I'll defer since you at least think you know about AMD internal structure specifically. I was referring to enterprise organizations in general. What I do know about AMD specifically is they aren't even in the business people think they are anymore. AMD doesn't make chips or develop new fab processes at all, they sold off that portion of their company.
"So far, AMD's on-die GPUs (in their APUs) have been incredibly slower than the discrete ones."
Per transistor? No, they have not.
"Now, true, you have the problem of communication across the PCIe bus - but that can be resolved with a different system architecture (like OpenPower)."
No, it can not. It's called the speed of light. It is physically impossible for any architecture to make an external bus be as fast as communications can be on the same die.
"Why not just have Intel ship a Mobile CPU without iGPU and a Separate GPU."
Because a GPU on die is much faster and more efficient. That external bus might be high bandwidth but the latency is a killer compared with sitting on the same die. Many of the same reasons that AMD managed to coast along with much smaller and more efficient intel chips for awhile by putting the memory controller on the die.
"And AMD, why now? When Zen is doing great, has great roadmap and potential, along with much better GFx then Intel. Why?"
You aren't even talking about the same AMD. People who work outside enterprise don't seem to get this. They think an enterprise like AMD is one company like the local hardware store. At enterprise scale there are multiple companies, even within those there are multiple independent divisions, each with their own roapmap and goals. Other divisions and AMD companies are the same thing to any of them as a completely external company like Intel, if they want or need their services they have to pay for them... similarly they will use whichever offering provides what they need for less whether that is the offering of another group within AMD or a third party. In this way even parts of the company that are purely cost centers like support, are billing all the parts of the company that use those services and provide some kind of way to estimate the value they are providing or to let each of those parts of the company drift away when they aren't competitive with other options piecemail until that division is no longer needed/justified. In some cases across restructuring/divisions/mergers/etc you can even have more than one group within a company that competes with each other to offer the same service.
Yes, constantly. Almost every major bank reorders transactions so that the highest value transactions occur first and the opposite is true of deposits which are applied after charges. This maximizes the chance for an overdraft and before occupy wallstreet and the banking reforms by Elizabeth Warren it maximized the number of transactions they could charge an OD fee on. Sometimes this could allow for charging five OD fees even though only one transaction of less than $1 was actually made with insufficient available funds in the account. Also banks will algorithmically apply those fees up to 72hrs later, they will apply a historical analysis to the account and retroactively apply the fee at any point that does the most damage.
These things have less impact to those who can afford to maintain a notable buffer balance but for people living paycheck to paycheck
Also Wells Fargo has been busted in a pretty major way very recently. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wells+fargo+accounts+scandal&atb=v72-3__&ia=news
Exchanges are not part of the bitcoin system. Neither are tumblers, black markets, etc.
But yes, people lose their money at banks ALL the time, it's happened to me and I'm sure it's happened to you at some point. It happens every time a bank charges a fee, pays out an electronic charge you didn't authorize, reverses a charge on a bounced check, holds/freezes funds on behalf of a government agency, pays out funds for identity theft, or issues loans because they come from newly created debt and not deposited funds and therefore dissolve all existing money. There aren't usually many "stories" about it because we are used to be robbed by the banks but there was the entire occupy wallstreet protest on the matter, a peaceful protest shut down in a not so peaceful manner by the government.
True, but your bank can also rip you off, give your money away at the request of a third party; such as a robber like a gunman, the IRS, or someone in response to a court order. Also your money could be fake, the transaction that funded your balance could have fraud at some point in the history and be reversed or someone could just say it was fraud, etc. You might agree some of those things would be just or for the communal good but ultimately it doesn't matter what you think, people have the power to take what is yours even if they use fraudulent means to activate that power.
The Bitcoin system is so computationally challenging because it makes it impossible to counterfeit or defraud the system itself, those miners can't take control of your money for any reason, just or unjust. Of course nothing about that prevents you from getting ripped off otherwise but it won't be your money system working against you.
Yes, mining is brute forcing hashes to verify network transactions for a time, when a hash is deemed difficult enough the network releases a block but the difficulty automatically adjusts to the total mining power on the network so those blocks are released at a fixed rate. Along with the released blocks the miners get the transaction fees paid to give various transactions higher priority on the network. At some point when all the bitcoin blocks have been released those fees are meant to reward miners so that they will continue processing transactions.
That is how the whole thing works, mining does serve a very important purpose, it isn't just a giveaway or complete waste of power like some people indicate. Mining provides actual value to the system and the more mining power on the network the greater the integrity of bitcoin transactions. It does require more power than a traditional transaction verification system simply because the whole thing is set up in a way so that math and statistics are all anyone needs to trust in.
This is the part where Trump is right. Corporations are mindless profit machines. Right or wrong has nothing to do with it, cut corporate taxes by 15% and there is a dramatically lower incentive to offshore, moreover it is 15% cheaper to operate in the US than it otherwise would be. That 15% impacts those cold mindless decisions in a substantial way. That is not the same thing as just giving the money to the rich people and hoping they'll spend it. Those evil corporations (including the small ones that are really just one guy) ARE our economy, collectively they provide pretty much all the jobs. They aren't going to give that difference back as a generous handout, but they will take advantage of that extra 15% margin and expand anywhere that lets them so they can make more money and as a side effect they'll create jobs, offer new services, etc.
By that logic if someone is using birth control it isn't sex. If anyone cums, tries to cum, and/or tries to make someone cum, it's sex. Similarly, append that list and add "thinks about cumming, tries to make someone think about cumming, or anything that generally culiminates in cumming", and it's cheating.
In fairness, there really wasn't any science going into the Dark Ages. Although, looking at the current articles on the topics it seems the current trend is to try to cater to a more global view that tries to give credit to those who advocated ideas that the scientific method incorporates rather than firmly declare the formal and modern scientific method as the beginning of science.
"Allah means "God" in arabic, and Islam is based on Judaism and Christianity - in many ways it's the same religion worshiping the "one true God". So Mohammed didn't invent Allah. Nope."
Agreed, the jews invented the "one true God" unless you considered them to have borrowed their deity from the Egyptians since the occult inner teachings of their priesthood tend to support that idea even if the simplified version for the masses of their people was quite different than anything in Egypt.
"It might be inconceivable to you, but moral and ethical standards do change over the centuries."
Which is a reasonable argument to make for a man but for not a mouth piece of an infallible deity that defines in an absolute and unchangeable manner what is and is not moral.
You have to figure out how to get it and then extract it. Even if you are just getting someone else to fleece the money for you, it's still an effort to do so.
No but in 5-10 years it WILL mean something. It's like when someone invented the word "cloud" or "automations" or "devops", none of these terms actually had real meanings, over time people trying to figure out what they mean while not admitting they have no idea have come to enough common consensus that some sort of meaning has begun to emerge.
Luckily as computing becomes more power efficient so does mining which is performed with custom ASICs and not GPUs as some many deluded investors seem to think. Only alternative cryptocurrencies created by people who had large investments in existing obsolete GPU mining rigs are mined with GPUs.
Also, at some point the fixed output rewards for unlocking new blocks will disappear and the reward for mining will only be the transaction fees paid on transactions. This will limit the incentive to pile on more mining power. Although, I do expect at some point governments (or national level banks) will engage in something of a mining arms race.
Why would you do that when ASIC mining is much cheaper and would crush your rig? That is a big part of the point. The experts advising people investing aren't even well enough informed to know GPU's haven't been how you mined bitcoin for 6-7 years.
"So for example in countries with strong institutions and rule of law, blockchain wouldn't at first blush make sense for a land registry"
It would to parties not located in that country. I've always felt bitcoin was actually the perfect way for nations to exchange value with one another. That of course would elevate "mining power" to a matter of national security.
Sounds like a great way to satisfy finger pointers and feed into the blame game. 99.999% of the time there is zero value in identifying who made a mistake, mistakes happen and everyone makes them, constantly. When a mistake happens to result in a high visibility problem being able to conclusively identify who made the mistake typically just means firing a perfectly competent and experienced resource and replacing them with at best an equally competent resource without that experience.
Almost the only time this kind of accounting is actually useful is when someone is making the mistake on purpose and while that happens, it is by far the rare exception.
I'm curious how they arrive at the figure. It isn't an easy thing to calculate. Many think of defense spending benefits in terms of waging war and preventing war for understandable reasons but defense spending in large part stimulates the economy in many of the same ways as infrastructure spending. It isn't usually credited but it is quite possible that the money spent on WWII deserves a lot of credit for bringing us out of the great depression.
The most obvious of course is building actual military installations which fuel the economy the same as any other government infrastructure project. The next most obvious is pay to soldiers and civilian contractors employed by the military. Somewhat less thought about is the actual munitions and equipment manufacture, all money being dumped right back into the economy. Last I checked (which was several years ago) the lion share of defense spending is on research which drives science, especially science without an immediate benefit. This obviously benefits the economy in a number of ways which are difficult to measure as well as directly, paying staff, buying equipment, etc. You might be surprised at how widespread defense spending is, they don't just pay for bigger bombs, the military provides for essentially all the needs of active troops so they fund medical and drug research, energy, fuel, technology, and communications research just to scratch the surface. The military will just about fund anything if they have a budget category, a requester who is qualified to research/develop it, and some kind of rational for why it could, directly or indirectly, benefit the military at some point. Obviously it gets more difficult the more money you are talking about. I suspect this philosophy was largely born after WWII when the military became aware of just valuable being ahead on science and research was and aside from the direct benefits to military technology want to make sure the brain trust to develop that technology is maintained and cultivated. After being paid for by the military most of the results are still also owned by private business, individuals, and universities so subsequent benefits go out to the tax payers.
Impossible to measure but likely of much larger economic benefit is the power the military (and for this I include the CIA/NSA which are really military "branches") enables us to bring to trade negotiations. People think protecting oil interests has been about oil and groups in the oil industry that profit. Protecting oil has been about the security of the dollar. The dollar is the standard currency by which other currencies measure for their value because it is the currency oil is priced in. There is a speculative market to determine where those values falls but central banks can buy, sell, and create their currency at will and can essentially adjust the value on the markets at any point. If you understand the way this works, the federal reserve and fractional banking works, and that nobody other than the federal reserve know how much digital money the federal reserve creates and lends out because it is a privately owned bank, you'd understand that there almost certainly has been trillions of dollars worth of benefit to the US in trade with overvalued dollars. Credit for that primarily goes to the military.
True but no small part of the perception is just sour grapes from other nations that resent being the bullied rather than the bully, most any nation would push its advantage to secure its agenda if it had the kind of advantage the US does.
Anyone and their dog can set up a VPN service in a few hours with claims they don't retain records or some such. First they are lying, you can't verify it and it's far far easier to run such a service with records so they are lying. Second, VPN services make great honeypots, therefore you can safely assume most of them are just that. Third, IP addresses alone are no longer considered sufficient evidence of identity in most cases, a VPN solves that problem by giving a second layer of identification in the form of VPN account information. This double linkage back to you is generally viewed as greatly increasing the probability of conclusive identification.
If you are trying to use network resources at home, use a home vpn you set up yourself. Otherwise you probably want a proxy and/or TOR (not perfect and slow) with javascript disabled in the browser. If you are asking because you pirate crap, you don't really need a VPN, keep your bandwidth usage reasonable and avoid torrents for idiots like content still in theaters. Better yet, don't use torrents AND avoid content for idiots like things still in theaters.
Don't think in terms of absolute security and being untraceable, think in terms of who you don't want tracking you, their realistic resources and being the low value target with too high a cost to be worth it. Movies for instance make most of their money in the theaters and while the studios oppose all piracy efforts to hinder it cost money eating into their profits so what do you think they target to get the most bang for their buck? By avoiding that content at that critical time you aren't just avoiding their most likely target, you are from their perspective doing orders of magnitude less damage.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll defer since you at least think you know about AMD internal structure specifically. I was referring to enterprise organizations in general. What I do know about AMD specifically is they aren't even in the business people think they are anymore. AMD doesn't make chips or develop new fab processes at all, they sold off that portion of their company.
"So far, AMD's on-die GPUs (in their APUs) have been incredibly slower than the discrete ones."
Per transistor? No, they have not.
"Now, true, you have the problem of communication across the PCIe bus - but that can be resolved with a different system architecture (like OpenPower)."
No, it can not. It's called the speed of light. It is physically impossible for any architecture to make an external bus be as fast as communications can be on the same die.
"Why not just have Intel ship a Mobile CPU without iGPU and a Separate GPU."
Because a GPU on die is much faster and more efficient. That external bus might be high bandwidth but the latency is a killer compared with sitting on the same die. Many of the same reasons that AMD managed to coast along with much smaller and more efficient intel chips for awhile by putting the memory controller on the die.
"And AMD, why now? When Zen is doing great, has great roadmap and potential, along with much better GFx then Intel. Why?"
You aren't even talking about the same AMD. People who work outside enterprise don't seem to get this. They think an enterprise like AMD is one company like the local hardware store. At enterprise scale there are multiple companies, even within those there are multiple independent divisions, each with their own roapmap and goals. Other divisions and AMD companies are the same thing to any of them as a completely external company like Intel, if they want or need their services they have to pay for them... similarly they will use whichever offering provides what they need for less whether that is the offering of another group within AMD or a third party. In this way even parts of the company that are purely cost centers like support, are billing all the parts of the company that use those services and provide some kind of way to estimate the value they are providing or to let each of those parts of the company drift away when they aren't competitive with other options piecemail until that division is no longer needed/justified. In some cases across restructuring/divisions/mergers/etc you can even have more than one group within a company that competes with each other to offer the same service.
Yes, constantly. Almost every major bank reorders transactions so that the highest value transactions occur first and the opposite is true of deposits which are applied after charges. This maximizes the chance for an overdraft and before occupy wallstreet and the banking reforms by Elizabeth Warren it maximized the number of transactions they could charge an OD fee on. Sometimes this could allow for charging five OD fees even though only one transaction of less than $1 was actually made with insufficient available funds in the account. Also banks will algorithmically apply those fees up to 72hrs later, they will apply a historical analysis to the account and retroactively apply the fee at any point that does the most damage.
These things have less impact to those who can afford to maintain a notable buffer balance but for people living paycheck to paycheck
Also Wells Fargo has been busted in a pretty major way very recently. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wells+fargo+accounts+scandal&atb=v72-3__&ia=news
Exchanges are not part of the bitcoin system. Neither are tumblers, black markets, etc.
But yes, people lose their money at banks ALL the time, it's happened to me and I'm sure it's happened to you at some point. It happens every time a bank charges a fee, pays out an electronic charge you didn't authorize, reverses a charge on a bounced check, holds/freezes funds on behalf of a government agency, pays out funds for identity theft, or issues loans because they come from newly created debt and not deposited funds and therefore dissolve all existing money. There aren't usually many "stories" about it because we are used to be robbed by the banks but there was the entire occupy wallstreet protest on the matter, a peaceful protest shut down in a not so peaceful manner by the government.
True, but your bank can also rip you off, give your money away at the request of a third party; such as a robber like a gunman, the IRS, or someone in response to a court order. Also your money could be fake, the transaction that funded your balance could have fraud at some point in the history and be reversed or someone could just say it was fraud, etc. You might agree some of those things would be just or for the communal good but ultimately it doesn't matter what you think, people have the power to take what is yours even if they use fraudulent means to activate that power.
The Bitcoin system is so computationally challenging because it makes it impossible to counterfeit or defraud the system itself, those miners can't take control of your money for any reason, just or unjust. Of course nothing about that prevents you from getting ripped off otherwise but it won't be your money system working against you.
Yes, mining is brute forcing hashes to verify network transactions for a time, when a hash is deemed difficult enough the network releases a block but the difficulty automatically adjusts to the total mining power on the network so those blocks are released at a fixed rate. Along with the released blocks the miners get the transaction fees paid to give various transactions higher priority on the network. At some point when all the bitcoin blocks have been released those fees are meant to reward miners so that they will continue processing transactions.
That is how the whole thing works, mining does serve a very important purpose, it isn't just a giveaway or complete waste of power like some people indicate. Mining provides actual value to the system and the more mining power on the network the greater the integrity of bitcoin transactions. It does require more power than a traditional transaction verification system simply because the whole thing is set up in a way so that math and statistics are all anyone needs to trust in.
Right, now read the rest of the comment you are responding to.
This is the part where Trump is right. Corporations are mindless profit machines. Right or wrong has nothing to do with it, cut corporate taxes by 15% and there is a dramatically lower incentive to offshore, moreover it is 15% cheaper to operate in the US than it otherwise would be. That 15% impacts those cold mindless decisions in a substantial way. That is not the same thing as just giving the money to the rich people and hoping they'll spend it. Those evil corporations (including the small ones that are really just one guy) ARE our economy, collectively they provide pretty much all the jobs. They aren't going to give that difference back as a generous handout, but they will take advantage of that extra 15% margin and expand anywhere that lets them so they can make more money and as a side effect they'll create jobs, offer new services, etc.
By that logic if someone is using birth control it isn't sex. If anyone cums, tries to cum, and/or tries to make someone cum, it's sex. Similarly, append that list and add "thinks about cumming, tries to make someone think about cumming, or anything that generally culiminates in cumming", and it's cheating.
In fairness, there really wasn't any science going into the Dark Ages. Although, looking at the current articles on the topics it seems the current trend is to try to cater to a more global view that tries to give credit to those who advocated ideas that the scientific method incorporates rather than firmly declare the formal and modern scientific method as the beginning of science.
"Allah means "God" in arabic, and Islam is based on Judaism and Christianity - in many ways it's the same religion worshiping the "one true God". So Mohammed didn't invent Allah. Nope."
Agreed, the jews invented the "one true God" unless you considered them to have borrowed their deity from the Egyptians since the occult inner teachings of their priesthood tend to support that idea even if the simplified version for the masses of their people was quite different than anything in Egypt.
"It might be inconceivable to you, but moral and ethical standards do change over the centuries."
Which is a reasonable argument to make for a man but for not a mouth piece of an infallible deity that defines in an absolute and unchangeable manner what is and is not moral.
Those are three examples, how many thousands of mistakes do you think employees in those organizations make each day?
You have to figure out how to get it and then extract it. Even if you are just getting someone else to fleece the money for you, it's still an effort to do so.
No but in 5-10 years it WILL mean something. It's like when someone invented the word "cloud" or "automations" or "devops", none of these terms actually had real meanings, over time people trying to figure out what they mean while not admitting they have no idea have come to enough common consensus that some sort of meaning has begun to emerge.
Luckily as computing becomes more power efficient so does mining which is performed with custom ASICs and not GPUs as some many deluded investors seem to think. Only alternative cryptocurrencies created by people who had large investments in existing obsolete GPU mining rigs are mined with GPUs.
Also, at some point the fixed output rewards for unlocking new blocks will disappear and the reward for mining will only be the transaction fees paid on transactions. This will limit the incentive to pile on more mining power. Although, I do expect at some point governments (or national level banks) will engage in something of a mining arms race.
Why would you do that when ASIC mining is much cheaper and would crush your rig? That is a big part of the point. The experts advising people investing aren't even well enough informed to know GPU's haven't been how you mined bitcoin for 6-7 years.
"and if there are massive amounts of (real) money to be had, let's you and I go get some of it. "
Which of course ultimately means someone investing money in your effort.... which is how the amounts of money being thrown at it grows.
"So for example in countries with strong institutions and rule of law, blockchain wouldn't at first blush make sense for a land registry"
It would to parties not located in that country. I've always felt bitcoin was actually the perfect way for nations to exchange value with one another. That of course would elevate "mining power" to a matter of national security.
Sounds like a great way to satisfy finger pointers and feed into the blame game. 99.999% of the time there is zero value in identifying who made a mistake, mistakes happen and everyone makes them, constantly. When a mistake happens to result in a high visibility problem being able to conclusively identify who made the mistake typically just means firing a perfectly competent and experienced resource and replacing them with at best an equally competent resource without that experience.
Almost the only time this kind of accounting is actually useful is when someone is making the mistake on purpose and while that happens, it is by far the rare exception.
I'm curious how they arrive at the figure. It isn't an easy thing to calculate. Many think of defense spending benefits in terms of waging war and preventing war for understandable reasons but defense spending in large part stimulates the economy in many of the same ways as infrastructure spending. It isn't usually credited but it is quite possible that the money spent on WWII deserves a lot of credit for bringing us out of the great depression.
The most obvious of course is building actual military installations which fuel the economy the same as any other government infrastructure project. The next most obvious is pay to soldiers and civilian contractors employed by the military. Somewhat less thought about is the actual munitions and equipment manufacture, all money being dumped right back into the economy. Last I checked (which was several years ago) the lion share of defense spending is on research which drives science, especially science without an immediate benefit. This obviously benefits the economy in a number of ways which are difficult to measure as well as directly, paying staff, buying equipment, etc. You might be surprised at how widespread defense spending is, they don't just pay for bigger bombs, the military provides for essentially all the needs of active troops so they fund medical and drug research, energy, fuel, technology, and communications research just to scratch the surface. The military will just about fund anything if they have a budget category, a requester who is qualified to research/develop it, and some kind of rational for why it could, directly or indirectly, benefit the military at some point. Obviously it gets more difficult the more money you are talking about. I suspect this philosophy was largely born after WWII when the military became aware of just valuable being ahead on science and research was and aside from the direct benefits to military technology want to make sure the brain trust to develop that technology is maintained and cultivated. After being paid for by the military most of the results are still also owned by private business, individuals, and universities so subsequent benefits go out to the tax payers.
Impossible to measure but likely of much larger economic benefit is the power the military (and for this I include the CIA/NSA which are really military "branches") enables us to bring to trade negotiations. People think protecting oil interests has been about oil and groups in the oil industry that profit. Protecting oil has been about the security of the dollar. The dollar is the standard currency by which other currencies measure for their value because it is the currency oil is priced in. There is a speculative market to determine where those values falls but central banks can buy, sell, and create their currency at will and can essentially adjust the value on the markets at any point. If you understand the way this works, the federal reserve and fractional banking works, and that nobody other than the federal reserve know how much digital money the federal reserve creates and lends out because it is a privately owned bank, you'd understand that there almost certainly has been trillions of dollars worth of benefit to the US in trade with overvalued dollars. Credit for that primarily goes to the military.
You might be surprised... we've been burning up the resource reserves of other nations for decades leaving our own in reserve.
True but no small part of the perception is just sour grapes from other nations that resent being the bullied rather than the bully, most any nation would push its advantage to secure its agenda if it had the kind of advantage the US does.
Anyone and their dog can set up a VPN service in a few hours with claims they don't retain records or some such. First they are lying, you can't verify it and it's far far easier to run such a service with records so they are lying. Second, VPN services make great honeypots, therefore you can safely assume most of them are just that. Third, IP addresses alone are no longer considered sufficient evidence of identity in most cases, a VPN solves that problem by giving a second layer of identification in the form of VPN account information. This double linkage back to you is generally viewed as greatly increasing the probability of conclusive identification.
If you are trying to use network resources at home, use a home vpn you set up yourself. Otherwise you probably want a proxy and/or TOR (not perfect and slow) with javascript disabled in the browser. If you are asking because you pirate crap, you don't really need a VPN, keep your bandwidth usage reasonable and avoid torrents for idiots like content still in theaters. Better yet, don't use torrents AND avoid content for idiots like things still in theaters.
Don't think in terms of absolute security and being untraceable, think in terms of who you don't want tracking you, their realistic resources and being the low value target with too high a cost to be worth it. Movies for instance make most of their money in the theaters and while the studios oppose all piracy efforts to hinder it cost money eating into their profits so what do you think they target to get the most bang for their buck? By avoiding that content at that critical time you aren't just avoiding their most likely target, you are from their perspective doing orders of magnitude less damage.
"any of the countries that roll over to please the US"
Which is most all of them.