Option 1 would be the far more moderate choice, and less likely to create a protracted battle in the Senate, which SEEMS to be what he was hinting at he wants when he said in his speech that he wanted a "dignified" nomination process - of course this could just be posturing.
Come on, haven't you decoded the Presidental Code yet? When he says he wants a dignified nomination process, he means he wants the Democrats to shut up and just confirm his choice. Just like when he says he wants to be "a uniter", and what he means is he wants people to stop expressing disagreement with him. He sure "united" when he drove Powell, the only competent member of his cabinet, out of office. Now everybody around him would tow the line!
By the way, the idea that Gonzales is the more moderate choice for justice really frightens me. This was the man who was, as far as I can tell, appointed specifically to make people who said "Oh, thank God John Ashcroft is leaving! Anybody will be better than him!" eat crow.
Hell yes I remember that. Of course it isn't surprising; AMD is Microsoft's bitch. They need Microsoft, because it is Microsoft's pressure that keeps Intel from screwing AMD over at the instruction set level. What would happen if Intel decided that their new SSE-whatever instructions should use the same opcodes as AMD-specific instructions like 3dnow? And the reason why Intel's 64-bit x86 instruction set is essentially identical to AMD's is almost certainly because Microsoft told Intel that they were only going to support one 64-bit x86 instruction set and they had already picked AMD's. If that wasn't the case it would have been in Intel's interest to make their 64-bit extensions completely incompatable with AMDs, such that if AMD wanted to support Intel's they'd have to drop their own.
I wouldn't be surprised if Jerry's testimony was an attempt to scratch MS' back in exchange for support for AMD64. Fat lot of good it did them; MS still didn't release a 64-bit OS until Intel was ready with their 64-bit solution.
What we really need is more development of more efficient solar cells. I keep hearing of lab research into vastly more efficient (20-30%) cells, but we need products.
Solar can right now serve a useful role in providing for an individual household's energy needs. In sun-rich locations, a house could provide just about all its electricity needs with solar panels. This modular approach to energy production has fallen out of favor, perhaps because the cost was too high without a single purchaser buying a normal energy plant worth of solar cells.
Look, anyone who is making enough money to pay for rent and their other necessities and has some money besides can save up for a TV. TVs aren't very expensive. Once you've payed for the TV, if you don't buy cable then you're done. So no, you can still be quite poor and afford a TV. That is a Reagan-era fallacy that wasn't true even then. The poor can buy a TV. A new HDTV that's much more expensive or a recurring monthly charge for digital TV access -- that they may not be able to do.
Do you understand? It is quite possible to be poor and buy a TV. That doesn't make them not very poor, that doesn't make them able to afford a new TV just because you think 85% is enough to completely shut out the old technology.
What if rotary telephones had ceased to work once 85% had switched to touch tone? Simple answer: Lot's of people who didn't have a new phone in their budget would have been forced to buy one for no good reason.
Can they provide analog and digital HD access at the same time? Yes. Do they still find analog broadcasts profitable. Yes. So why force them to stop? You shut off access to anyone who can't afford a new TV and for what?
This trailing end is hardly mythical -- that you think it is tells me that you're probably lying about being poor -- as evidenced by the fact that there are 33 million people still using analog broadcast. I hang out with people riding the trailing end of this curve regularly. It's actually somewhat surprising how much the tech gap has already widened -- e.g. news stands are difficult to find in a lot of places because most people who want diverse news sources get their news online. Now you're going to tell them they have 18 months until their current TV becomes obsolete, and they can either go without or buy a new TV which will be more expensive. What do you think they'll say? I've been poor, but I don't think that's even necessary to come to the right conclusion. Yeah, it's pretty fucking obvious who never consulted anyone who can't afford an HD TV.
So industry has decided to force upgrades onto everyone in America, pretty much guaranteed bank for them. You then shill for them by calling not shutting out the people who won't be able to afford this upgrade a Marxist. As if I'm trying to force everyone to not get digital HD TV. What-fucking-ever.
You're god damned right I feel superior to you, you corporate whoring troll.
Keep in mind that 1) altamont is the most deadly wind farm and 2) this is largely because of its location in a valley used as a migratory route, which could obviously be considered and avoided and 3) 1,300 is an incredibly tiny number compared to the number killed by most human developments.
The point that wind farmers have not implemented known methods for preventing raptor deaths is quite valid, but also indicates that the number of deaths could be reduced even more.
Since the only two arguments -against- wind power are bird deaths (a tiny effect) and unsightliness (because coal plants look awesome) I think wind power is a actually a quite viable method of providing clean power. Not -all- our power, but that's no reason not to build more of them. Every bit of clean energy we produce is less dirty energy needed.
Though I'm not sure that the article author himself is serving as the corporate whore. This is the last paragraph of the article:
"In related news, the Cable & Satellite Higher Subscription Fee Association released figures claiming that 72 percent of subscribers felt they were paying too little for their monthly programming. 18 percent said they'd gladly pay twice as much if the level of customer service could be lowered. Surprisingly, a full six percent indicated that they'd rather watch TV from cable or satellite than eat or have sex. (The margin of error for the survey is +/- 100 percent.) "
Yeah, I think the author may have reached the same conclusion we did about the true implications of the numbers, given their source.
Yeah, let's screw everyone who can afford a one-time purchase of a TV (analog color TVs are cheap) but can't afford monthly digital cable bills.
This is absolutely eltists trying to widen the tech gap by eliminating the trailing end of the curve. Things are already headed in that direction; let's not try to deliberatly speed it up, okay?
Whore cares if analog tv goes dark? They answered their own question: 33 million households care, asshole!
You're absolutely right, this is a troll. A self-serving corporate-whoring troll.
I just think the guy is making an incredibly foolish mistake. Didn't he watch the prequels? It was their involvement in politics that corrupted and ultimately doomed the Jedi Council and the Order itself! He should be like the ESB Yoda, content with living in peace with the Force, not the AotC Yoda, who wishes to control the future of an entire empire.
Yah, the French certainly made some blunders. The Maginot Line is one of history's most famous -- though you do have to remember that the fast tank attack hadn't been seen yet. It was still pretty stupid to imagine that WWII would be a repeat of WWI. Yet I maintain that nobody would have been able to stand up to that first German rush in 1940. Nobody was prepared for Blitzkrieg.
Yes, the Opteron, with the "SledgeHammer" core was to have 1024KB of L2, and the Athlon 64, with the "ClawHammer" core was to have 512KB of L2 (I'm using quotes for a reason here). For some reason, "ClawHammer" was delayed, but AMD wanted Opteron to launch with a "SledgeHammer" core and Athlon 64 to launch with a "ClawHammer" core, probably so they can claim some level of consistency with their roadmaps. The solution? Screw with the names. The core that was called "ClawHammer" was renamed "Newcastle". The name "ClawHammer" was then redefined to mean "'SledgeHammer' in a Socket 754 (and later 939) package".
Yes, that does make perfect sense. It was a face-saving move designed to disguise the fact that they had execution problems and had basically shredded their roadmaps. What customers don't know doesn't hurt them, right?
So it would seem that we were both right. This thread was started by me because I was still using information from before AMD's historical revisions. I guess this is what happens when they let internal codenames for projects come out and then let marketing screw with thm. But I can't really blame them, since "Sledgehammer" was a good name for building buzz.
I still think they should have named the dual-core Opterons the Opteron Prime.
Yes, well, in WWII I don't believe there was an army in the world that would have lasted much longer than France's. France had a long land border with Nazi Germany, the Wermacht, inventor of the Blitzkrieg. Britain, Russia, and the U.S. were spared because of the English Channel, the Russian Winter, and the Atlantic Ocean respectively. France was pretty much screwed.
Three desktop ClawHammer models (2800+, 3000+, 3500+) and one mobile ClawHammer model (2700+) have half of the L2 disabled, but it is still physically present on the die. This is likely because up to half of the cache was damaged, so rather than throw out the whole chip, they disabled half the cache and adjusted the model number and/or clock speed to compensate.
That's what they did with Sledgehammer until they could save money with Claw. That is the only reason for Claw's existence. Otherwise Sledgehammer could have easily met all of their market requirements.
There is one, and only one difference between SledgeHammer and ClawHammer: the memory controller. SledgeHammer requires registered RAM, and ClawHammer requires normal (unbuffered) RAM.
This is not correct. The memory controllers are identical. The requirement for buffered ram comes from signal integrity issues in the DRAM channel of the 940-pin package. When they designed the 940-pin package, they assumed it would only be for Opteron and thus they would be using buffered ram anyway. Then they decided they wanted a dual-channel desktop part, which is the Athlon FX and which if you recall was originally 940-pin and required buffered DIMMs. Yet the 754-pin package Athlon 64s available at the same time did not require buffered dimms. The 939-pin package involved optimizing the placement of the DRAM pins to allow unbuffered access. This is the reason to change packages. It is still the same core. There was a revision to the silicon to change the pinout (that was rev D I believe, but I'm not 100% sure), but that isn't the same thing as a different core. It was still Sledge.
The idea that AMD would create and maintain a separate design database and mask set for a feature like buffered vs unbuffered DIMMs is illogical and also not true. Even more so than creating a new mask set for 1 vs 3 HT links -- what could possibly justify the cost with almost no gain? Nothing, which is why they didn't do it.
No, the only justification for a separate mask set -- which is extremely expensive -- is to reduce die area by removing half the cache instead of still making it then disabling it. This saves a lot of area (== money), and is a good reason to produce separate masks.
SledgeHammer has been released under the Opteron (x40-x50) and Athlon 64 FX (51 and 53) brands, both of them only on Socket 940.
Sledge has been in all packages. When Athlon64 launched, Sledgehammer was the only core that existed. Any Athlon64 purchased at that time was Sledgehammer. Clawhammer did not even tape out much less reach production before Athlon64 was launched. Yet the 754-pin Athlon64 using the Sledge core (the only choice) did not require buffered DIMMs.
I've spent a lot of time doing research on and documenting the specs of all the different models of the Athlon 64, and I know what a ClawHammer is.
That's great. I don't want to sound too smarmy, but when I am sitting here looking at the layouts and the product engineering packaging guides that doesn't mean much to me. You can trust me when I say I know what a Clawhammer is.
Here is what I now believe is the cause of the confusion:
When AMD put out roadmaps for K8 originally, the Opteron and Athlon64 were sharply contrasted. Dual channel vs single, MP vs UP, and 1MB l2 vs 512K l2. At this time, Clawhammer == Athlon 64 and Sledgehammer == Opteron, and AMD roadmaps reflected this.
Then a combination of schedule slips and competitive pressure from Intel shook things up. Athlon FX was conceived to give dual channel to the desktop, and it was decided that the Athlon 64 needed 1MB of cache at least until it began to displace K7 in lower market segments. At this point doing Clawhammer immediately was deemed impractical. It would come later as a cost saving measure. At the launch of Athlon 64, there was exactly one K8 core: Sledgehammer. Clawhammer had not yet taped out, but would shortly.
I don't agree with these thoughts.. but I can hear them.
(puts tin-foil hat back on)
You have to take your tin-foil beanie off to hear people's thoughts? That sucks. I'm not sure it'd be worth the benefit. No good reading minds if yours is being controlled, you know? You must be using electro-telepathy, which would explain why you need to take off the hat. I'm more into neuro-chemical-empathy which only requires that I take my allergy medication to keep my nasal passages clear. To each their own, I guess.
I know this is flamebait (and pretty funny, besides they deserve it), but I always have to take issue with - American Revolution Sorry, Ameri-centrists, but France saved our ass on this one. Saying the colonists defeated Britain on their own is like saying the Northern Alliance defeated the Taliban. That's a little bit of hyperbole, but France was nevertheless instrumental in our victory. I try to tone down my French-bashing just based on this debt of gratitude.
As for the World Wars, I'm wondering what country you could have put in France's position and expected to do better. Holding off Germany for years in WWI while the U.S. decided whether or not they wanted to do anything isn't something to be scoffed at. U.S. gloating over these wars reminds me of two boxers going at it for ten rounds, and then in the eleventh round another fighter who had been sitting safetly in the locker room jumps into the ring and pops out the fatigued opponent, and then mocks the other fighter for not having the strength to do it themselves.
clawhammer and slegehammer both have 1MB of l2 cache. the difference is that sledgehammer is the codename for opterons and clawhammer is the codename for athlon64s.
No, you are wrong. Athlon 64 and Opteron are products. Sledgehammer and Clawhammer are cores. There is absolutely zero reason to spin new silicon just to save the tiny area of two HT links when you can just disable those links with fuses to create the product differentiation you want.
Clawhammer is the 512MB core. That is the motivation to have another core, to save on the die area.
Let me repeat: Athlon 64 and Opteron are brands distinguished by being MP capable vs. not, which is a decision made at packaging time by blowing fuses on the chip.
Sledgehammer and Clawhammer are silicon designs with different masks sets and different fab runs. Whether a Sledgehammer is destined to become an Opteron or an Athlon 64 depends entirely on what market need they want to fill.
and the clawhammers are all socket 754. i should know, i am using one at the moment.
Does your cpu have 1MB of l2 cache or 512MB? If it's 1MB, you're the proud owner of Sledgehammer with 2 of the HT links disabled.
Yes, all clawhammers are in 754-pin packages, but this is an arbitrary decision based on market segmentation, not on the design of the core. Not all 754-pin packages are Claws.
just search the web for the relevant specs if you don't believe me.
There's a lot of misinfromation regarding this subject. Originally, all Sledgehammers would be Opterons and all Clawhammers would be Athlon 64. Then they decided they needed 1MB of cache in the Athlon 64, and thus they used Sledgehammer. They eventually released an Athlon 64 with half a MB of cache, and this was the first appearance of Clawhammer. However that initial plan and some understandable confusion on the part of readers on the web has resulted in this scenario. But 1) it isn't true and 2) it doesn't make sense.
I quickly found an Anandtech article which got it right. But regardless, I'm going to be trusting the layouts on the walls versus the speculation and assumption on the web.
It has been suggested by people not bothering to do the math that the change in albedo from the solar cells themselves would cause warming, but we've already paved twice that area.
Yes, but it isn't clear that they aren't right and that paved area isn't causing warming, and you're talking about paving 50% more. That doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
Don't get me wrong; I love solar, I want more solar, and I especially want more efficient solar cells. I just think putting the collectors in space and transmitting the power via microwave is on a large scale a more environmentally friendly solution.
The usual profit sharing (if we chose to share with the Defeated People) is 50/50, meaning at least 5:1 profit on that adventure for the country as a whole, but since Haliburton is actually getting paid for their efforts (and then some) and the profit will accrue directly to the oil companies and not back to We the People, it's an amazingly shrewd business deal, the greatest heist in the history of mankind: $10 trillion. Almost the entire US gross domestic product for a year.
Yeah, and it boggles me how many people are completely oblivious to this fact. They'll say to me "how could the war be about oil? We've spent X billion dollars and only gotten Y million in oil!" To which I say first "only Y million as of yet" and second "And where do you think that X billion went?" Our "expenditures" are lining the pockets of the same companies that are going to be profiting from the "gain".
It's a massive money shift from the people into private coffers, it's blatant, and nobody notices because they can'd dissociate the "us" meaning every American from the government and their cronies. I'm disgusted.
Something I myself hadn't thought about but another poster made plain: We may not be getting much out of Iraqi oil fields, but the oil companies are making shedloads of cash off the increased price in oil the instability of those fields has caused. Their cost hasn't changed, but the supply/demand equation is now letting them make extra profit.
It's technically easy to solve, but politically impossible.
Agreed. Which is why it doesn't really matter if we're talking about paving the Sahara with solar cells or making gigantic space collectors. They're both pipe dreams and we'll all die dreaming of them.
That is of course important to consider. However when deciding whether solar cells are benificial, you have to remember to add the same costs (production and maintenance) of our existing infrastructure. I think you'd find that solar comes out as good if not better on that front. Also there is manufacturing and maintenance involved in aquiring the fuel source for our current energy plants as well, which you save when using solar.
I've seen this inaccuracy all over the place, so I'm going to clear it up now with the understanding that it is perfectly normal that you'd be confused by AMD's products versus their cores.
AMD has two 64-bit products, the Athlon 64 and the Opteron. AMD had two 64-bit cores, the Clawhammer and the Sledgehammer. These are not the same thing.
Sledgehammer was the first K8 core, and has 1MB of L2 cache. Clawhammer came later, and has 512 MB of L2 cache. I can't recall if Clawhammer had all three hypertransport links, but Sledgehammer had fuses so you could disable as many as you liked, and Clawhammer could naturally have the same. So the decision of what package/socket to put the part in is completely orthoganal to what core it uses.
Any AMD part with 1MB of L2 cache was based on the Sledgehammer core -- meaning all of the Opterons, the Athlon FX, and all of the original Athlon 64's. If it has 512MB of cache, it was a Clawhammer core, which includes some of the Athlon 64's.
I know it's confusing, but once you know the truth it should hopefully make sense. Making a new mask set is expensive, and AMD would only do it to save something substantial, like half the area of the cache. The hypertransport links are pretty small, so making a new core just to remove them wouldn't make financial sense.
AMD designs were clean-room implementations based solely on the published instruction set, not on the Intel designs.
Actually, up to I believe the K5 which was the first purely original AMD dsign, AMD did use the Intel designs. They would actually take photographs of Intel chips, take them to a local copy shop, blow them up, and use that to reverse-engineer the part and create mask sets.
However on patents AMD is pretty well protected since they have a patent cross-license agreement with Intel that goes back quite some time.
I don't think you should need a special license. There are enough reasons to need an SUV or truck that I don't think they should have to ask the government's permission. Instead I take a two-prong approach to reducing the use of SUVs.
First, I stigmatize those who drive one without need. I try to make it as clear as I can that I think driving a huge truck when you don't need to looks really stupid to me. A truck bed that hasn't carried so much as a sofa or an SUV that's never been on so much as a dirt driveway is the height of poserdom.
Second, I try to inform those that buy SUVs for safety that they are not safe. They have high centers of gravity and like to roll. They look really good in safety tests because in the U.S. safety tests are only dead-center head-on, whereas most crashes are more oblique and the SUV's large and high center of mass work against it. They aren't overall less safe (being big is advantageous) but they aren't more safe than a safe car either.
The problem with SUVs is that they are a fashion. Like bellbottoms, it will pass and we can all chip in to stop it from coming back.
But that heat would be taken out of the chunk we produce when we consume energy from other sources, so it is still a net gain on the inward flux. Reducing emissions by closing coal plants would increase the outward flux. This also reduces the energy expended on getting at our current sources of energy, so less heat is produced by us. We win on all fronts.
Personally, I'd like to have the huge space-bound solar collector with microwave transmitter, but in a place where it doesn't reduce the sunlight on earth. If we clean up our act with emissions we should have plenty of breathing room and not have to block out the sun just yet. And sunlight is useful for so many things.
Please, tell me more about these Burke brand firearms...
"Personal firearms are made by manufacturers for a variety of purposes. Hunting, self-defense, the police and armed forces, or post-apocalyptic survival bunkers. All legal uses of guns, protected by the Second Ammendment of the U.S. Constitution. If the owner chooses, they can also be used for murder.
No so with Burke brand firearms. Guns from other manufacturers only tacitly accept their guns common uses as murder weapons, and thus make weapons ill suited to the tough requirements of assassinations, drive-bys, and vigilante justice in the crime-filled streets of pre-post-apocalyptic America. This is what makes Burke brand firearms different. They are designed for a single purpose: killing people without regard to law and order. Our engineers have spent years designing our weapons and field testing them in realistic use scenarios, to deliver the best performance money can buy.
Remember, America: Guns don't kill people. Burke(tm) brand firearms do.(r)"
And now I can probably never open up a gun shop.
Sorry, but I actually remember the press conferences and speeches. The reason why we had to depose Saddam and depose him immediately was because he had weapons of mass destruction. The gassing of the Kurds was proof that he had them and would use them again. It was also why we were going to kick his ass and enjoy it, regardless of his opinion, yes. To say WMD wasn't the primary stated motivation for invading Iraq in 2003 is to rewrite history. It is perfectly obvious that if it hadn't been for the alleged threat of Saddam's WMDs we wouldn't be at war.
If you are going to start using body counts to justify things, you should be careful. Why Saddam and not any of dozens of dictators who have killed more? The answer to that question was always, of course, because he has WMD. Now since you're comparing numbers, how many civilians have died as a result of the U.S. invasion? If the answer is "I don't know" -- which by the way is the official answer of the U.S. military -- don't tell me that you care about the Iraqi people.
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Option 1 would be the far more moderate choice, and less likely to create a protracted battle in the Senate, which SEEMS to be what he was hinting at he wants when he said in his speech that he wanted a "dignified" nomination process - of course this could just be posturing.
Come on, haven't you decoded the Presidental Code yet? When he says he wants a dignified nomination process, he means he wants the Democrats to shut up and just confirm his choice. Just like when he says he wants to be "a uniter", and what he means is he wants people to stop expressing disagreement with him. He sure "united" when he drove Powell, the only competent member of his cabinet, out of office. Now everybody around him would tow the line!
By the way, the idea that Gonzales is the more moderate choice for justice really frightens me. This was the man who was, as far as I can tell, appointed specifically to make people who said "Oh, thank God John Ashcroft is leaving! Anybody will be better than him!" eat crow.
Hell yes I remember that. Of course it isn't surprising; AMD is Microsoft's bitch. They need Microsoft, because it is Microsoft's pressure that keeps Intel from screwing AMD over at the instruction set level. What would happen if Intel decided that their new SSE-whatever instructions should use the same opcodes as AMD-specific instructions like 3dnow? And the reason why Intel's 64-bit x86 instruction set is essentially identical to AMD's is almost certainly because Microsoft told Intel that they were only going to support one 64-bit x86 instruction set and they had already picked AMD's. If that wasn't the case it would have been in Intel's interest to make their 64-bit extensions completely incompatable with AMDs, such that if AMD wanted to support Intel's they'd have to drop their own.
I wouldn't be surprised if Jerry's testimony was an attempt to scratch MS' back in exchange for support for AMD64. Fat lot of good it did them; MS still didn't release a 64-bit OS until Intel was ready with their 64-bit solution.
What we really need is more development of more efficient solar cells. I keep hearing of lab research into vastly more efficient (20-30%) cells, but we need products.
Solar can right now serve a useful role in providing for an individual household's energy needs. In sun-rich locations, a house could provide just about all its electricity needs with solar panels. This modular approach to energy production has fallen out of favor, perhaps because the cost was too high without a single purchaser buying a normal energy plant worth of solar cells.
Look, anyone who is making enough money to pay for rent and their other necessities and has some money besides can save up for a TV. TVs aren't very expensive. Once you've payed for the TV, if you don't buy cable then you're done. So no, you can still be quite poor and afford a TV. That is a Reagan-era fallacy that wasn't true even then. The poor can buy a TV. A new HDTV that's much more expensive or a recurring monthly charge for digital TV access -- that they may not be able to do.
Do you understand? It is quite possible to be poor and buy a TV. That doesn't make them not very poor, that doesn't make them able to afford a new TV just because you think 85% is enough to completely shut out the old technology.
What if rotary telephones had ceased to work once 85% had switched to touch tone? Simple answer: Lot's of people who didn't have a new phone in their budget would have been forced to buy one for no good reason.
Can they provide analog and digital HD access at the same time? Yes. Do they still find analog broadcasts profitable. Yes. So why force them to stop? You shut off access to anyone who can't afford a new TV and for what?
LOL.
This trailing end is hardly mythical -- that you think it is tells me that you're probably lying about being poor -- as evidenced by the fact that there are 33 million people still using analog broadcast. I hang out with people riding the trailing end of this curve regularly. It's actually somewhat surprising how much the tech gap has already widened -- e.g. news stands are difficult to find in a lot of places because most people who want diverse news sources get their news online. Now you're going to tell them they have 18 months until their current TV becomes obsolete, and they can either go without or buy a new TV which will be more expensive. What do you think they'll say? I've been poor, but I don't think that's even necessary to come to the right conclusion. Yeah, it's pretty fucking obvious who never consulted anyone who can't afford an HD TV.
So industry has decided to force upgrades onto everyone in America, pretty much guaranteed bank for them. You then shill for them by calling not shutting out the people who won't be able to afford this upgrade a Marxist. As if I'm trying to force everyone to not get digital HD TV. What-fucking-ever.
You're god damned right I feel superior to you, you corporate whoring troll.
Keep in mind that
1) altamont is the most deadly wind farm and
2) this is largely because of its location in a valley used as a migratory route, which could obviously be considered and avoided and
3) 1,300 is an incredibly tiny number compared to the number killed by most human developments.
The point that wind farmers have not implemented known methods for preventing raptor deaths is quite valid, but also indicates that the number of deaths could be reduced even more.
Since the only two arguments -against- wind power are bird deaths (a tiny effect) and unsightliness (because coal plants look awesome) I think wind power is a actually a quite viable method of providing clean power. Not -all- our power, but that's no reason not to build more of them. Every bit of clean energy we produce is less dirty energy needed.
Though I'm not sure that the article author himself is serving as the corporate whore. This is the last paragraph of the article:
"In related news, the Cable & Satellite Higher Subscription Fee Association released figures claiming that 72 percent of subscribers felt they were paying too little for their monthly programming. 18 percent said they'd gladly pay twice as much if the level of customer service could be lowered. Surprisingly, a full six percent indicated that they'd rather watch TV from cable or satellite than eat or have sex. (The margin of error for the survey is +/- 100 percent.) "
Yeah, I think the author may have reached the same conclusion we did about the true implications of the numbers, given their source.
Yeah, let's screw everyone who can afford a one-time purchase of a TV (analog color TVs are cheap) but can't afford monthly digital cable bills.
This is absolutely eltists trying to widen the tech gap by eliminating the trailing end of the curve. Things are already headed in that direction; let's not try to deliberatly speed it up, okay?
Whore cares if analog tv goes dark? They answered their own question: 33 million households care, asshole!
You're absolutely right, this is a troll. A self-serving corporate-whoring troll.
I just think the guy is making an incredibly foolish mistake. Didn't he watch the prequels? It was their involvement in politics that corrupted and ultimately doomed the Jedi Council and the Order itself! He should be like the ESB Yoda, content with living in peace with the Force, not the AotC Yoda, who wishes to control the future of an entire empire.
Yah, the French certainly made some blunders. The Maginot Line is one of history's most famous -- though you do have to remember that the fast tank attack hadn't been seen yet. It was still pretty stupid to imagine that WWII would be a repeat of WWI. Yet I maintain that nobody would have been able to stand up to that first German rush in 1940. Nobody was prepared for Blitzkrieg.
Yes, the Opteron, with the "SledgeHammer" core was to have 1024KB of L2, and the Athlon 64, with the "ClawHammer" core was to have 512KB of L2 (I'm using quotes for a reason here). For some reason, "ClawHammer" was delayed, but AMD wanted Opteron to launch with a "SledgeHammer" core and Athlon 64 to launch with a "ClawHammer" core, probably so they can claim some level of consistency with their roadmaps. The solution? Screw with the names. The core that was called "ClawHammer" was renamed "Newcastle". The name "ClawHammer" was then redefined to mean "'SledgeHammer' in a Socket 754 (and later 939) package".
Yes, that does make perfect sense. It was a face-saving move designed to disguise the fact that they had execution problems and had basically shredded their roadmaps. What customers don't know doesn't hurt them, right?
So it would seem that we were both right. This thread was started by me because I was still using information from before AMD's historical revisions. I guess this is what happens when they let internal codenames for projects come out and then let marketing screw with thm. But I can't really blame them, since "Sledgehammer" was a good name for building buzz.
I still think they should have named the dual-core Opterons the Opteron Prime.
Yes, well, in WWII I don't believe there was an army in the world that would have lasted much longer than France's. France had a long land border with Nazi Germany, the Wermacht, inventor of the Blitzkrieg. Britain, Russia, and the U.S. were spared because of the English Channel, the Russian Winter, and the Atlantic Ocean respectively. France was pretty much screwed.
Three desktop ClawHammer models (2800+, 3000+, 3500+) and one mobile ClawHammer model (2700+) have half of the L2 disabled, but it is still physically present on the die. This is likely because up to half of the cache was damaged, so rather than throw out the whole chip, they disabled half the cache and adjusted the model number and/or clock speed to compensate.
That's what they did with Sledgehammer until they could save money with Claw. That is the only reason for Claw's existence. Otherwise Sledgehammer could have easily met all of their market requirements.
There is one, and only one difference between SledgeHammer and ClawHammer: the memory controller. SledgeHammer requires registered RAM, and ClawHammer requires normal (unbuffered) RAM.
This is not correct. The memory controllers are identical. The requirement for buffered ram comes from signal integrity issues in the DRAM channel of the 940-pin package. When they designed the 940-pin package, they assumed it would only be for Opteron and thus they would be using buffered ram anyway. Then they decided they wanted a dual-channel desktop part, which is the Athlon FX and which if you recall was originally 940-pin and required buffered DIMMs. Yet the 754-pin package Athlon 64s available at the same time did not require buffered dimms. The 939-pin package involved optimizing the placement of the DRAM pins to allow unbuffered access. This is the reason to change packages. It is still the same core. There was a revision to the silicon to change the pinout (that was rev D I believe, but I'm not 100% sure), but that isn't the same thing as a different core. It was still Sledge.
The idea that AMD would create and maintain a separate design database and mask set for a feature like buffered vs unbuffered DIMMs is illogical and also not true. Even more so than creating a new mask set for 1 vs 3 HT links -- what could possibly justify the cost with almost no gain? Nothing, which is why they didn't do it.
No, the only justification for a separate mask set -- which is extremely expensive -- is to reduce die area by removing half the cache instead of still making it then disabling it. This saves a lot of area (== money), and is a good reason to produce separate masks.
SledgeHammer has been released under the Opteron (x40-x50) and Athlon 64 FX (51 and 53) brands, both of them only on Socket 940.
Sledge has been in all packages. When Athlon64 launched, Sledgehammer was the only core that existed. Any Athlon64 purchased at that time was Sledgehammer. Clawhammer did not even tape out much less reach production before Athlon64 was launched. Yet the 754-pin Athlon64 using the Sledge core (the only choice) did not require buffered DIMMs.
I've spent a lot of time doing research on and documenting the specs of all the different models of the Athlon 64, and I know what a ClawHammer is.
That's great. I don't want to sound too smarmy, but when I am sitting here looking at the layouts and the product engineering packaging guides that doesn't mean much to me. You can trust me when I say I know what a Clawhammer is.
Here is what I now believe is the cause of the confusion:
When AMD put out roadmaps for K8 originally, the Opteron and Athlon64 were sharply contrasted. Dual channel vs single, MP vs UP, and 1MB l2 vs 512K l2. At this time, Clawhammer == Athlon 64 and Sledgehammer == Opteron, and AMD roadmaps reflected this.
Then a combination of schedule slips and competitive pressure from Intel shook things up. Athlon FX was conceived to give dual channel to the desktop, and it was decided that the Athlon 64 needed 1MB of cache at least until it began to displace K7 in lower market segments. At this point doing Clawhammer immediately was deemed impractical. It would come later as a cost saving measure. At the launch of Athlon 64, there was exactly one K8 core: Sledgehammer. Clawhammer had not yet taped out, but would shortly.
Since t
I don't agree with these thoughts.. but I can hear them.
(puts tin-foil hat back on)
You have to take your tin-foil beanie off to hear people's thoughts? That sucks. I'm not sure it'd be worth the benefit. No good reading minds if yours is being controlled, you know? You must be using electro-telepathy, which would explain why you need to take off the hat. I'm more into neuro-chemical-empathy which only requires that I take my allergy medication to keep my nasal passages clear. To each their own, I guess.
I know this is flamebait (and pretty funny, besides they deserve it), but I always have to take issue with
- American Revolution
Sorry, Ameri-centrists, but France saved our ass on this one. Saying the colonists defeated Britain on their own is like saying the Northern Alliance defeated the Taliban. That's a little bit of hyperbole, but France was nevertheless instrumental in our victory. I try to tone down my French-bashing just based on this debt of gratitude.
As for the World Wars, I'm wondering what country you could have put in France's position and expected to do better. Holding off Germany for years in WWI while the U.S. decided whether or not they wanted to do anything isn't something to be scoffed at. U.S. gloating over these wars reminds me of two boxers going at it for ten rounds, and then in the eleventh round another fighter who had been sitting safetly in the locker room jumps into the ring and pops out the fatigued opponent, and then mocks the other fighter for not having the strength to do it themselves.
clawhammer and slegehammer both have 1MB of l2 cache. the difference is that sledgehammer is the codename for opterons and clawhammer is the codename for athlon64s.
No, you are wrong. Athlon 64 and Opteron are products. Sledgehammer and Clawhammer are cores. There is absolutely zero reason to spin new silicon just to save the tiny area of two HT links when you can just disable those links with fuses to create the product differentiation you want.
Clawhammer is the 512MB core. That is the motivation to have another core, to save on the die area.
Let me repeat: Athlon 64 and Opteron are brands distinguished by being MP capable vs. not, which is a decision made at packaging time by blowing fuses on the chip.
Sledgehammer and Clawhammer are silicon designs with different masks sets and different fab runs. Whether a Sledgehammer is destined to become an Opteron or an Athlon 64 depends entirely on what market need they want to fill.
and the clawhammers are all socket 754. i should know, i am using one at the moment.
Does your cpu have 1MB of l2 cache or 512MB? If it's 1MB, you're the proud owner of Sledgehammer with 2 of the HT links disabled.
Yes, all clawhammers are in 754-pin packages, but this is an arbitrary decision based on market segmentation, not on the design of the core. Not all 754-pin packages are Claws.
just search the web for the relevant specs if you don't believe me.
There's a lot of misinfromation regarding this subject. Originally, all Sledgehammers would be Opterons and all Clawhammers would be Athlon 64. Then they decided they needed 1MB of cache in the Athlon 64, and thus they used Sledgehammer. They eventually released an Athlon 64 with half a MB of cache, and this was the first appearance of Clawhammer. However that initial plan and some understandable confusion on the part of readers on the web has resulted in this scenario. But 1) it isn't true and 2) it doesn't make sense.
I quickly found an Anandtech article which got it right. But regardless, I'm going to be trusting the layouts on the walls versus the speculation and assumption on the web.
It has been suggested by people not bothering to do the math that the change in albedo from the solar cells themselves would cause warming, but we've already paved twice that area.
Yes, but it isn't clear that they aren't right and that paved area isn't causing warming, and you're talking about paving 50% more. That doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
Don't get me wrong; I love solar, I want more solar, and I especially want more efficient solar cells. I just think putting the collectors in space and transmitting the power via microwave is on a large scale a more environmentally friendly solution.
The usual profit sharing (if we chose to share with the Defeated People) is 50/50, meaning at least 5:1 profit on that adventure for the country as a whole, but since Haliburton is actually getting paid for their efforts (and then some) and the profit will accrue directly to the oil companies and not back to We the People, it's an amazingly shrewd business deal, the greatest heist in the history of mankind: $10 trillion. Almost the entire US gross domestic product for a year.
Yeah, and it boggles me how many people are completely oblivious to this fact. They'll say to me "how could the war be about oil? We've spent X billion dollars and only gotten Y million in oil!" To which I say first "only Y million as of yet" and second "And where do you think that X billion went?" Our "expenditures" are lining the pockets of the same companies that are going to be profiting from the "gain".
It's a massive money shift from the people into private coffers, it's blatant, and nobody notices because they can'd dissociate the "us" meaning every American from the government and their cronies. I'm disgusted.
Something I myself hadn't thought about but another poster made plain: We may not be getting much out of Iraqi oil fields, but the oil companies are making shedloads of cash off the increased price in oil the instability of those fields has caused. Their cost hasn't changed, but the supply/demand equation is now letting them make extra profit.
It's technically easy to solve, but politically impossible.
Agreed. Which is why it doesn't really matter if we're talking about paving the Sahara with solar cells or making gigantic space collectors. They're both pipe dreams and we'll all die dreaming of them.
That is of course important to consider. However when deciding whether solar cells are benificial, you have to remember to add the same costs (production and maintenance) of our existing infrastructure. I think you'd find that solar comes out as good if not better on that front. Also there is manufacturing and maintenance involved in aquiring the fuel source for our current energy plants as well, which you save when using solar.
I've seen this inaccuracy all over the place, so I'm going to clear it up now with the understanding that it is perfectly normal that you'd be confused by AMD's products versus their cores.
AMD has two 64-bit products, the Athlon 64 and the Opteron. AMD had two 64-bit cores, the Clawhammer and the Sledgehammer. These are not the same thing.
Sledgehammer was the first K8 core, and has 1MB of L2 cache. Clawhammer came later, and has 512 MB of L2 cache. I can't recall if Clawhammer had all three hypertransport links, but Sledgehammer had fuses so you could disable as many as you liked, and Clawhammer could naturally have the same. So the decision of what package/socket to put the part in is completely orthoganal to what core it uses.
Any AMD part with 1MB of L2 cache was based on the Sledgehammer core -- meaning all of the Opterons, the Athlon FX, and all of the original Athlon 64's. If it has 512MB of cache, it was a Clawhammer core, which includes some of the Athlon 64's.
I know it's confusing, but once you know the truth it should hopefully make sense. Making a new mask set is expensive, and AMD would only do it to save something substantial, like half the area of the cache. The hypertransport links are pretty small, so making a new core just to remove them wouldn't make financial sense.
AMD designs were clean-room implementations based solely on the published instruction set, not on the Intel designs.
Actually, up to I believe the K5 which was the first purely original AMD dsign, AMD did use the Intel designs. They would actually take photographs of Intel chips, take them to a local copy shop, blow them up, and use that to reverse-engineer the part and create mask sets.
However on patents AMD is pretty well protected since they have a patent cross-license agreement with Intel that goes back quite some time.
I don't think you should need a special license. There are enough reasons to need an SUV or truck that I don't think they should have to ask the government's permission. Instead I take a two-prong approach to reducing the use of SUVs.
First, I stigmatize those who drive one without need. I try to make it as clear as I can that I think driving a huge truck when you don't need to looks really stupid to me. A truck bed that hasn't carried so much as a sofa or an SUV that's never been on so much as a dirt driveway is the height of poserdom.
Second, I try to inform those that buy SUVs for safety that they are not safe. They have high centers of gravity and like to roll. They look really good in safety tests because in the U.S. safety tests are only dead-center head-on, whereas most crashes are more oblique and the SUV's large and high center of mass work against it. They aren't overall less safe (being big is advantageous) but they aren't more safe than a safe car either.
The problem with SUVs is that they are a fashion. Like bellbottoms, it will pass and we can all chip in to stop it from coming back.
Besides, moving the earth further away from the Sun is a much more hair brained idea, so why not do that?
Your other ideas were hopeless, but this... this might get you some funding.
But that heat would be taken out of the chunk we produce when we consume energy from other sources, so it is still a net gain on the inward flux. Reducing emissions by closing coal plants would increase the outward flux. This also reduces the energy expended on getting at our current sources of energy, so less heat is produced by us. We win on all fronts.
Personally, I'd like to have the huge space-bound solar collector with microwave transmitter, but in a place where it doesn't reduce the sunlight on earth. If we clean up our act with emissions we should have plenty of breathing room and not have to block out the sun just yet. And sunlight is useful for so many things.
Sorry, but I actually remember the press conferences and speeches. The reason why we had to depose Saddam and depose him immediately was because he had weapons of mass destruction. The gassing of the Kurds was proof that he had them and would use them again. It was also why we were going to kick his ass and enjoy it, regardless of his opinion, yes. To say WMD wasn't the primary stated motivation for invading Iraq in 2003 is to rewrite history. It is perfectly obvious that if it hadn't been for the alleged threat of Saddam's WMDs we wouldn't be at war.
If you are going to start using body counts to justify things, you should be careful. Why Saddam and not any of dozens of dictators who have killed more? The answer to that question was always, of course, because he has WMD. Now since you're comparing numbers, how many civilians have died as a result of the U.S. invasion? If the answer is "I don't know" -- which by the way is the official answer of the U.S. military -- don't tell me that you care about the Iraqi people.