be compatible.
AMD would love for Intel to copy their tech. Every time they do, it makes AMD look like the leader and Intel the follower. You could practically hear the screams of orgasmic joy from AMD when Intel announced EMT64.
My point was that the metrics are important, but the people buying the servers are going to do research regardless of the marketing material.
Tee hee hee! Of course, that's why there's all those ads in computer trade rags and the wall street journal, because the people buying servers always do their own research and never believe marketing materials.
AMD should market to their entire market.
Based on what? They can't exactly claim top performance right now. They can't claim longest battery life for laptops. They might be able to go after perf/dollar, but being mostly fab limited it helps them more to get higher margins, and Intel is being aggressive on pricing which doesn't leave them much room anyway.
AMD is playing to their strengths, and right now their biggest strength is perf/watt and the server market. If I'm not mistaken, the big full page add you are referencing has a picture of an Opteron -- not Athlon -- right in the middle, and refers to a server benchmark at the bottom.
Not really. Based on projected release dates, AMD is basically just releasing the results of simulations. They almost certainly don't have real silicon yet, and until they do, it'll be pretty hard for them to guess how fast they'll run.
Since the projected release date is in the next six months, I'll say it's quite certain that they have real silicon. It may not be the silicon they end up going to production with -- historically it's unlikely that rev A0 ends up being the production rev -- but they must have silicon for testing and validation by now or they'll never make the Q3 target. It can take 2-3 months to get a new mask set that changes the base layers through the fab, so if they find a single functional bug they eat up half the time until launch.
Though none of that contradicts my point -- that AMD is not talking about total system performance, they are talking about half of the performance equation. This is not what AMD has liked to talk about in the past, and is misleading to take by itself. The state of their current performance projections -- whether purely simulated or based on early silicon revs -- doesn't enter into it other than as the justification for the change.
In addition these processors are targeted at the server market, and in the server market performance per watt often matters more than performance per system. Power consumed is generally about linear with clock speed, so in this respect a faster clock rarely does any real good. Of course, there are other contributors to power consumption, but IPC and performance per watt tend to correlate to at least some degree.
Yes, performance/watt is now the metric of top importance, though if the performance is too low then you need too many machines -- low power or not -- to fit in your data center to get good enough throughput.
It's true that power scales linearly with frequency. IPC is still not a good measure of perf/watt. Higher IPC usually comes at the cost of more transistors and more transistors firing at once. Widening a data bus to be twice as wide, or doubling the width of a functional unit -- both of which Barcelona has done with the FP units -- has essentially the same effect on power as clocking the bus twice as fast. Maybe more because more transistors means more leakage, maybe less because the change is local rather than applied to the entire clock tree. Depending on how extensive the changes are, how many more transistors are added, it could come out either way.
In general, you can't say higher IPC is better for power. Now you could look at the Netburst architecture and think this isn't true, high frequency obviously sucks for power. In the limit that's true, but because to get that high frequency you need to have many pipe stages which means many more latches which have both dynamic power and static leakage power. It was the double whammy of the increasing dynamic power and the jump in static leakage current that started to become problematic at 90nm that doomed the high transistor count Prescott. But all this tells us is that 20+ stage pipelines are bad for power, and a bad idea in general. For more reasonable middle of the road designs, the tradeoff between IPC and frequency to get more perf/watt isn't as clear.
Sorry, but performance/watt has become one of the major metrics by which CPUs are chosen, especially in business and double especially in business server rooms. Performance/watt is the new performance/$, because wattage tells you how much the hardware is going to cost on a continual basis for both the electricity to run it and for the necessary air conditioning. These costs dominate over the initial cost of the hardware, and are thus more important. Plus, if you have limited space you have a limited heat capacity, and higher perf/watt means you can get more perf in your server room.
How is that different than what they've been saying all along?
Because they've been saying all along that it is overall performance that matters, while here they are keeping the discussion only in the realm of IPC. Performance in Instructions/second = IPC * Hz. If you talk only about IPC or only about frequency, then you're leaving out half the equation that results in the real number you want.
So while they are at least talking about benchmark scores and actual performance (can't really talk about IPC without them), the problem is that they are leaving out the effect of frequency. In the absence of any other information, "40% more IPC" isn't really any more informative than "40% more frequency". We can guess what frequencies Barcelona might come out at, and thus make some use of this information, but it is definitely a difference from AMD's old statements.
Clearly, the USSC is long past being a useful institution... The USSC is just one part of an entirely corrupt and out of control government.
The sad thing is that your entire post is true, except the part about it not being useful, solely by virtue of being the least corrupt and out of control branch of government. It even occasionally stops some of the worst abuses of the other two branches of government with no outside prompting. It's kinda strange that this is mostly due to the Justices being unelected appointments for life. Yay democracy?
That's the big thing. It's not just on the high end market AMD is having problems, it is the whole lineup, at least when it comes to processors. The Core series just rules, doesn't matter what level you are interested in them for.
It worries me. I'm an Intel fan, and have been for a long time, ever since having massive problems with Athlons back in the KT133 days, but AMD is the thing that's been forcing Intel to develop new technologies so fast. I sure don't want a single processor vendor out there for desktops. However unless they get their act together, we could be looking at that.
I don't think you need to worry that much. If AMD lags for a couple years, maybe, but even then I doubt AMD will fold.
For one thing, Opteron is still rocking the house in servers. Core 2 is a great core, no doubt, but Intel's system architecture still sucks compared to Hyertransport. This is significant because in the past AMD had very little presence in servers, so Intel could charge whatever they wanted in that market and use those extremely high margins to fund price wars with AMD on the desktop. Since the release of Opteron Intel's margins in the server market have dropped hugely and AMD has established itself very well.
Desktop is a less friendly picture, but still not so bad for AMD. Sure, they can't match Intel at the very top end, and people who want that very top end will buy Core 2. Go down a couple speed grades, and AMD is very competitive. They can't get the high margins that the very top end gives, but they can still make solid sales in this market. Personally, I never buy the top end anyway because of the disproportionately higher price, and for people like me AMD is still a good choice.
Mobile is AMD's real weak spot, but since it's a spot they've only recently been competing in anyway it's more a case of not being able to get into the market rather than losing an established market. This does give Intel a market where AMD doesn't compete strongly, similar to the server market in the K7 days but without the high margins of server parts. So while this is a weakness to be sure, it isn't a crippling weak spot. They have time to get their act together in this market, and hopefully they do.
I think the take away is that at this point in time AMD is well established enough that they probably aren't going to go anywhere. Certainly not as a result of a bad quarter. They've had bad years in the early 00s and are still around, and their position is only more secure today.
Which is good, because as you note Intel is only pushing the technology so hard because of pressure from AMD. They would have to produce faster parts anyway, just so people have something new to buy, but it wouldn't be as good. More importantly (to me at least) they could charge whatever the hell they wanted, like they used to, and enjoy ludicrous 70+% margins on their parts.
Yeah, and notice that they say "at the same frequency", when Intel currently has a frequency advantage (not as big as P4, but then again Core 2 isn't an IPC dog like P4 was). Not that I expect any minor improvements Intel makes in the next 60 months to produce their own 50% leap in performance, this comparison still seems very suspect. As in pure marketing BS.
However AMD doesn't need to attempt become relevent again. They are currently very relevent. Did Intel become irrelevent when they were behind AMD on performance? No. In the past, AMD did lose more by not having the performance crown, and one could certainly imagine the momentum they were gaining in the K7 days fading quickly if Intel had come out with a superior chip. But today, AMD has both the marketshare and the OEM support to be merely competitive performance-wise and still be relevent. So they lose out at the top speed grades. If they can continue to match up their products to Intel's at lower speed grades, and they will, then they will continue to be a good choice for many people, and will definitely still be relevent.
The computer knows exactly where you are, exactly what you are doing, and exactly where and when that rocket will blow up. The challenge is to make the computer ignore that enough of the time to convince you that its stupid. The bot does not "see" you, it's programmed to respond to your location only when you're within X of it.
While obviously "the computer" does know where you are, that information does not necessarily have to be given to the AI algorithm. Of course many times the information is given and the AI just selectively ignores it, yes. But it needn't be (and isn't in most games in the last few years as processor speed has gotten high enough) so simple as "within X", since computing visibility is a reasonably well solved problem. Making the AI not take into account the oracle knowledge of player location isn't really that hard. Heck, games as old as Doom did a decent job of making monsters react only when they would "see" you.
Game AI is currently an Artificial Stupidity problem, and will remain that way until we have bots that play via a video camera (or screen-scraper) pointing at a monitor and running the mouse itself.
No, it's artificial ignorance, because you're only limiting knowledge. And that's the easy part. The hard part is, given limited information, make a good choice, adapt to behavior by reacting in different ways. That's the artificial intelligence part, and it's the part that doesn't work well yet, only with good scripting.
Partner: "So, I heard your nutjob husband's legal theories were ruled unconstitutional and cost [US state] $[legal bill]..."
Mrs. T: "Well it gives him something to do while I bring home the bacon. The tough part is turning him down when he wants to help with my cases. I tell him the firm can't afford someone of his caliber!"
Which has everything to do with the Wii's unique controller and very little to do with EA or Madden.
No, no... It's because of EA's implementation of controls using the Wii's unique controller. The Wiimote, awesome as it is, is not a magic wand. It does not turn shit into gold, and it's perfectly possible for a game to implement shitty controls for the Wii. In fact, seeing how hard it seemed for some game studios to get simple analog stick + binary buttons controls working reasonably, I think the potential of shitty controls for the Wii is very high, and some of the games that are out there bear this out.
I'm not a fan of EA or Madden (nor have I played it on the Wii) but the reason people keep talking about Madden for the Wii is because EA did a good job of implementing the controls and creating a unique experience. Never would have happened without the Wii there in the first place, but hey that's the whole point of Nintendo's strategy, breaking game developers out of their old habits and getting them to do something new.
Not to defend that utterly retarded theory (for one thing, if they were going to artificially limit supply, they would have limited it to a level where they could still outsell the PS2)... But remember that the sale goes on Nintendo's books when they sell it to the retailer (or supply chain middleman, however it works), not when the retailer puts the box on the shelf for you to buy. So they could have theoretically opened the floodgates on their warehouses on April 1, sold a ton of units to retailers, and those boxes could still be winding their way to the retailers over here in the States.
But I agree that emotion, not logic, is the only thing supporting the theory.
You already have the suspend your sense of belief to really think that you will actually beat a computer in say a FPS where it can aim perfectly, or a fighting game where they can simply react to any move you might do. For example you can play the training mode in Soul Calibur and you'll quickly realize that the computer can guard counter every move you ever do forever, but of course they don't do that in the real game. Even on the super duper hard setting they give up after a while, even though they can do it forever on the training mode. Shin Akuma in various Street Fighter incarnations counters almost every move perfectly.
That's absolutely true, but is in some ways dependent on the game. In a fighting game, you can always see what your opponent is doing, so if you had perfect reaction time you could counter every move. In this type of a game, a computer could theoretically play "perfectly" and never lose.
In an FPS, this is not necessarily the case. Bots that can aim perfectly are quite potent, to be sure, but sometimes being smart can be just as important to actually winning. For example, if the AI bot has a predictible pattern through the map (as most bots I've played against do), then when you know where the bot's pathing takes them you can have fired a rocket at where they are going to be so it smacks into their feet right as they round the corner. Unless the bot "cheats", and sees your rocket through the wall, it won't be able to avoid it nor will it be able to retaliate because you've moved around the next corner already to line up your next ambush shot. An actual AI that attempted to learn your patterns, and change its own pattterns when it realizes that you've discovered them, would be a truly deadly opponent.
This is where the difference between algorithmic precision and speed vs actual intelligence becomes obvious. Parts of the game that require fast reflexes and precise aiming are where the computer dominates. Parts of the game that require strategy are where the computer lags severely. One can compensate for the other to various degrees depending on the game. Look at chess. Simply by examining as much of the tree of potential moves as possible it can beat a human player even though it has none of the strategy or intuition that makes the human player good. And ridiculously powerful computers can only just barely compete with the top human players by using the massive computation model.
But that's only talking about victory. To make an immersive experience, AI could do a much better job than if/else statements, at least in theory. An enemy character that reacted to your actions in a believable way would be much more immersive than one that only responds to a couple specific stimuli and has only a couple scripted strategies. A lot of FPS AIs I would call blatantly retarded and completely wooden and predictable, and that takes you out of the game regardless of whether you give the AI unnaturally perfect aim or not.
On the other hand, I'm realistic, and AI that really behaves in a believable way without scripting is a long way off. For now, if/else is the most bang for the buck. I'm just saying good AI could make for a much better gaming experience, and much better opponents, ones that are truly vexing to beat without having to make use of perfect aiming/reaction times. And it wouldn't feel as cheap as Akuma to boot.
And your acceptance of non-Free software now, today means that you'll still be asking for the same thing 10 years down the road. It's a long term losing strategy for very minimal short-term gain.
I don't think history bears that out at all. Ten years ago the choices for free software were much more limited, and you had to use non-free software to get a lot of things done. If you needed a high-quality office suite, web browser, spreadsheets, financial software, graphic editing software, plotting software, 3D drivers, or 3D modelling/CAD software, then you used closed source software. Period. Lots of people did use close source programs for these needs. Which, according to you, means that Open Office, Firefox, Gnucalc, Gimp, Blender, the free 3D driver projects, etc etc don't exist. But they do.
The fact is that the GP was correct: History has shown that the existence and widespread use of closed source software on Linux does not hinder the development of free software. In fact, it often enhances the development of free software by creating Linux users that want that software. If there was no closed source program available for Linux, then they wouldn't be using Linux at all, and there'd be no demand for a free software application to suit those needs.
Frankly I think we have the perfect combination of distros right now. Debian forms the solid, and completely free, base operating system. Ubuntu takes Debian and adds both polish and selective non-free parts to fill in the gaps that still remain in the completely free OS. Making Linux more useable for more people is a long-term winning strategy, because it brings more people and more needs to the free software world, and they'll already be here and ready when free software covers another gap. The fact is that people need to get work done today, and allowing them to get that work done despite the fact that a free software solution is not ready yet is a positive thing.
Free software is winning. It's going to win, for largely pragmatic reasons even because once mature free software just works better in many ways. But it hasn't won yet, and the drive for purity for everyone is detrimental.
I think I made it clear that the Iraqi's don't think we're doing them any favors, and that this is why they won't help us. I'm well aware of their reasons to not like us. So don't call me a hypocrite. Unless you think I just like putting "free" in quotes for no reason.
It's the political situation behind the conflict that makes it unwinnable, and that is why we should have never gotten into the conflict in the first place. This is one way in which Iraq is very similar to Vietnam.
I'd have to disagree. Like the stock (that you classify as tangible), your gnome is a claim to a certain kind of performance (from Blizzard). Yes, Blizzard could "inflate" your gnome into worthlessness, or delete it, for the heck of it. Just like the board of directors could tell you they're not sharing dividends with shareholders anymore. What creates value for the gnome and the shares is the (well-founded) expectation that that won't happen.
The only "performance" I get from Blizzard involves pushing those self-same bits around on the server they already exist on. That gnome represents nothing in the real world; it's existence is completely self-contained in its virtual world.
The share of stock, however, represents something in the real world: Partial ownership of the company that issued the stock, and a proportionate amount of voting power. If I own enough of these shares, I could demand that the board start sharing dividends or I would replace them. That is the real world connection that turns bits into something tangible, because it is designed to create tangible effects in the real world.
That's the difference, and it is plain and real. It is that ownership that forms the fundamental value of a stock, and is why investors trade stocks and not gnomes.
I don't see a moral problem with a tool I created being used for war. Everything can be subverted for use in war; what would you do, condemn farmers for making grains that is turned into bread which is used to feed the soldiers which are an integral part of the horrible war machine? War happens, war must be fought effectively, and frankly given that I'm not going to sweat a soldier using Linux in a weapon system any more than a farmer should sweat a soldier having a sandwich for lunch.
I do have a problem, though, with war profiteering. War is horrible, and profiting directly from the terrible suffering caused does create a moral conflict in my mind, especially because it creates the incentive to create more war and suffering. If our government wasn't packed to the gills with former defense contractors, would we be involved in fewer conflicts? I believe so.
From that standpoint, using Linux in a weapon system is a good thing. Some defense contractor didn't get paid billions of dollars to develop an embedded OS for that system. Oh sure they got paid billions for doing all the other parts of the contract, but that's one less way in which people profited directly from war. That's a long way from taking the profit out of the war, but since that wasn't the goal of Linux to begin with, I think all Linux developers can look at this as an unintended positive outcome.
What you, and everyone who thinks along these lines, don't understand is that all military conflicts are by definition political. Not only that, but you also fail to define "won". In military terms, we already won. We just failed to keep the peace in Iraq.
Yes, exactly. Especially in a conflict like this the goals are political and you cannot separate the military methods used from those goals.
I have no doubt that the rules of engagement hamstring soldiers in life-and-death situations, and result in insurgents escaping. The thing is, in any situation where the soldier actually has a potential target, they're already way ahead of the game. When the IED goes off under the HUMMWV, when the suicide bomber in the buick blows up the car at the checkpoint, who exactly is the soldier supposed to shoot at? The guy looking around the corner? He could be the trigger man, or he could be an innocent bystander, or he could be a lookout working for the insurgents. You can't figure that out after the fact.
The real problem in Iraq is a failure of intelligence. We have no insight into the workings of the insurgents, we have no ability to infiltrate them without the explicit help of the local population, and they simply are not helping us. The local population, even the ones who are glad we invaded and took out Saddam, even the ones who look forward to a stable democratic government, are not truly on our side. They don't see us as helping, and so they aren't helping us. Does anyone think that showing less restraint, being less selective about who we shoot at, is going to convince them to aid us?
You see the same thinking -- that having less restraint would have turned a loss into a Victory -- about Vietnam. But really the fundamental problem was the same -- when it came down to it, the people did not support us, they undermined us. We won every battle, but lost the war, simply because it wasn't the battles that were important. We could have "won" if we wiped out every village the VC had ever been seen near, just like we could "win" in Iraq if every time an IED blew up in a neighborhood and nobody told us who set it off we leveled the entire town. We'd absolutely never have the people's support, but we could "win" according to a goal post that has nothing to do with the reason our troops were there in the first place.
I think the key learning here is that there are types of conflicts where our military and our political reality make victory nigh impossible. We are not willing to wipe out whole populations in the name of "freeing" them, ergo we will fail in the face of any long-term insurgency that has a substantial degree of support among the populace. People who want to "win" by reducing restraint want to "win" by changing the name of the game from "free" to "wipe out". You could do that just to claim a victory, but that's like changing a losing game of Hearts into 52 Card Pickup -- you "win" by losing the real game even worse.
Please! A share of stock is ownership of a piece of the company. It gives you the right to vote on decisions made by the board of directors, and it may entitle you to receive dividends based on the company's profits. There are limitations on a company's ability to issue new stock. These are the reasons why stocks are tangible and have value. Yes, your stock is probably just bits on server that keeps track of how many you own, but those bits represent actual ownership of an actual company. When someone buys my stock, they are paying for that ownership, not for the bits that represent that ownership. This is quite tangible.
Your gnome is bits on a server, and that's it. Those bits don't even represent anything in the real world; the bits are the entirety of the thing's existence. The server owners could delete those bits at no cost except your annoyance, or they could duplicate those bits so everyone on the server has three dozen exact copies of everything you own. If you can get someone to buy those bits from you, they are still buying nothing but bits. There is no connection to anything outside the world of bits, and hence the gnome is truly intangible.
I mean that's just silly. My bank account is just data on a server -- except that data represents very real, very tangible currency. Cash is no more tangible than your WoW character -- yeah right!
All this means is the same thing that it has always meant regarding taxation: The second my in-tangible, non-existent thing (my online gaming bits) is turned into something tangible (like a stock or wad of cash) then you tax it. How much do you value the bits at for tax purposes? The amount they were sold for. Simple. And we're done. We don't need a whole new section of tax code about the value of things that don't exist or even represent things that exist.
Yeah I read the article, and I don't know where you're getting that. I see them de-emphasizing programming experience for acceptance to the program, and I see them talking more about uses and applications for computers than just the programming of them. No mention of actually changing the curriculum. Maybe adjusting teaching styles, but what's wrong with that? The difference between what these people think women want and the men I described in my post thinking they know what women want is that the people at CMU actually talked to women to get an idea of what they wanted, and have shown success as a result.
What I'm trying to say is if women don't want to enroll, so be it. Why force this 'positive discrimination'?
Because of the negative discrimination that is artificially limiting the number of women in the field in the first place. Discrimination in the form of men assuming that women "don't want to enroll", simply because they're women and thus less interested in our manly computer engineering/sciences.
Look at this thread. I guarantee (in part because a lot has already shown up) that you'll see men in computer fields stating as fact that women don't really want to be in computer science. You'll see them state as fact that women aren't as good in computers as men. That it's an obvious "natural difference" that means that there really shouldn't be as many women in CS, only those rare few that have what it takes to match up with the men, and thus recruiting more is futile or even counter-productive. And then they'll say that all this proves that there isn't any discrimination against women in CS. Despite the fact that the real reason there are few women in CS -- men in the field discriminating against women -- is put blatantly before them every time they look in the mirror.
It's the same thing that went on in the 70s and 80s with women in the fields of law, business, and medicine. Fields dominated by men, and those men said that clearly women neither wanted nor were capable of succeeding in these fields, and hence would continue to be minorities. Well time passed and the women proved both that they wanted to and that they could, and you'd look like an archaic dinosaur with severe damage to the tact centers of the brain if you said otherwise. Computers, a field that has been dominated by a particularly anti-social breed of men even more prone to insulation than lawyers or MBAS, is the next stop. Encouraging women, letting them know that there are people in the field who welcome them, that the ones telling them what they want to do with their own lives are dinosaurs on the way out, that's helpful.
It may be that once we have gotten rid of all the sex discrimination in the computer field that there will still be fewer women in the field. It may be that there is in fact natural tendency that affects the ratio of men vs women. There's nothing wrong with that. The problem is that if you think that we are at that point, today, where sex discrimination doesn't exist? Then you're 1) male and 2) delusional.
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But the cops test his soap for a date rape drug? Did they bother to stop for a second and consider the likeliness of application? "Oh, honey, why don't you take a drink of this soap, it's delicious."
That's what I was thinking. If you can get your date to eat a bar of soap, I can't imagine you need GHB.
It's only a stash box if you keep your stash in it. Otherwise it's just a box.
Intel can't copy AMD's advances. They'd have to license some tech to do so, and that's not very likely (I believe HTT for instance belongs to AMD).
Actually Hypertransport is an open standard and anyone can implement it. AMD doesn't have the clout to force proprietary standards on the market, so their only hope to have a standard adopted is to make it open and royalty free.
Which is why Intel will (probably) never implement it. They aren't interested in standards which they don't control. They already don't like the fact that AMD is cross-licensed for all x86 tech, which was part of the motivation for creating the entirely separate IA-64 ISA. When IA-64 failed and Intel was forced to implement x86-64, the only reason they used AMD's spec was because Microsoft said that they would only support one x86-64 ISA, and AMD got their first. Basically it took MS to out-monopoly Intel. So unless they are forced to use HT, they won't, and I can't see any way they could be forced. They may implement something similar -- they will have to in order to address multi-socket scalability -- but it will not be compatible.
AMD would love for Intel to copy their tech. Every time they do, it makes AMD look like the leader and Intel the follower. You could practically hear the screams of orgasmic joy from AMD when Intel announced EMT64.
My point was that the metrics are important, but the people buying the servers are going to do research regardless of the marketing material.
Tee hee hee! Of course, that's why there's all those ads in computer trade rags and the wall street journal, because the people buying servers always do their own research and never believe marketing materials.
AMD should market to their entire market.
Based on what? They can't exactly claim top performance right now. They can't claim longest battery life for laptops. They might be able to go after perf/dollar, but being mostly fab limited it helps them more to get higher margins, and Intel is being aggressive on pricing which doesn't leave them much room anyway.
AMD is playing to their strengths, and right now their biggest strength is perf/watt and the server market. If I'm not mistaken, the big full page add you are referencing has a picture of an Opteron -- not Athlon -- right in the middle, and refers to a server benchmark at the bottom.
Not really. Based on projected release dates, AMD is basically just releasing the results of simulations. They almost certainly don't have real silicon yet, and until they do, it'll be pretty hard for them to guess how fast they'll run.
Since the projected release date is in the next six months, I'll say it's quite certain that they have real silicon. It may not be the silicon they end up going to production with -- historically it's unlikely that rev A0 ends up being the production rev -- but they must have silicon for testing and validation by now or they'll never make the Q3 target. It can take 2-3 months to get a new mask set that changes the base layers through the fab, so if they find a single functional bug they eat up half the time until launch.
Though none of that contradicts my point -- that AMD is not talking about total system performance, they are talking about half of the performance equation. This is not what AMD has liked to talk about in the past, and is misleading to take by itself. The state of their current performance projections -- whether purely simulated or based on early silicon revs -- doesn't enter into it other than as the justification for the change.
In addition these processors are targeted at the server market, and in the server market performance per watt often matters more than performance per system. Power consumed is generally about linear with clock speed, so in this respect a faster clock rarely does any real good. Of course, there are other contributors to power consumption, but IPC and performance per watt tend to correlate to at least some degree.
Yes, performance/watt is now the metric of top importance, though if the performance is too low then you need too many machines -- low power or not -- to fit in your data center to get good enough throughput.
It's true that power scales linearly with frequency. IPC is still not a good measure of perf/watt. Higher IPC usually comes at the cost of more transistors and more transistors firing at once. Widening a data bus to be twice as wide, or doubling the width of a functional unit -- both of which Barcelona has done with the FP units -- has essentially the same effect on power as clocking the bus twice as fast. Maybe more because more transistors means more leakage, maybe less because the change is local rather than applied to the entire clock tree. Depending on how extensive the changes are, how many more transistors are added, it could come out either way.
In general, you can't say higher IPC is better for power. Now you could look at the Netburst architecture and think this isn't true, high frequency obviously sucks for power. In the limit that's true, but because to get that high frequency you need to have many pipe stages which means many more latches which have both dynamic power and static leakage power. It was the double whammy of the increasing dynamic power and the jump in static leakage current that started to become problematic at 90nm that doomed the high transistor count Prescott. But all this tells us is that 20+ stage pipelines are bad for power, and a bad idea in general. For more reasonable middle of the road designs, the tradeoff between IPC and frequency to get more perf/watt isn't as clear.
Sorry, but performance/watt has become one of the major metrics by which CPUs are chosen, especially in business and double especially in business server rooms. Performance/watt is the new performance/$, because wattage tells you how much the hardware is going to cost on a continual basis for both the electricity to run it and for the necessary air conditioning. These costs dominate over the initial cost of the hardware, and are thus more important. Plus, if you have limited space you have a limited heat capacity, and higher perf/watt means you can get more perf in your server room.
How is that different than what they've been saying all along?
Because they've been saying all along that it is overall performance that matters, while here they are keeping the discussion only in the realm of IPC. Performance in Instructions/second = IPC * Hz. If you talk only about IPC or only about frequency, then you're leaving out half the equation that results in the real number you want.
So while they are at least talking about benchmark scores and actual performance (can't really talk about IPC without them), the problem is that they are leaving out the effect of frequency. In the absence of any other information, "40% more IPC" isn't really any more informative than "40% more frequency". We can guess what frequencies Barcelona might come out at, and thus make some use of this information, but it is definitely a difference from AMD's old statements.
Clearly, the USSC is long past being a useful institution... The USSC is just one part of an entirely corrupt and out of control government.
The sad thing is that your entire post is true, except the part about it not being useful, solely by virtue of being the least corrupt and out of control branch of government. It even occasionally stops some of the worst abuses of the other two branches of government with no outside prompting. It's kinda strange that this is mostly due to the Justices being unelected appointments for life. Yay democracy?
That's the big thing. It's not just on the high end market AMD is having problems, it is the whole lineup, at least when it comes to processors. The Core series just rules, doesn't matter what level you are interested in them for.
It worries me. I'm an Intel fan, and have been for a long time, ever since having massive problems with Athlons back in the KT133 days, but AMD is the thing that's been forcing Intel to develop new technologies so fast. I sure don't want a single processor vendor out there for desktops. However unless they get their act together, we could be looking at that.
I don't think you need to worry that much. If AMD lags for a couple years, maybe, but even then I doubt AMD will fold.
For one thing, Opteron is still rocking the house in servers. Core 2 is a great core, no doubt, but Intel's system architecture still sucks compared to Hyertransport. This is significant because in the past AMD had very little presence in servers, so Intel could charge whatever they wanted in that market and use those extremely high margins to fund price wars with AMD on the desktop. Since the release of Opteron Intel's margins in the server market have dropped hugely and AMD has established itself very well.
Desktop is a less friendly picture, but still not so bad for AMD. Sure, they can't match Intel at the very top end, and people who want that very top end will buy Core 2. Go down a couple speed grades, and AMD is very competitive. They can't get the high margins that the very top end gives, but they can still make solid sales in this market. Personally, I never buy the top end anyway because of the disproportionately higher price, and for people like me AMD is still a good choice.
Mobile is AMD's real weak spot, but since it's a spot they've only recently been competing in anyway it's more a case of not being able to get into the market rather than losing an established market. This does give Intel a market where AMD doesn't compete strongly, similar to the server market in the K7 days but without the high margins of server parts. So while this is a weakness to be sure, it isn't a crippling weak spot. They have time to get their act together in this market, and hopefully they do.
I think the take away is that at this point in time AMD is well established enough that they probably aren't going to go anywhere. Certainly not as a result of a bad quarter. They've had bad years in the early 00s and are still around, and their position is only more secure today.
Which is good, because as you note Intel is only pushing the technology so hard because of pressure from AMD. They would have to produce faster parts anyway, just so people have something new to buy, but it wouldn't be as good. More importantly (to me at least) they could charge whatever the hell they wanted, like they used to, and enjoy ludicrous 70+% margins on their parts.
Obviously that was supposed to say "in the next 6 months", no "60". I'm betting Intel can produce at least a 50% speed improvement in 5 years. :P
Yeah, and notice that they say "at the same frequency", when Intel currently has a frequency advantage (not as big as P4, but then again Core 2 isn't an IPC dog like P4 was). Not that I expect any minor improvements Intel makes in the next 60 months to produce their own 50% leap in performance, this comparison still seems very suspect. As in pure marketing BS.
However AMD doesn't need to attempt become relevent again. They are currently very relevent. Did Intel become irrelevent when they were behind AMD on performance? No. In the past, AMD did lose more by not having the performance crown, and one could certainly imagine the momentum they were gaining in the K7 days fading quickly if Intel had come out with a superior chip. But today, AMD has both the marketshare and the OEM support to be merely competitive performance-wise and still be relevent. So they lose out at the top speed grades. If they can continue to match up their products to Intel's at lower speed grades, and they will, then they will continue to be a good choice for many people, and will definitely still be relevent.
The computer knows exactly where you are, exactly what you are doing, and exactly where and when that rocket will blow up. The challenge is to make the computer ignore that enough of the time to convince you that its stupid. The bot does not "see" you, it's programmed to respond to your location only when you're within X of it.
While obviously "the computer" does know where you are, that information does not necessarily have to be given to the AI algorithm. Of course many times the information is given and the AI just selectively ignores it, yes. But it needn't be (and isn't in most games in the last few years as processor speed has gotten high enough) so simple as "within X", since computing visibility is a reasonably well solved problem. Making the AI not take into account the oracle knowledge of player location isn't really that hard. Heck, games as old as Doom did a decent job of making monsters react only when they would "see" you.
Game AI is currently an Artificial Stupidity problem, and will remain that way until we have bots that play via a video camera (or screen-scraper) pointing at a monitor and running the mouse itself.
No, it's artificial ignorance, because you're only limiting knowledge. And that's the easy part. The hard part is, given limited information, make a good choice, adapt to behavior by reacting in different ways. That's the artificial intelligence part, and it's the part that doesn't work well yet, only with good scripting.
Partner: "So, I heard your nutjob husband's legal theories were ruled unconstitutional and cost [US state] $[legal bill]..."
Mrs. T: "Well it gives him something to do while I bring home the bacon. The tough part is turning him down when he wants to help with my cases. I tell him the firm can't afford someone of his caliber!"
Partner: "Yeah, can't afford to lose!"
Both: "Ha ha ha ha ha!"
Mrs. T: "But seriously, he has a huge johnson."
Partner: "Ah... I knew it wasn't his brains."
Which has everything to do with the Wii's unique controller and very little to do with EA or Madden.
No, no... It's because of EA's implementation of controls using the Wii's unique controller. The Wiimote, awesome as it is, is not a magic wand. It does not turn shit into gold, and it's perfectly possible for a game to implement shitty controls for the Wii. In fact, seeing how hard it seemed for some game studios to get simple analog stick + binary buttons controls working reasonably, I think the potential of shitty controls for the Wii is very high, and some of the games that are out there bear this out.
I'm not a fan of EA or Madden (nor have I played it on the Wii) but the reason people keep talking about Madden for the Wii is because EA did a good job of implementing the controls and creating a unique experience. Never would have happened without the Wii there in the first place, but hey that's the whole point of Nintendo's strategy, breaking game developers out of their old habits and getting them to do something new.
Not to defend that utterly retarded theory (for one thing, if they were going to artificially limit supply, they would have limited it to a level where they could still outsell the PS2)... But remember that the sale goes on Nintendo's books when they sell it to the retailer (or supply chain middleman, however it works), not when the retailer puts the box on the shelf for you to buy. So they could have theoretically opened the floodgates on their warehouses on April 1, sold a ton of units to retailers, and those boxes could still be winding their way to the retailers over here in the States.
But I agree that emotion, not logic, is the only thing supporting the theory.
You already have the suspend your sense of belief to really think that you will actually beat a computer in say a FPS where it can aim perfectly, or a fighting game where they can simply react to any move you might do. For example you can play the training mode in Soul Calibur and you'll quickly realize that the computer can guard counter every move you ever do forever, but of course they don't do that in the real game. Even on the super duper hard setting they give up after a while, even though they can do it forever on the training mode. Shin Akuma in various Street Fighter incarnations counters almost every move perfectly.
That's absolutely true, but is in some ways dependent on the game. In a fighting game, you can always see what your opponent is doing, so if you had perfect reaction time you could counter every move. In this type of a game, a computer could theoretically play "perfectly" and never lose.
In an FPS, this is not necessarily the case. Bots that can aim perfectly are quite potent, to be sure, but sometimes being smart can be just as important to actually winning. For example, if the AI bot has a predictible pattern through the map (as most bots I've played against do), then when you know where the bot's pathing takes them you can have fired a rocket at where they are going to be so it smacks into their feet right as they round the corner. Unless the bot "cheats", and sees your rocket through the wall, it won't be able to avoid it nor will it be able to retaliate because you've moved around the next corner already to line up your next ambush shot. An actual AI that attempted to learn your patterns, and change its own pattterns when it realizes that you've discovered them, would be a truly deadly opponent.
This is where the difference between algorithmic precision and speed vs actual intelligence becomes obvious. Parts of the game that require fast reflexes and precise aiming are where the computer dominates. Parts of the game that require strategy are where the computer lags severely. One can compensate for the other to various degrees depending on the game. Look at chess. Simply by examining as much of the tree of potential moves as possible it can beat a human player even though it has none of the strategy or intuition that makes the human player good. And ridiculously powerful computers can only just barely compete with the top human players by using the massive computation model.
But that's only talking about victory. To make an immersive experience, AI could do a much better job than if/else statements, at least in theory. An enemy character that reacted to your actions in a believable way would be much more immersive than one that only responds to a couple specific stimuli and has only a couple scripted strategies. A lot of FPS AIs I would call blatantly retarded and completely wooden and predictable, and that takes you out of the game regardless of whether you give the AI unnaturally perfect aim or not.
On the other hand, I'm realistic, and AI that really behaves in a believable way without scripting is a long way off. For now, if/else is the most bang for the buck. I'm just saying good AI could make for a much better gaming experience, and much better opponents, ones that are truly vexing to beat without having to make use of perfect aiming/reaction times. And it wouldn't feel as cheap as Akuma to boot.
And your acceptance of non-Free software now, today means that you'll still be asking for the same thing 10 years down the road. It's a long term losing strategy for very minimal short-term gain.
I don't think history bears that out at all. Ten years ago the choices for free software were much more limited, and you had to use non-free software to get a lot of things done. If you needed a high-quality office suite, web browser, spreadsheets, financial software, graphic editing software, plotting software, 3D drivers, or 3D modelling/CAD software, then you used closed source software. Period. Lots of people did use close source programs for these needs. Which, according to you, means that Open Office, Firefox, Gnucalc, Gimp, Blender, the free 3D driver projects, etc etc don't exist. But they do.
The fact is that the GP was correct: History has shown that the existence and widespread use of closed source software on Linux does not hinder the development of free software. In fact, it often enhances the development of free software by creating Linux users that want that software. If there was no closed source program available for Linux, then they wouldn't be using Linux at all, and there'd be no demand for a free software application to suit those needs.
Frankly I think we have the perfect combination of distros right now. Debian forms the solid, and completely free, base operating system. Ubuntu takes Debian and adds both polish and selective non-free parts to fill in the gaps that still remain in the completely free OS. Making Linux more useable for more people is a long-term winning strategy, because it brings more people and more needs to the free software world, and they'll already be here and ready when free software covers another gap. The fact is that people need to get work done today, and allowing them to get that work done despite the fact that a free software solution is not ready yet is a positive thing.
Free software is winning. It's going to win, for largely pragmatic reasons even because once mature free software just works better in many ways. But it hasn't won yet, and the drive for purity for everyone is detrimental.
I think I made it clear that the Iraqi's don't think we're doing them any favors, and that this is why they won't help us. I'm well aware of their reasons to not like us. So don't call me a hypocrite. Unless you think I just like putting "free" in quotes for no reason.
It's the political situation behind the conflict that makes it unwinnable, and that is why we should have never gotten into the conflict in the first place. This is one way in which Iraq is very similar to Vietnam.
I'd have to disagree. Like the stock (that you classify as tangible), your gnome is a claim to a certain kind of performance (from Blizzard). Yes, Blizzard could "inflate" your gnome into worthlessness, or delete it, for the heck of it. Just like the board of directors could tell you they're not sharing dividends with shareholders anymore. What creates value for the gnome and the shares is the (well-founded) expectation that that won't happen.
The only "performance" I get from Blizzard involves pushing those self-same bits around on the server they already exist on. That gnome represents nothing in the real world; it's existence is completely self-contained in its virtual world.
The share of stock, however, represents something in the real world: Partial ownership of the company that issued the stock, and a proportionate amount of voting power. If I own enough of these shares, I could demand that the board start sharing dividends or I would replace them. That is the real world connection that turns bits into something tangible, because it is designed to create tangible effects in the real world.
That's the difference, and it is plain and real. It is that ownership that forms the fundamental value of a stock, and is why investors trade stocks and not gnomes.
I don't see a moral problem with a tool I created being used for war. Everything can be subverted for use in war; what would you do, condemn farmers for making grains that is turned into bread which is used to feed the soldiers which are an integral part of the horrible war machine? War happens, war must be fought effectively, and frankly given that I'm not going to sweat a soldier using Linux in a weapon system any more than a farmer should sweat a soldier having a sandwich for lunch.
I do have a problem, though, with war profiteering. War is horrible, and profiting directly from the terrible suffering caused does create a moral conflict in my mind, especially because it creates the incentive to create more war and suffering. If our government wasn't packed to the gills with former defense contractors, would we be involved in fewer conflicts? I believe so.
From that standpoint, using Linux in a weapon system is a good thing. Some defense contractor didn't get paid billions of dollars to develop an embedded OS for that system. Oh sure they got paid billions for doing all the other parts of the contract, but that's one less way in which people profited directly from war. That's a long way from taking the profit out of the war, but since that wasn't the goal of Linux to begin with, I think all Linux developers can look at this as an unintended positive outcome.
What you, and everyone who thinks along these lines, don't understand is that all military conflicts are by definition political. Not only that, but you also fail to define "won". In military terms, we already won. We just failed to keep the peace in Iraq.
Yes, exactly. Especially in a conflict like this the goals are political and you cannot separate the military methods used from those goals.
I have no doubt that the rules of engagement hamstring soldiers in life-and-death situations, and result in insurgents escaping. The thing is, in any situation where the soldier actually has a potential target, they're already way ahead of the game. When the IED goes off under the HUMMWV, when the suicide bomber in the buick blows up the car at the checkpoint, who exactly is the soldier supposed to shoot at? The guy looking around the corner? He could be the trigger man, or he could be an innocent bystander, or he could be a lookout working for the insurgents. You can't figure that out after the fact.
The real problem in Iraq is a failure of intelligence. We have no insight into the workings of the insurgents, we have no ability to infiltrate them without the explicit help of the local population, and they simply are not helping us. The local population, even the ones who are glad we invaded and took out Saddam, even the ones who look forward to a stable democratic government, are not truly on our side. They don't see us as helping, and so they aren't helping us. Does anyone think that showing less restraint, being less selective about who we shoot at, is going to convince them to aid us?
You see the same thinking -- that having less restraint would have turned a loss into a Victory -- about Vietnam. But really the fundamental problem was the same -- when it came down to it, the people did not support us, they undermined us. We won every battle, but lost the war, simply because it wasn't the battles that were important. We could have "won" if we wiped out every village the VC had ever been seen near, just like we could "win" in Iraq if every time an IED blew up in a neighborhood and nobody told us who set it off we leveled the entire town. We'd absolutely never have the people's support, but we could "win" according to a goal post that has nothing to do with the reason our troops were there in the first place.
I think the key learning here is that there are types of conflicts where our military and our political reality make victory nigh impossible. We are not willing to wipe out whole populations in the name of "freeing" them, ergo we will fail in the face of any long-term insurgency that has a substantial degree of support among the populace. People who want to "win" by reducing restraint want to "win" by changing the name of the game from "free" to "wipe out". You could do that just to claim a victory, but that's like changing a losing game of Hearts into 52 Card Pickup -- you "win" by losing the real game even worse.
Please! A share of stock is ownership of a piece of the company. It gives you the right to vote on decisions made by the board of directors, and it may entitle you to receive dividends based on the company's profits. There are limitations on a company's ability to issue new stock. These are the reasons why stocks are tangible and have value. Yes, your stock is probably just bits on server that keeps track of how many you own, but those bits represent actual ownership of an actual company. When someone buys my stock, they are paying for that ownership, not for the bits that represent that ownership. This is quite tangible.
Your gnome is bits on a server, and that's it. Those bits don't even represent anything in the real world; the bits are the entirety of the thing's existence. The server owners could delete those bits at no cost except your annoyance, or they could duplicate those bits so everyone on the server has three dozen exact copies of everything you own. If you can get someone to buy those bits from you, they are still buying nothing but bits. There is no connection to anything outside the world of bits, and hence the gnome is truly intangible.
I mean that's just silly. My bank account is just data on a server -- except that data represents very real, very tangible currency. Cash is no more tangible than your WoW character -- yeah right!
All this means is the same thing that it has always meant regarding taxation: The second my in-tangible, non-existent thing (my online gaming bits) is turned into something tangible (like a stock or wad of cash) then you tax it. How much do you value the bits at for tax purposes? The amount they were sold for. Simple. And we're done. We don't need a whole new section of tax code about the value of things that don't exist or even represent things that exist.
Yeah I read the article, and I don't know where you're getting that. I see them de-emphasizing programming experience for acceptance to the program, and I see them talking more about uses and applications for computers than just the programming of them. No mention of actually changing the curriculum. Maybe adjusting teaching styles, but what's wrong with that? The difference between what these people think women want and the men I described in my post thinking they know what women want is that the people at CMU actually talked to women to get an idea of what they wanted, and have shown success as a result.
What I'm trying to say is if women don't want to enroll, so be it. Why force this 'positive discrimination'?
Because of the negative discrimination that is artificially limiting the number of women in the field in the first place. Discrimination in the form of men assuming that women "don't want to enroll", simply because they're women and thus less interested in our manly computer engineering/sciences.
Look at this thread. I guarantee (in part because a lot has already shown up) that you'll see men in computer fields stating as fact that women don't really want to be in computer science. You'll see them state as fact that women aren't as good in computers as men. That it's an obvious "natural difference" that means that there really shouldn't be as many women in CS, only those rare few that have what it takes to match up with the men, and thus recruiting more is futile or even counter-productive. And then they'll say that all this proves that there isn't any discrimination against women in CS. Despite the fact that the real reason there are few women in CS -- men in the field discriminating against women -- is put blatantly before them every time they look in the mirror.
It's the same thing that went on in the 70s and 80s with women in the fields of law, business, and medicine. Fields dominated by men, and those men said that clearly women neither wanted nor were capable of succeeding in these fields, and hence would continue to be minorities. Well time passed and the women proved both that they wanted to and that they could, and you'd look like an archaic dinosaur with severe damage to the tact centers of the brain if you said otherwise. Computers, a field that has been dominated by a particularly anti-social breed of men even more prone to insulation than lawyers or MBAS, is the next stop. Encouraging women, letting them know that there are people in the field who welcome them, that the ones telling them what they want to do with their own lives are dinosaurs on the way out, that's helpful.
It may be that once we have gotten rid of all the sex discrimination in the computer field that there will still be fewer women in the field. It may be that there is in fact natural tendency that affects the ratio of men vs women. There's nothing wrong with that. The problem is that if you think that we are at that point, today, where sex discrimination doesn't exist? Then you're 1) male and 2) delusional.
That was stupid. Leave the works of Bill Hicks alone.