That sounds so much like what people have been saying about *nix systems for years.
Which is exactly what I was thinking... and I can't help but think in response: Is this really the first Microsoft OS to have built-in file caching? I mean, really? I guess I just assumed that around the same time Windows got big-boy OS features like memory protection that they also got file caching. I'm still assuming I'm not understanding, because it seems ridiculous.
It's not a karma whore trick. It's a recognition that a good number of/.ers either work for NASA or have their heads well up NASA's ass. They WILL mod down any criticism, valid or no. It's a reality.
Yeah, yeah, I've heard that one before. "There's a secret cabal of moderators that will mod down my unpopular opinion. Oh, look at that, beyond all expectations my post has been modded up! Who would have thought!"
Even if this appearance is deceiving, "I know I will be modded down for this" is a karma whore trick. Don't wanna whore? Don't use it.
I wasn't aware that NASA was making big bucks today. As far as I knew, it already was the case where NASA spent all the money, and private enterprise -- as in aerospace contractors -- reaped the harvest.
It's basically the same with universities here as you describe across the pond. They are at the forefront of pure research, but it's the corporations that take the pure research ideas and apply it and make the cash. Sometimes the companies fund university research, sometimes it's the government that funds it, either way the university isn't making a profit on the deal. But that's okay, because as long as they continue to exist while doing pure research then there is benefit.
The NASA I'm envisioning, btw, is a much smaller organization anyway. They wouldn't be in the business of building a space shuttle. Mars rovers and Saturn probes, sure. Let the ones with the profit motive figure out how to move people and cargo into space efficiently.
Option B is that the moving people and cargo aspect of NASA gets taken over directly by the defense department, as the privatization of space would probably spurn them to see the militarization of space as essential.
I had the highest respect for John Glenn until he traded political favors to then-president Clinton for a joy-ride on the shuttle. He is in no position to lecture anyone on NASA waste.
Man, I'd trade a fucking lot more than mere political favors to get a joy-ride on the shuttle.
On the other hand he had already been to space on multiple occasions. He should have traded political favors to get me a ride on the shuttle. Then I'd still respect him.
So Mr. Glen, if you're reading this, re-read my first sentence but with a *wink wink Johnny-boy* at the end.
I know you're using the oldest karma whore trick in the book, but
The launch of SpaceShipOne should have been a wake-up call for the U.S. The future is NOT in NASA.
I agree that private funding is the future of space. I do see a role for NASA in the forseeable future at least for the pure research and exploration roles that they are currently doing a good job at. There's not much impetus to send a probe to Io just to see what the place looks like, unless you have a budget designed around ideas like that. Private interprise wouldn't see the ROI -- certainly not until gathering resources from another body becomes feasible, and even then they'd need some reason to think resources were there. However, for a space station or cheap flights to the moon, I'm looking at the private ventures.
"Speed bump"? You mean it's supposed to keep my computer slow(er)?
Is that what those are for? I thought it was so that you knew you were going fast enough when you caught air off the bump. If you're going too slow, it's not a bump, right?
Well, that's one way to look at it, another is that Intel has finally decided to unleash the flood gates on their own manufacturing and produce huge caches. Before the most recent generation of chips, Intel's desktop parts weren't sporting very big caches either. It was the Xeon MP and Itanium that were being granted gigantic caches -- I still maintain that Itanium's specfp score was mostly due to the amount of cache, since specfp 2000 should really be called speccache or specmem.
Anyway, Intel has the best fab tech in the industry, some of the best circuit designers, and the most fab capacity. Combine this, and it is economical for Intel to put big caches on all their parts, and they decided to start using that advantage. AMD can't afford to follow suit -- not only are their caches larger in die area for the same storage, they also don't have the capacity to produce huge chips. AMD is already fab limited.
This is why the recent IBM announcement about eDRAM is significant. AMD has a tech sharing agreement with IBM. If eDRAM is practical in AMD's 45nm process, then that could eliminate Intel's advantage in cache sizes.
What is the point of releasing a new iteration of an existing platform to bump up speed and still not catch up with the competitions products?
Uh, if you're behind, then it is even more imperative that you continue releasing parts that keep you competitive. If you were in 2nd place in a stock car race, would you refrain from pulling a tight inside turn because it would only close the gap with 1st, not actually allow you to overtake?
Wouldn't they have been better served re-routing this R&D effort/money into something which would put them back on top of either the price or performance curves?
"Better" implies either-or, which is incorrect. Obviously AMD knows they need to do something to try to get back on top, and have claimed they have that thing in the upcoming Barcelona chip. Designing such a thing takes years. So if they did 'either-or', they would have been working entirely on Barcelona for the past couple years, and in the meantime would have released zero incremental speed upgrades. Which would be disastrous for their competitive standings. So they do the obvious thing: Work on both. A design team works on the new chip, while the product development team works on squeezing more MHz out of the existing design.
Similarly, it isn't like Intel was sitting on their asses for four years while K8 kicked the Pentium 4's sorry ass around. They didn't keep releasing Pentium 4 + 200MHz because they thought that would get them the lead back. They did it because they had to keep selling parts while the multi-year effort to get their new PPro-ancestry designs was going on. In the short term, though, Pentium 4 + 200 MHz was what they could do to try to keep pace, so they did it.
You think? I'm not sure anymore. Just a few weeks ago Michael Dell stood up with Vint Cerf and admitted 1 in 4 M$ computers is part of a botnet. Now his company is publicizing customer demand for Linux. If he was interested in toeing the M$ party line, he would have suppressed the results. The odds are Dell is moving away from being a M$ vassal.
I think it is incorrect to call Dell a vassal of MS or formerly of Intel. Obviously they were tightly in bed with both companies, but Dell is itself big enough that they can make their own demands. It works both ways -- Dell needs MS/Intel to give them deals so they can have low costs so Dell mostly toes the line, but MS/Intel need Dell as the biggest supplier of PCs to be exclusive to them, so Dell can occasionally throw their weight around.
Again, based on what I saw with Dell/AMD, these sorts of statements that hint that Dell might be thinking of breaking with their exclusive status are at least initially all based around getting more concessions. The threat of Dell becoming non-exclusive was a powerful one that kept Intel dancing to Dell's tune. That's the only reason Intel released a 64-bit x86 chip (though it had already been designed) -- Dell said "We're losing customers to Opteron, give us 64 bit x86 or we buy AMD". Intel didn't want to, since doing so would kill Itanium (more). So I'd say that the statement about botnets was a similar wakeup call for MS, which if translated directly into a call for action would be either "clean up your security and/or gives us better deals".
However, over time all these statements which are fundamentally true become even more true, the demand becomes more clear, and the financial picture starts to speak clearly against Dell's exclusivity. This may in fact be the precursor to such a change at Dell; I'm just saying don't expect it super soon.
2007 is the year of Linux. Vista sucks, is not selling and the revolt is on. It's about time!
If that is true, then I expect Dell to start shipping Linux desktops in 2008. That's all I'm sayin.
After level 20, an increasing number of quests are instance-based, meaning that you can't just hop in and complete a quest in an hour or so. (Perhaps Blizzard has since implemented a better group-finding system than a mere chat channel.)
Let me clue you in on what you missed.
First, Blizzard changed the Looking For Group channel to be world-wide. Obviously, this instantly became General Chat World Wide, or more accurately Barrens Chat World Wide. It worked for finding groups, but ugh.
Then they decided to go the other way, and get rid of the LFG channel entirely. Now they have a "LFG Interface", and it sucks. You can pick what instance/quest you want to do, and then it automatically adds you to a group. It is rarely used, at least in part because it's hard to control who joins the group so you can end up with a group of 5, with no tank or healer.
So now we're back to using general chat in the capital cities/zones near instances to try to find groups. Combine the substantial difficulty in setting up a group with the fact that most people are cruising around in the 60+ zones of the expansion, and finding groups for leveling is obnoxious.
We are going to play 1-2 different games until we beat them or get tired of them. THEN, we will either take a break for a while (days, weeks, maybe months) or buy another game and take our time beating it.
Its a different demographic, so they aren't going to behave the same as your normal console buyers.
Good point, and this means N was especially smart to see to it that they made money on every console sale, rather than taking a loss and making it up on software sales.
There are implications though for 3rd party support. If the number of games sold per console (there's a marketese word for it) is small, 3rd parties may see the Wii as being a less interesting target. It will ultimately come down to the games per console * number of consoles. If casual gamers only buy a game or two a year, but make up a larger target audience, then it will still be worth it to make games.
Mars is experiencing the SAME rate of warming that earth is. No possible human cause.
Funny how the word you caps-locked is the one that is the most utter bullshit that neither of your articles even begins to support. Your second article even has to admit that current research shows the sun (the presumed common non-anthropogenic factor for earth and mars) only accounts for 10-30% of the warming on earth.
But then again what was I expecting from someone who says "Repeat after me" rather than "Read up on current research"? Because, you know, if you repeat your denial enough it becomes reality, right?
Oh, that's not the problem. They could easily just pick one distro and only offer it. The problem is that even that one distro involves spending money on qualification, help desk, and so on. Plus then you are pissing of Microsoft, and who knows what kinds of "cooperative marketing" dollars Dell gets from them.
It's pretty much the same thing as with AMD processors. For the longest time the official line was "There's no customer demand for AMD." Well, obviously there's demand, which is why they are bringing it up in the first place. What they really mean is "There's customer demand, but not enough for it to be worth the cost of supporting more than one platform, plus the loss from making our current single-platform vendor unhappy."
Basically, just like with selling AMD-based systems, there's no way in hell Dell is going to sell pre-installed supported Linux until the financial incentive to do so is simply undeniable. And even then, they will at first just use the threat of doing so as a lever to get more concessions from Microsoft. If history holds true, expect Dell to be the last major OEM not shipping Linux.
What inherently makes the motivation of a government worker more pure and noble than a private employee?
I'm not sure how the words "pretend to care" and "thin veneer of accountability" implied "pure and noble" to you, but they were not intended to.
The biggest motivation for them is the simple fact that I can choose another company if I am not satisfied with their services. When this motivation is taken away by virtue of a monopoly or near-monopoly, the service becomes much worse. The closer to a pure monopoly, in fact, the worse the service. The problem with the government as an exclusive service provider is that it instantly becomes a monopoly, and therefor has no direct incentive to provide better service. Voting can mitigate this somewhat, but because there is no direct competition, the government can never "lose business" no matter how appalling the service or the product.
There are plenty of natural monopolies that result in the same thing. For example in Libertarian Crazy Land, your corporate-owned neighborhood would have its own corporate-run security forces and corporate-run justice system. How are you going to have competition? The choice of law enforcement company is not one you can make; you can only do so by moving, just like now. The government can't "lose business", but neither would this law enforcement company, in so much as in both cases people moving away due to poor security would mean less tax revenue/corporate rent income. However in the democratic version, you could also vote out the sheriff/commissioner/mayor or whatever level of elected official is there, so they at least have a motivation to keep the appearance of good service.
That's what my point is -- Our current situation has many problems, but democratic government adds a few advantages to the system as far as accountability goes. The proposed solution keeps all the problems, and eliminates the few advantages.
But we really get into trouble when the government tries to start running the whole show.
A perfectly reasonable statement. The next step into Libertarian Crazy Land would be to say that the government should be running none of the show, and therefore doing a s/government/private enterprise/g on the country would fix everything.
The inability to put units on shelves is just that. A concert being sold out is a good thing, but a console being sold out is not.
That is certainly true from the "not selling as many units as we could" point of view. A very valid point of view, one I'm sure Nintendo is concerned about.
However being sold out is a fantastic thing from the "selling far more units than we predicted, and based production schedules on" point of view. Thus I'm sure their concern is tempered by a kind of giddiness that comes from making money hand over fist beyond expectations.
I think on the balance Nintendo is the kind of conservative company who is more interested in aquiring real money than the hypothetical loss of potential money. Obviously, though, they will want to fix the shortage if they can because they'd obviously like even more money. I think it's rather funny that just like in the vgcats comic they made a lot of consoles, only it still wasn't enough to meet demand.
From the consumer's standpoint, we're in the post-launch doldrums, and stocks are still short such that many of us still can't get them. Maybe it looks like the "magic" is gone, but by the time initial demand for the Wii is met, we may be ready for some new releases.
There is no feedback, no force stopping your hand and arm, and immediately disconnecting you from the game.
Yeah, this is the biggest obstacle to it (though it will be better than any previous version of sword swinging). Maybe it would be adequate to use rumble to indicate that you are pushing against a solid object -- it wouldn't prevent the motion, but it would give feedback that you have moved too far. We'll see.
Not to mention 1 to 1 movement would not lend to realistic sword handling. Swords are heavy, the Wii Remote is not. You could swing that sword around like a madman in ways that you could never do with a real sword, essentially spamming sword attacks that couldn't realistically be stopped by an opposing virtual sword.
Which is why I think the wiimote was made to be a wiisaber. Light sabers are also light and ammendable to crazy swinging and twirling, because they too are just a handle.
Well, a little, since the best thing anyone has been able to offer as an alternative is exactly the same thing, only with "State" replaced by "corporate oligarchy", with exactly the same problems only without the thin veneer of accountability created by a representative government to prevent wholesale profiteering off of the populace.
In Libertarian Crazy Land, the only difference would be that at no point would the corporate-run security officers even have to pretend to care about serving you or having the general public interest at heart. They would explicitly work on behalf of the interests of the company that hired them.
When will people learn that it isn't left or right, it is pro-tyranny and against-tyranny -- liberals and conservatives are on the "pro-tyranny" side of the coin. The opposite side of the coin is not a libertarian, as some might think, but an anarcho-capitalist.
Libertarianism taken to an extreme is anarcho-capitalism. The big problem is that while anarcho-capitalism may be an anti-tyranny belief system, it is absolutely positively 100% a pro-tyranny political system. Or in other words, Anarchy is the best government in theory, and the worst in practice. In theory there's no difference between practice and theory, but in practice there is. Forget this at your peril.
Other than that, good job on the anti-authoritarian screed. If you Libertarians would just stop allowing your ideas to be pushed all the way to anarcho-capitalism, I'd actually agree with you most of the time.
If they lowball TDP, the OEM designs an inadequate solution, and both Intel and AMD cpus will throttle more, reducing performance. If the throttle cannot cool the CPU, the catastrophic diode triggers, halting the CPU.
AMD doesn't have thermal clock throttling. They didn't even have an on-chip thermal diode to handle chip kill until K8 -- K7-based designs required a sensor on the motherboard. Clock throttling based on temperature (no OS control) was a feature Intel introduced in the Pentium 4, and which was kept in the change away from Netburst. So I repeat: If AMD under-specs their TDP, then their parts will fail.
TDP is selected based on performance/cooling cost tradeoff, which is entirely based on the distribution of power of typical applications, as both companies have admitted in print. This can be fudged both for bragging rights, and to reduce OEM thermal solution cost, but it cannot be set so low as to impair performance. Sure, AMD/Intel could spec 5W TDP, the OEM would design a 5W solution, and the CPU would run as fast as a 200 MHz CPU because it throttles all the time. See?
Yes TDP is "selected" based on power/performance tradeoffs, but that is nothing like it being a pure marketing decision. Marketing may say that market X has max power envelope Y, but after that it's the physical requirements of the chip that dictate the cross of performance/TDP.
AMD's TDP is based on the distribution of power of applications, but it uses the right-most end of the graph -- like I said, they must do this because they have no way of guaranteeing that the power won't go that high. If the chip -can- use that much power, then they must spec that much power even if marketing doesn't like it. The only performance/cooling cost tradeoff AMD can make is raise/lower VDD and raise/lower the frequency. They could produce a higher clocked part, but it would use more power. To make a 5W part, it would have to actually be 200MHz. This is why dual-core parts that are supposed to fit in the same socket infrastructure (== cooling design, == TDP) are a couple speed grades slower than the single core. If they could "fudge" the numbers so that their dual-core parts didn't lose to their single-core product in single-threaded benchmarks, they would. But they can't. They spec TDP at max power because they must.
Intel has more flexibility, in that they can also count on their thermal clock throttling to guarantee power stays in range and pick a spot in the application power distribution closer to the mean. In practice they pick a spot on the curve a few standard deviations out from the mean, where very few applications go beyond. When clock throttling is engaged, it is at a halving of frequency (actually a 50/50 full speed/completely off duty cycle), so it is very expensive performance-wise to rely on that feature. Chips that throttled a lot would be almost as bad as chips that failed; it would have made more sense to lower the frequency and avoid the throttling. Thus their main lever for adjusting TDP is still voltage/frquency, they just get some extra leeway from their methodology. This was important for Netburst, which had a very long tail to their power curve that they wanted to lop off. When they moved away from Netburst to a design with a narrower power distribution, this became less important.
There is no need to spec a beefier VRM requirement if the CPU will not exceed a particular power threshold, which is TDP.
And if you inadequately spec your voltage regulator then the part will fail. Which again directly contradicts the idea of TDP being a number made up by marketing.
Your point is that AMD spec's MAX power and Intel does not, so AMD is more honest. This is factually incorrect, as they both us TDP numbers.
Ah, see, there's the problem, you're arguing against an assumed but incorrect conclusion. I never said AMD is "more honest", if anything I'm saying both are completely honest, because even Intel guarantees
"It does not do anything a real player can do with one exception. It does allow the character to be played 24x7. Humans can't do that. Groups of people could do this though."
Heh. "Sammy Sosa's new cybernetic brain implant doesn't do anything the athlete would be physically incapable of doing himself, it just does it with an unnerring accuracy and resiliance that Sosa himself could never in practice achieve. Senate hearings as to whether or not this constitues 'cheating' are expected to continue..."
Since the only people who really know about it are the people who made money out of it, it's hard to accept a claim of "we all just did our jobs and saved the world."
There were plenty of people with financial, security, or safety interests in making sure that their systems did not fail on 1/1/2000. Banks, for example. Power plants. Air traffic control. The systems that could not fail were all tested and the ones that needed fixing were fixed.
The reason you don't hear a whole lot about that is that few of these companies want to come out and say "Yes, our software was riddled with bugs, and we almost screwed the pooch and lost all your money / overloaded the reactor / smashed airplanes into mountains.
In the cases where it mattered it was all handled smoothly, professionally, and quietly. There were of course some who heard about Y2K on the news and rushed out to hire expensive COBOL contractors to re-write everything without even first deciding if it mattered for them and second without testing if their systems had a problem first. They're probably who you hear about on the news, both before Y2K and whining about it after.
TDP = Thermal Design Power. Not "total". Get your facts right.
Big whoop, an acronym wrong. Rote memory vs understanding? I'll take understanding, which you fail.
Marketing drones on the prowl. AMD took Intel's spec, changed what is considered a "typical" day, and said, "Hey look, we win!!!" I'm sure Intel will respond in kind.
I don't care about marketing spiels about how it costs less to own Brand X for Purpose Y. The article talks about situations where the processor is idle and consuming less power, in processor talk running at a higher P-state. It sounds like you think this "typical usage scenario" where the computer is idle most of the time has something to do with TDP. That has nothing to do with TDP. TDP is about the physical requirements to transfer power away from the silicon. If they bullshit their TDP numbers, then the HSF the OEMs use will be inadequate, and they will absolutely notice this in the form of chips failing from overheating.
Do you understand? You can't market-speak your way around thermodynamics.
No one has spec'd MAX since pre 1GHz days.
Utter bullshit. It was impossible for AMD to spec anything but max power until late in the life of K7 when they implemented thermal sensors and motherboard-impl. Intel specced max power until Pentium 4. The reason they do this is because unless you can guarantee that using the lowest P-state setting and running any arbitrary program that the TDP will not be exceeded then the cooling solution may fail. The only reason Intel started quoting a lower number than max power was because they could guarantee with their P4 clock throttling thermal sensor that the chip would never go above that number. AMD couldn't actually do this; they could only cause the chip to shut down if it exceeded the stated TDP number. That's not desireable, so they continued to have to issue TDP numbers for maximum power.
Did you even see how the thermal spec only listed TDP for a specific P-state? PowerNow! is how those P-states are managed; TDP is for one P-state, and the TDP for the lowest P-state is without any power saving chip features in use, because that's what it means. PowerNow! is not a method of reducing TDP; it cannot, because TDP is not defined that way.
Repeat after me: AMD SPECS MAX POWER BECAUSE THEY MUST.
PowerNow! defines TDP as the max power of the CPU under TDP conditions. There's the rib. TDP conditions (see page 83 of aforementioned documents) are not explained, "please see your FAE for details." But we already know the answer to that.
Uh, yeah, if you don't know what IDD_max is then I guess it's unexplained, then maybe you should see your FAE for details and I'm sure they'd be happy to explain it to you. I'll save you the trouble: maximum current draw. It is when the chip is sinking the maximum amount of current due to having the maximum number of transistors enabled. Being able to switch to a different P-state in the following few microseconds doesn't change that number. The only thing AMD may not be disclosing is whatever worst-case code sequence they use to determine the maximum number of transistors that can be enabled at once.
I can't believe you have confused a marketing press release about cost-of-ownership discussions of power consumption with an actual engineering document used for constructing cooling solutions that must actually work in situations nothing like the "typical" scenario of the marketing BS. If you want to talk shit about AMD's marketing, go ahead they're terrible and evil like basically all marketing, but don't act like that's the same as what engineers use to do their job.
Yes, because all "farm states" (I live in a metro area and am not a farmer) are backwater hicks that don't know about them Internets thangs, right?
Well yeah of course, but let me help you out. For starters, you have to understand that the internet is not a truck. I think you can figure the rest out on your own.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds so much like what people have been saying about *nix systems for years.
Which is exactly what I was thinking... and I can't help but think in response: Is this really the first Microsoft OS to have built-in file caching? I mean, really? I guess I just assumed that around the same time Windows got big-boy OS features like memory protection that they also got file caching. I'm still assuming I'm not understanding, because it seems ridiculous.
It's not a karma whore trick. It's a recognition that a good number of /.ers either work for NASA or have their heads well up NASA's ass. They WILL mod down any criticism, valid or no. It's a reality.
Yeah, yeah, I've heard that one before. "There's a secret cabal of moderators that will mod down my unpopular opinion. Oh, look at that, beyond all expectations my post has been modded up! Who would have thought!"
Even if this appearance is deceiving, "I know I will be modded down for this" is a karma whore trick. Don't wanna whore? Don't use it.
I wasn't aware that NASA was making big bucks today. As far as I knew, it already was the case where NASA spent all the money, and private enterprise -- as in aerospace contractors -- reaped the harvest.
It's basically the same with universities here as you describe across the pond. They are at the forefront of pure research, but it's the corporations that take the pure research ideas and apply it and make the cash. Sometimes the companies fund university research, sometimes it's the government that funds it, either way the university isn't making a profit on the deal. But that's okay, because as long as they continue to exist while doing pure research then there is benefit.
The NASA I'm envisioning, btw, is a much smaller organization anyway. They wouldn't be in the business of building a space shuttle. Mars rovers and Saturn probes, sure. Let the ones with the profit motive figure out how to move people and cargo into space efficiently.
Option B is that the moving people and cargo aspect of NASA gets taken over directly by the defense department, as the privatization of space would probably spurn them to see the militarization of space as essential.
I had the highest respect for John Glenn until he traded political favors to then-president Clinton for a joy-ride on the shuttle. He is in no position to lecture anyone on NASA waste.
Man, I'd trade a fucking lot more than mere political favors to get a joy-ride on the shuttle.
On the other hand he had already been to space on multiple occasions. He should have traded political favors to get me a ride on the shuttle. Then I'd still respect him.
So Mr. Glen, if you're reading this, re-read my first sentence but with a *wink wink Johnny-boy* at the end.
I know I will get modded down for this, but
I know you're using the oldest karma whore trick in the book, but
The launch of SpaceShipOne should have been a wake-up call for the U.S. The future is NOT in NASA.
I agree that private funding is the future of space. I do see a role for NASA in the forseeable future at least for the pure research and exploration roles that they are currently doing a good job at. There's not much impetus to send a probe to Io just to see what the place looks like, unless you have a budget designed around ideas like that. Private interprise wouldn't see the ROI -- certainly not until gathering resources from another body becomes feasible, and even then they'd need some reason to think resources were there. However, for a space station or cheap flights to the moon, I'm looking at the private ventures.
US triumphs are not so special as to be noteworthy compared to the superior exploits of other nations.
Oh yeah? Well at least we knew to bring a chisel instead of a sickle!
Don't worry yourself. They didn't have CGI back then, so everything you saw in Star Wars was real.
"Speed bump"? You mean it's supposed to keep my computer slow(er)?
Is that what those are for? I thought it was so that you knew you were going fast enough when you caught air off the bump. If you're going too slow, it's not a bump, right?
AMD has been skimping lately on its cache.
Well, that's one way to look at it, another is that Intel has finally decided to unleash the flood gates on their own manufacturing and produce huge caches. Before the most recent generation of chips, Intel's desktop parts weren't sporting very big caches either. It was the Xeon MP and Itanium that were being granted gigantic caches -- I still maintain that Itanium's specfp score was mostly due to the amount of cache, since specfp 2000 should really be called speccache or specmem.
Anyway, Intel has the best fab tech in the industry, some of the best circuit designers, and the most fab capacity. Combine this, and it is economical for Intel to put big caches on all their parts, and they decided to start using that advantage. AMD can't afford to follow suit -- not only are their caches larger in die area for the same storage, they also don't have the capacity to produce huge chips. AMD is already fab limited.
This is why the recent IBM announcement about eDRAM is significant. AMD has a tech sharing agreement with IBM. If eDRAM is practical in AMD's 45nm process, then that could eliminate Intel's advantage in cache sizes.
What is the point of releasing a new iteration of an existing platform to bump up speed and still not catch up with the competitions products?
Uh, if you're behind, then it is even more imperative that you continue releasing parts that keep you competitive. If you were in 2nd place in a stock car race, would you refrain from pulling a tight inside turn because it would only close the gap with 1st, not actually allow you to overtake?
Wouldn't they have been better served re-routing this R&D effort/money into something which would put them back on top of either the price or performance curves?
"Better" implies either-or, which is incorrect. Obviously AMD knows they need to do something to try to get back on top, and have claimed they have that thing in the upcoming Barcelona chip. Designing such a thing takes years. So if they did 'either-or', they would have been working entirely on Barcelona for the past couple years, and in the meantime would have released zero incremental speed upgrades. Which would be disastrous for their competitive standings. So they do the obvious thing: Work on both. A design team works on the new chip, while the product development team works on squeezing more MHz out of the existing design.
Similarly, it isn't like Intel was sitting on their asses for four years while K8 kicked the Pentium 4's sorry ass around. They didn't keep releasing Pentium 4 + 200MHz because they thought that would get them the lead back. They did it because they had to keep selling parts while the multi-year effort to get their new PPro-ancestry designs was going on. In the short term, though, Pentium 4 + 200 MHz was what they could do to try to keep pace, so they did it.
You think? I'm not sure anymore. Just a few weeks ago Michael Dell stood up with Vint Cerf and admitted 1 in 4 M$ computers is part of a botnet. Now his company is publicizing customer demand for Linux. If he was interested in toeing the M$ party line, he would have suppressed the results. The odds are Dell is moving away from being a M$ vassal.
I think it is incorrect to call Dell a vassal of MS or formerly of Intel. Obviously they were tightly in bed with both companies, but Dell is itself big enough that they can make their own demands. It works both ways -- Dell needs MS/Intel to give them deals so they can have low costs so Dell mostly toes the line, but MS/Intel need Dell as the biggest supplier of PCs to be exclusive to them, so Dell can occasionally throw their weight around.
Again, based on what I saw with Dell/AMD, these sorts of statements that hint that Dell might be thinking of breaking with their exclusive status are at least initially all based around getting more concessions. The threat of Dell becoming non-exclusive was a powerful one that kept Intel dancing to Dell's tune. That's the only reason Intel released a 64-bit x86 chip (though it had already been designed) -- Dell said "We're losing customers to Opteron, give us 64 bit x86 or we buy AMD". Intel didn't want to, since doing so would kill Itanium (more). So I'd say that the statement about botnets was a similar wakeup call for MS, which if translated directly into a call for action would be either "clean up your security and/or gives us better deals".
However, over time all these statements which are fundamentally true become even more true, the demand becomes more clear, and the financial picture starts to speak clearly against Dell's exclusivity. This may in fact be the precursor to such a change at Dell; I'm just saying don't expect it super soon.
2007 is the year of Linux. Vista sucks, is not selling and the revolt is on. It's about time!
If that is true, then I expect Dell to start shipping Linux desktops in 2008. That's all I'm sayin.
After level 20, an increasing number of quests are instance-based, meaning that you can't just hop in and complete a quest in an hour or so. (Perhaps Blizzard has since implemented a better group-finding system than a mere chat channel.)
Let me clue you in on what you missed.
First, Blizzard changed the Looking For Group channel to be world-wide. Obviously, this instantly became General Chat World Wide, or more accurately Barrens Chat World Wide. It worked for finding groups, but ugh.
Then they decided to go the other way, and get rid of the LFG channel entirely. Now they have a "LFG Interface", and it sucks. You can pick what instance/quest you want to do, and then it automatically adds you to a group. It is rarely used, at least in part because it's hard to control who joins the group so you can end up with a group of 5, with no tank or healer.
So now we're back to using general chat in the capital cities/zones near instances to try to find groups. Combine the substantial difficulty in setting up a group with the fact that most people are cruising around in the 60+ zones of the expansion, and finding groups for leveling is obnoxious.
We are going to play 1-2 different games until we beat them or get tired of them. THEN, we will either take a break for a while (days, weeks, maybe months) or buy another game and take our time beating it.
Its a different demographic, so they aren't going to behave the same as your normal console buyers.
Good point, and this means N was especially smart to see to it that they made money on every console sale, rather than taking a loss and making it up on software sales.
There are implications though for 3rd party support. If the number of games sold per console (there's a marketese word for it) is small, 3rd parties may see the Wii as being a less interesting target. It will ultimately come down to the games per console * number of consoles. If casual gamers only buy a game or two a year, but make up a larger target audience, then it will still be worth it to make games.
Mars is experiencing the SAME rate of warming that earth is. No possible human cause.
Funny how the word you caps-locked is the one that is the most utter bullshit that neither of your articles even begins to support. Your second article even has to admit that current research shows the sun (the presumed common non-anthropogenic factor for earth and mars) only accounts for 10-30% of the warming on earth.
But then again what was I expecting from someone who says "Repeat after me" rather than "Read up on current research"? Because, you know, if you repeat your denial enough it becomes reality, right?
Oh, that's not the problem. They could easily just pick one distro and only offer it. The problem is that even that one distro involves spending money on qualification, help desk, and so on. Plus then you are pissing of Microsoft, and who knows what kinds of "cooperative marketing" dollars Dell gets from them.
It's pretty much the same thing as with AMD processors. For the longest time the official line was "There's no customer demand for AMD." Well, obviously there's demand, which is why they are bringing it up in the first place. What they really mean is "There's customer demand, but not enough for it to be worth the cost of supporting more than one platform, plus the loss from making our current single-platform vendor unhappy."
Basically, just like with selling AMD-based systems, there's no way in hell Dell is going to sell pre-installed supported Linux until the financial incentive to do so is simply undeniable. And even then, they will at first just use the threat of doing so as a lever to get more concessions from Microsoft. If history holds true, expect Dell to be the last major OEM not shipping Linux.
What inherently makes the motivation of a government worker more pure and noble than a private employee?
I'm not sure how the words "pretend to care" and "thin veneer of accountability" implied "pure and noble" to you, but they were not intended to.
The biggest motivation for them is the simple fact that I can choose another company if I am not satisfied with their services. When this motivation is taken away by virtue of a monopoly or near-monopoly, the service becomes much worse. The closer to a pure monopoly, in fact, the worse the service. The problem with the government as an exclusive service provider is that it instantly becomes a monopoly, and therefor has no direct incentive to provide better service. Voting can mitigate this somewhat, but because there is no direct competition, the government can never "lose business" no matter how appalling the service or the product.
There are plenty of natural monopolies that result in the same thing. For example in Libertarian Crazy Land, your corporate-owned neighborhood would have its own corporate-run security forces and corporate-run justice system. How are you going to have competition? The choice of law enforcement company is not one you can make; you can only do so by moving, just like now. The government can't "lose business", but neither would this law enforcement company, in so much as in both cases people moving away due to poor security would mean less tax revenue/corporate rent income. However in the democratic version, you could also vote out the sheriff/commissioner/mayor or whatever level of elected official is there, so they at least have a motivation to keep the appearance of good service.
That's what my point is -- Our current situation has many problems, but democratic government adds a few advantages to the system as far as accountability goes. The proposed solution keeps all the problems, and eliminates the few advantages.
But we really get into trouble when the government tries to start running the whole show.
A perfectly reasonable statement. The next step into Libertarian Crazy Land would be to say that the government should be running none of the show, and therefore doing a s/government/private enterprise/g on the country would fix everything.
The inability to put units on shelves is just that. A concert being sold out is a good thing, but a console being sold out is not.
That is certainly true from the "not selling as many units as we could" point of view. A very valid point of view, one I'm sure Nintendo is concerned about.
However being sold out is a fantastic thing from the "selling far more units than we predicted, and based production schedules on" point of view. Thus I'm sure their concern is tempered by a kind of giddiness that comes from making money hand over fist beyond expectations.
I think on the balance Nintendo is the kind of conservative company who is more interested in aquiring real money than the hypothetical loss of potential money. Obviously, though, they will want to fix the shortage if they can because they'd obviously like even more money. I think it's rather funny that just like in the vgcats comic they made a lot of consoles, only it still wasn't enough to meet demand.
From the consumer's standpoint, we're in the post-launch doldrums, and stocks are still short such that many of us still can't get them. Maybe it looks like the "magic" is gone, but by the time initial demand for the Wii is met, we may be ready for some new releases.
There is no feedback, no force stopping your hand and arm, and immediately disconnecting you from the game.
Yeah, this is the biggest obstacle to it (though it will be better than any previous version of sword swinging). Maybe it would be adequate to use rumble to indicate that you are pushing against a solid object -- it wouldn't prevent the motion, but it would give feedback that you have moved too far. We'll see.
Not to mention 1 to 1 movement would not lend to realistic sword handling. Swords are heavy, the Wii Remote is not. You could swing that sword around like a madman in ways that you could never do with a real sword, essentially spamming sword attacks that couldn't realistically be stopped by an opposing virtual sword.
Which is why I think the wiimote was made to be a wiisaber. Light sabers are also light and ammendable to crazy swinging and twirling, because they too are just a handle.
Is it any wonder that I am anti-State?
Well, a little, since the best thing anyone has been able to offer as an alternative is exactly the same thing, only with "State" replaced by "corporate oligarchy", with exactly the same problems only without the thin veneer of accountability created by a representative government to prevent wholesale profiteering off of the populace.
In Libertarian Crazy Land, the only difference would be that at no point would the corporate-run security officers even have to pretend to care about serving you or having the general public interest at heart. They would explicitly work on behalf of the interests of the company that hired them.
When will people learn that it isn't left or right, it is pro-tyranny and against-tyranny -- liberals and conservatives are on the "pro-tyranny" side of the coin. The opposite side of the coin is not a libertarian, as some might think, but an anarcho-capitalist.
Libertarianism taken to an extreme is anarcho-capitalism. The big problem is that while anarcho-capitalism may be an anti-tyranny belief system, it is absolutely positively 100% a pro-tyranny political system. Or in other words, Anarchy is the best government in theory, and the worst in practice. In theory there's no difference between practice and theory, but in practice there is. Forget this at your peril.
Other than that, good job on the anti-authoritarian screed. If you Libertarians would just stop allowing your ideas to be pushed all the way to anarcho-capitalism, I'd actually agree with you most of the time.
If they lowball TDP, the OEM designs an inadequate solution, and both Intel and AMD cpus will throttle more, reducing performance. If the throttle cannot cool the CPU, the catastrophic diode triggers, halting the CPU.
AMD doesn't have thermal clock throttling. They didn't even have an on-chip thermal diode to handle chip kill until K8 -- K7-based designs required a sensor on the motherboard. Clock throttling based on temperature (no OS control) was a feature Intel introduced in the Pentium 4, and which was kept in the change away from Netburst. So I repeat: If AMD under-specs their TDP, then their parts will fail.
TDP is selected based on performance/cooling cost tradeoff, which is entirely based on the distribution of power of typical applications, as both companies have admitted in print. This can be fudged both for bragging rights, and to reduce OEM thermal solution cost, but it cannot be set so low as to impair performance. Sure, AMD/Intel could spec 5W TDP, the OEM would design a 5W solution, and the CPU would run as fast as a 200 MHz CPU because it throttles all the time. See?
Yes TDP is "selected" based on power/performance tradeoffs, but that is nothing like it being a pure marketing decision. Marketing may say that market X has max power envelope Y, but after that it's the physical requirements of the chip that dictate the cross of performance/TDP.
AMD's TDP is based on the distribution of power of applications, but it uses the right-most end of the graph -- like I said, they must do this because they have no way of guaranteeing that the power won't go that high. If the chip -can- use that much power, then they must spec that much power even if marketing doesn't like it. The only performance/cooling cost tradeoff AMD can make is raise/lower VDD and raise/lower the frequency. They could produce a higher clocked part, but it would use more power. To make a 5W part, it would have to actually be 200MHz. This is why dual-core parts that are supposed to fit in the same socket infrastructure (== cooling design, == TDP) are a couple speed grades slower than the single core. If they could "fudge" the numbers so that their dual-core parts didn't lose to their single-core product in single-threaded benchmarks, they would. But they can't. They spec TDP at max power because they must.
Intel has more flexibility, in that they can also count on their thermal clock throttling to guarantee power stays in range and pick a spot in the application power distribution closer to the mean. In practice they pick a spot on the curve a few standard deviations out from the mean, where very few applications go beyond. When clock throttling is engaged, it is at a halving of frequency (actually a 50/50 full speed/completely off duty cycle), so it is very expensive performance-wise to rely on that feature. Chips that throttled a lot would be almost as bad as chips that failed; it would have made more sense to lower the frequency and avoid the throttling. Thus their main lever for adjusting TDP is still voltage/frquency, they just get some extra leeway from their methodology. This was important for Netburst, which had a very long tail to their power curve that they wanted to lop off. When they moved away from Netburst to a design with a narrower power distribution, this became less important.
There is no need to spec a beefier VRM requirement if the CPU will not exceed a particular power threshold, which is TDP.
And if you inadequately spec your voltage regulator then the part will fail. Which again directly contradicts the idea of TDP being a number made up by marketing.
Your point is that AMD spec's MAX power and Intel does not, so AMD is more honest. This is factually incorrect, as they both us TDP numbers.
Ah, see, there's the problem, you're arguing against an assumed but incorrect conclusion. I never said AMD is "more honest", if anything I'm saying both are completely honest, because even Intel guarantees
"It does not do anything a real player can do with one exception. It does allow the character to be played 24x7. Humans can't do that. Groups of people could do this though."
Heh. "Sammy Sosa's new cybernetic brain implant doesn't do anything the athlete would be physically incapable of doing himself, it just does it with an unnerring accuracy and resiliance that Sosa himself could never in practice achieve. Senate hearings as to whether or not this constitues 'cheating' are expected to continue..."
Since the only people who really know about it are the people who made money out of it, it's hard to accept a claim of "we all just did our jobs and saved the world."
There were plenty of people with financial, security, or safety interests in making sure that their systems did not fail on 1/1/2000. Banks, for example. Power plants. Air traffic control. The systems that could not fail were all tested and the ones that needed fixing were fixed.
The reason you don't hear a whole lot about that is that few of these companies want to come out and say "Yes, our software was riddled with bugs, and we almost screwed the pooch and lost all your money / overloaded the reactor / smashed airplanes into mountains.
In the cases where it mattered it was all handled smoothly, professionally, and quietly. There were of course some who heard about Y2K on the news and rushed out to hire expensive COBOL contractors to re-write everything without even first deciding if it mattered for them and second without testing if their systems had a problem first. They're probably who you hear about on the news, both before Y2K and whining about it after.
TDP = Thermal Design Power. Not "total". Get your facts right.
Big whoop, an acronym wrong. Rote memory vs understanding? I'll take understanding, which you fail.
Marketing drones on the prowl. AMD took Intel's spec, changed what is considered a "typical" day, and said, "Hey look, we win!!!" I'm sure Intel will respond in kind.
I don't care about marketing spiels about how it costs less to own Brand X for Purpose Y. The article talks about situations where the processor is idle and consuming less power, in processor talk running at a higher P-state. It sounds like you think this "typical usage scenario" where the computer is idle most of the time has something to do with TDP. That has nothing to do with TDP. TDP is about the physical requirements to transfer power away from the silicon. If they bullshit their TDP numbers, then the HSF the OEMs use will be inadequate, and they will absolutely notice this in the form of chips failing from overheating.
Do you understand? You can't market-speak your way around thermodynamics.
No one has spec'd MAX since pre 1GHz days.
Utter bullshit. It was impossible for AMD to spec anything but max power until late in the life of K7 when they implemented thermal sensors and motherboard-impl. Intel specced max power until Pentium 4. The reason they do this is because unless you can guarantee that using the lowest P-state setting and running any arbitrary program that the TDP will not be exceeded then the cooling solution may fail. The only reason Intel started quoting a lower number than max power was because they could guarantee with their P4 clock throttling thermal sensor that the chip would never go above that number. AMD couldn't actually do this; they could only cause the chip to shut down if it exceeded the stated TDP number. That's not desireable, so they continued to have to issue TDP numbers for maximum power.
Did you even see how the thermal spec only listed TDP for a specific P-state? PowerNow! is how those P-states are managed; TDP is for one P-state, and the TDP for the lowest P-state is without any power saving chip features in use, because that's what it means. PowerNow! is not a method of reducing TDP; it cannot, because TDP is not defined that way.
Repeat after me: AMD SPECS MAX POWER BECAUSE THEY MUST.
PowerNow! defines TDP as the max power of the CPU under TDP conditions. There's the rib. TDP conditions (see page 83 of aforementioned documents) are not explained, "please see your FAE for details." But we already know the answer to that.
Uh, yeah, if you don't know what IDD_max is then I guess it's unexplained, then maybe you should see your FAE for details and I'm sure they'd be happy to explain it to you. I'll save you the trouble: maximum current draw. It is when the chip is sinking the maximum amount of current due to having the maximum number of transistors enabled. Being able to switch to a different P-state in the following few microseconds doesn't change that number. The only thing AMD may not be disclosing is whatever worst-case code sequence they use to determine the maximum number of transistors that can be enabled at once.
I can't believe you have confused a marketing press release about cost-of-ownership discussions of power consumption with an actual engineering document used for constructing cooling solutions that must actually work in situations nothing like the "typical" scenario of the marketing BS. If you want to talk shit about AMD's marketing, go ahead they're terrible and evil like basically all marketing, but don't act like that's the same as what engineers use to do their job.
The FPS Games should do this alot
Like when you say no to the man in the suit at the end of Half Life. That was fun.
Yes, because all "farm states" (I live in a metro area and am not a farmer) are backwater hicks that don't know about them Internets thangs, right?
Well yeah of course, but let me help you out. For starters, you have to understand that the internet is not a truck. I think you can figure the rest out on your own.