... the CEO is "anonymous" leading many to believe that the whole thing is a taxi company run plant
You're posting this anonymously, leading many to believe that you're a corporate plant. But anyway, so what if it's a taxi company? If they can provide a valuable service and cooperate with local municipalities, good for them.
As someone who lives in Austin, I can confirm the bombardment in advertising. Over the last few weeks I got between one and four pro-Prop 1 mailers per day. My wife and I didn't get texts, and we don't answer unknown numbers so we don't know if they actually called us or not. They did call my mother-in-law twice. The first time, they deliberately lied to her. "They" never identified themselves, but I'm assuming it was Rideshare Works for Austin (the Uber/Lyft PAC).
RWA: Which way are you planning on voting on Prop 1?
MIL: I'm FOR fingerprinting.
RWA: Then you want to vote FOR Prop 1.
MIL: Are you sure? I thought I'm supposed supposed to vote against.
RWA: Nope, you're supposed to vote FOR it if you're in favor of fingerprinting.
We got at least four canvassers. The first guy asked us how we were planning on voting for Prop 1, and my wife replied that she was for fingerprinting. He tried to argue that fingerprinting wasn't necessary, so he was pro-Prop 1. I answered the door to another canvasser who was anti-Prop 1. My wife ignored the last two when she saw that they were carrying clipboards.
I ran into a pro-Prop 1 canvasser while out jogging with my neighbors. The canvasser got lost in our neighborhood, so we walked with her for a block. She tried to use some of the pro-Prop 1 talking points, but she admitted that she didn't really care about it, so she was probably paid.
On top of that, the internet was on fire. Here and here are two reddit posts just about the phone calls. Nextdoor threads were epic.
There's a legal issue here: the executive can't just wave state law aside. But they could suggest Congress write new laws instead of just noting that Congress would need to take action.
What difference would it make if the WH suggested this to Congress or not? The House isn't going to do anything. Why is it the WH that's punting on this issue?
Group texts (in iMessage) are MMS, and the less tech savvy people don't realize that. And people have sent me texts with images, which I wouldn't have known about unless someone told me that they sent them.
One thing the article nailed:
"MMS messages not only don't come through, there's no notice that someone tried to send something."
Most users don't know the difference between SMS and MMS (and why should they?), so it requires explaining to other people why you only get some texts and not others.
I do like the spam number blocking feature, though, and I'm afraid that once I port it over to a real phone I'll get more telemarketer calls than useful ones.
Yeah, you beat me to this. No one will probably read this, but...
If Superfreakonomics is even remotely objective on this topic, then it seems like IV is an engineer's dream. You get to build cool things and find solutions to big problems (reducing hurricane strength, climate change, yadda yadda), and they make money through patent licensing. But that's feeling I came away with after reading the book, and I'm giving the authors the benefit of the doubt.
At least with the general purpose registers, AMD wanted to go to 32, but couldn't do it without changing the instruction set. I'd assume the same thing applies to the SSE registers.
How so? Unless I'm missing something here, I think the only cost is in the size of the register file and rename register set, but nothing ISA-related.
Does SSE128 mean some significant departure from the doomed SSE instruction set?
No. It means 128 bit SSE ops can be done in a single cycle instead of two (64-bit chunks).
In SSE I'm familiar with, one of the input registers is always an output register, which means its contents are destroyed
How is this different from regular x86 (non-SSE) instructions? They have two operands where one is a source and destination.
Another flaw is that there aren't enough registers... SSE uses 8
AMD64 specifies 16 SSE (XMM) registers from the 8 in IA32.
where 32 are commonly not enough when latency is longish
The trade off to have 32 registers was probably not worth the die space and extra complexity. Having 16 probably gave most of the benefit, and having 32 provided diminishing returns.
I don't remember anything in recent history that was hyped as an "XYZ killer" ever coming true. For iPods, every company (and their product) has to overcome Apple's slick interface, Apple's brand loyalty, and market momentum. Too often the company only focuses on the technology.
It's interesting how "iPod" has come to mean "MP3 player," similar to how people say "Kleenex" for "tissue" or "Coke" for "soda."
Maybe they should integrate the RAM in to the CPU or something.
The problem with integrating DRAM is that capacitance is very sensitive to heat; cells won't be able to hold a charge (and will be useless functionally) if temperatures get too high.
It's entirely possible that OOOE could beat out the execution scheme that AMD has going but I wouldn't know enough to comment on it. I remember that there used to be a lot of buzz about IA-64's OOOE processing used on Itanium. But I'm not sure that was too popular among programmers.
Out-of-order execution has been standard on x86 processors since the Pentium Pro. Itanium doesn't have OoO, at least so far. Its goal has been to reduce hardware complexity by letting the compiler handle the instruction scheduling.
As for programmers, OoO is invisible to them. Instructions in our basic superscalar pipeline flow like so:
| Fetch | Decode | Schedule | Execute/Mem | Retire | | In order | In order | OoO | OoO | In order |
OoO is execution only and programmers have no idea whether instructions are shuffled or not.
Think about it, a lot of IA-64 code comes to a point where the instruction stalls as it waits for data to be computed (most cases, a branch).
No, in most cases, a cache miss. Branch prediction is what allows processors to continue execution speculatively until the results of a branch is known. If a processor stalled on every branch, you have no idea how slow machines would be.
If there are enough cores to compute both branches from the conditional
You don't need multiple cores to compute both branches. In fact, you don't even want to compute both branches - it's extra hardware and current branch prediction schemes achieve accuracy rates of > 95% (depending on the workload).
I'm somewhat playing devil's advocate here, but Sony/IBM/Toshiba were also following the idea of Piranha from the Compaq group paper. The old Compaq project had eight simple cores (in-order Alpha 21164, if I remember correctly) and it really shined in transaction benchmarks.
In a way, AMD64 is the same idea as when Intel extended x86 from 16-bit to 32-bit. Back in the 90's, Itanium sounded like a good idea, and they (Intel) really were looking ahead then (and they didn't want EMT64 to cannibalize Itanium sales for various reasons). They also hoped that compiler technology would be much further along than where it is now.
The real issue for Intel is whether or not many cores is a good investment for them. Amdahl's Law states that system performance will benefit more from improving single-threaded instead of multi-threaded execution (what if your code isn't or can't be parallelized?). So if you go with a scaled down processing core so you can fit eight cores on a chip, you may get a chip that kicks ass in TPC but isn't much better - or that may be worse - than what's out there for running general purpose code. And then they have to ask if people would buy a processor that is geared towards highly parallel applications only.
Two cores isn't a hard decision, but going beyond that requires some more cost-benefit analyses. Yes, high frequencies have gotten Intel far, and in retrospect, they should have explored this area earlier, but they have a lot more baggage (compatibility and performance-wise) than Cell.
Of course, when they're giving the stats in relative percentages, the numbers don't tell the whole story. Yet people were quick to make a judgment call before working out all of the numbers.
With that said, I would have liked to see an even higher turnout. I've read that the national turnout was roughly 60% according to this article.
But part of that was because Wisconsin had high voter turnout (see here), which was 72% statewide and 80% in Dane County (where Madison is). I guess I should blame myself since the campaigns really focused on the swing states... I'm sure the youth turnout in the non-swing states wasn't nearly as high.
This article says the same thing as this post, except it noted towards the end that most of the youth voters are in or have attended college. The non-college youth are the people that I'd like to see vote.
What baffles me is how a company can sell something that apparently suffers from serious quality control problems such as lockups. I checked out the cnet user comments and quite a few had flaky units too.
About three years ago, a friend and I both bought a Rio600 player (128 MB flash), and both of them had serious problems with lockups and corruption. We read about some battery problems that were supposedly corrected, but it didn't seem like they were fixed. Songs would occasionally playback with short, high pitched squeals, and it was most likely corrupted in the actual memory (instead of random playback bugs) since the squeal happened at the same place in the song every time. To make a long story short, we returned them in a week because they were so terrible.
But how does a company like this stay in business with such poor quality? Why do retailers still carry Rio products? And for a company that only makes digital media products, how can they fuck them up so consistently?
I would love to have a pair of opterons, but the prices are ridiculous.
Well, there are a couple of factors to consider. First, AMD is the only company right now that offers 64-bit x86. Second, the price is going to be pretty high since these were just released. Models that are a couple of notches down from top-of-the-line are better values. Third, these are server chips, so you should probably be wondering when dual processor Athlon64's will be coming out.
This is an important step, at least for the Power5. It's immensely complex, and I think feedback from collaborators such as OS people is important when they (IBM) ask themselves if a design decision makes sense. For example, SMT adds 24% to the die area for each core (see here). Compare that with Intel's HyperThreading, which adds little area but is still complicated to verify. Getting feedback and involving other groups can help determine if design decisions/features are worthwhile.
The Integraph suit deals with Itanium stuff, as is stated here. The SSE/Hyperthreading suit is another company (MicroUnity) and another suit (same article).
Now, from what I understand, MicroUnity's MediaProcessor is a fine-grained multithreaded processor. There's limited information here and here, which may be the processor with the alleged patents that have been infringed upon. But what about University of Washington's SMT group? They put out their first paper in 1995. The Alpha EV8 (21464), before it got canned, was supposed to have SMT (and the Alpha group went from Digital to Compaq and then to Intel). I'm speculating that Intel got Hyperthreading from Alpha who got it from Washington. DEC/Compaq worked with Washington's SMT group, as Luiz Barroso is listed on the Washington SMT page (interestingly, he works for Google now. His Google article is quite interesting).
I really don't understand why we're still being subjected to this crap. Virus news isn't news. It's spam.
I understand where you're coming from, especially since the/. crowd is more tech-savvy. However, I think more information is better than less... and you could just skip this story, couldn't you? I would draw the line when friends start e-mailing you or posting virus alerts to listservs.
This change in CPU naming might indicate a recognition that its rivals may overtake it in clockspeed. Perhaps they're planning strategic changes that could take them below Apple or AMD in clockspeed and want to jump on the "clockspeed ain't everything" bandwagon as soon as they can.
Actually, the article says that this is going to start with their next line of Pentium M processors (Dothan). Intel is nearly unrivaled in terms of fabrication technology and capacity. But mobile parts bring in higher margins than desktops, so their initial strategy is to sell more of those Pentium Ms. As for the (near) future, it doesn't seem likely since the newly-released Prescott has 31 pipe stages. I think they'll rely on microarchitectural and transistor design tricks (like the trace cache, metal gates, multiple gate electrodes) to save power, as long as it doesn't significantly sacrifice performance.
Really, the technical community needs to sit down and figure out a universal cross-platform benchmarking method.
Well, there's SPEC and TPC. Other than that, benchmarks are both overrated and the best metric we have for evaluating performance. Then you have cases when a CPU is optimized for a particular benchmark to inflate performance numbers (hence the term benchmarketing).
Or was it the blue one? Anyway, as a Wisconsinite, I have to make a correction. I saw this article in the school newspaper this morning stating that Wisconsin has backed out of the Matrix.
Good for companies: cheaper labor. According to some of my Indian friends, the rupee is undervalued, so it's (currently) a win-win situation for the Indian people and the companies.
>All the computers are from Compaq. The basic software is from Microsoft. The phones are from Lucent.
Sure, that's good... until they outsource those jobs, too. What we should watch out for is that companies don't start a race towards the bottom, where everyone is fighting for scraps and the jobs go to the lowest bidder.
Most Big-Ten schools have renamed their EE dept. to be called "Electrical and Computer Engineering"
Actually, Washington is one of the schools where it's CSE (Computer Science and Engineering) and EE is another department.
As for advice, find out what you're good at and what you like doing... and don't choose your major based solely on how much money you'll make when you graduate (there are many miserable lawyers because of this). Industrial Technology Education (ITED) is like a hands-on approach to using computers and networks. Chemical engineers are instrumental in semiconductor manufacturing. If you're good at (and like) math, you should consider analog/power electronics, or signal processing (all EE). I have a friend who's a very smart computer engineer... he doesn't like coding in C/C++ that much, but he told me that he found his calling in digital signal processing.
The point is, if you're paying tons of money for school, it's worth it to take the time to find out what your skills are and what you like to do.
How much credibility is AMD really lacking when buck for buck they've almost always been a better deal for the speed than Intel?
You're right... they're not lacking credibility with the great majority of the computer-competent. And this is/was not a slam on AMD by any means. But in the business and server space, it takes much longer to penetrate the market. When they had problems shipping the K6 in volume to meet customer demands, they had to rebuild their image, and fortunately, Athlon helped them achieve that. There's a twist on an old saying that goes something like, "no one got fired for buying Intel." Unfortunately, a lot of people still don't trust "the other company." And many people still feel that lower cost also means lower quality.
Slashdot Mirror
... the CEO is "anonymous" leading many to believe that the whole thing is a taxi company run plant
You're posting this anonymously, leading many to believe that you're a corporate plant. But anyway, so what if it's a taxi company? If they can provide a valuable service and cooperate with local municipalities, good for them.
As someone who lives in Austin, I can confirm the bombardment in advertising. Over the last few weeks I got between one and four pro-Prop 1 mailers per day. My wife and I didn't get texts, and we don't answer unknown numbers so we don't know if they actually called us or not. They did call my mother-in-law twice. The first time, they deliberately lied to her. "They" never identified themselves, but I'm assuming it was Rideshare Works for Austin (the Uber/Lyft PAC).
RWA: Which way are you planning on voting on Prop 1?
MIL: I'm FOR fingerprinting.
RWA: Then you want to vote FOR Prop 1.
MIL: Are you sure? I thought I'm supposed supposed to vote against.
RWA: Nope, you're supposed to vote FOR it if you're in favor of fingerprinting.
We got at least four canvassers. The first guy asked us how we were planning on voting for Prop 1, and my wife replied that she was for fingerprinting. He tried to argue that fingerprinting wasn't necessary, so he was pro-Prop 1. I answered the door to another canvasser who was anti-Prop 1. My wife ignored the last two when she saw that they were carrying clipboards.
I ran into a pro-Prop 1 canvasser while out jogging with my neighbors. The canvasser got lost in our neighborhood, so we walked with her for a block. She tried to use some of the pro-Prop 1 talking points, but she admitted that she didn't really care about it, so she was probably paid.
On top of that, the internet was on fire. Here and here are two reddit posts just about the phone calls. Nextdoor threads were epic.
There's a legal issue here: the executive can't just wave state law aside. But they could suggest Congress write new laws instead of just noting that Congress would need to take action.
What difference would it make if the WH suggested this to Congress or not? The House isn't going to do anything. Why is it the WH that's punting on this issue?
Group texts (in iMessage) are MMS, and the less tech savvy people don't realize that. And people have sent me texts with images, which I wouldn't have known about unless someone told me that they sent them.
One thing the article nailed:
"MMS messages not only don't come through, there's no notice that someone tried to send something."
Most users don't know the difference between SMS and MMS (and why should they?), so it requires explaining to other people why you only get some texts and not others.
I do like the spam number blocking feature, though, and I'm afraid that once I port it over to a real phone I'll get more telemarketer calls than useful ones.
Some third party Google Voice apps do support VoIP (like GV Mobile+), but yeah, it would be nice for it to be in the official app.
Yeah, you beat me to this. No one will probably read this, but... If Superfreakonomics is even remotely objective on this topic, then it seems like IV is an engineer's dream. You get to build cool things and find solutions to big problems (reducing hurricane strength, climate change, yadda yadda), and they make money through patent licensing. But that's feeling I came away with after reading the book, and I'm giving the authors the benefit of the doubt.
At least with the general purpose registers, AMD wanted to go to 32, but couldn't do it without changing the instruction set. I'd assume the same thing applies to the SSE registers.
How so? Unless I'm missing something here, I think the only cost is in the size of the register file and rename register set, but nothing ISA-related.
Does SSE128 mean some significant departure from the doomed SSE instruction set?
No. It means 128 bit SSE ops can be done in a single cycle instead of two (64-bit chunks).
In SSE I'm familiar with, one of the input registers is always an output register, which means its contents are destroyed
How is this different from regular x86 (non-SSE) instructions? They have two operands where one is a source and destination.
Another flaw is that there aren't enough registers... SSE uses 8
AMD64 specifies 16 SSE (XMM) registers from the 8 in IA32.
where 32 are commonly not enough when latency is longish
The trade off to have 32 registers was probably not worth the die space and extra complexity. Having 16 probably gave most of the benefit, and having 32 provided diminishing returns.
I don't remember anything in recent history that was hyped as an "XYZ killer" ever coming true. For iPods, every company (and their product) has to overcome Apple's slick interface, Apple's brand loyalty, and market momentum. Too often the company only focuses on the technology.
It's interesting how "iPod" has come to mean "MP3 player," similar to how people say "Kleenex" for "tissue" or "Coke" for "soda."
Maybe they should integrate the RAM in to the CPU or something.
The problem with integrating DRAM is that capacitance is very sensitive to heat; cells won't be able to hold a charge (and will be useless functionally) if temperatures get too high.
I'm somewhat playing devil's advocate here, but Sony/IBM/Toshiba were also following the idea of Piranha from the Compaq group paper. The old Compaq project had eight simple cores (in-order Alpha 21164, if I remember correctly) and it really shined in transaction benchmarks.
In a way, AMD64 is the same idea as when Intel extended x86 from 16-bit to 32-bit. Back in the 90's, Itanium sounded like a good idea, and they (Intel) really were looking ahead then (and they didn't want EMT64 to cannibalize Itanium sales for various reasons). They also hoped that compiler technology would be much further along than where it is now.
The real issue for Intel is whether or not many cores is a good investment for them. Amdahl's Law states that system performance will benefit more from improving single-threaded instead of multi-threaded execution (what if your code isn't or can't be parallelized?). So if you go with a scaled down processing core so you can fit eight cores on a chip, you may get a chip that kicks ass in TPC but isn't much better - or that may be worse - than what's out there for running general purpose code. And then they have to ask if people would buy a processor that is geared towards highly parallel applications only.
Two cores isn't a hard decision, but going beyond that requires some more cost-benefit analyses. Yes, high frequencies have gotten Intel far, and in retrospect, they should have explored this area earlier, but they have a lot more baggage (compatibility and performance-wise) than Cell.
Of course, when they're giving the stats in relative percentages, the numbers don't tell the whole story. Yet people were quick to make a judgment call before working out all of the numbers.
With that said, I would have liked to see an even higher turnout. I've read that the national turnout was roughly 60% according to this article.
But part of that was because Wisconsin had high voter turnout (see here), which was 72% statewide and 80% in Dane County (where Madison is). I guess I should blame myself since the campaigns really focused on the swing states... I'm sure the youth turnout in the non-swing states wasn't nearly as high.
This article says the same thing as this post, except it noted towards the end that most of the youth voters are in or have attended college. The non-college youth are the people that I'd like to see vote.
What baffles me is how a company can sell something that apparently suffers from serious quality control problems such as lockups. I checked out the cnet user comments and quite a few had flaky units too.
About three years ago, a friend and I both bought a Rio600 player (128 MB flash), and both of them had serious problems with lockups and corruption. We read about some battery problems that were supposedly corrected, but it didn't seem like they were fixed. Songs would occasionally playback with short, high pitched squeals, and it was most likely corrupted in the actual memory (instead of random playback bugs) since the squeal happened at the same place in the song every time. To make a long story short, we returned them in a week because they were so terrible.
But how does a company like this stay in business with such poor quality? Why do retailers still carry Rio products? And for a company that only makes digital media products, how can they fuck them up so consistently?
Yeah, I'm just bitter.
I would love to have a pair of opterons, but the prices are ridiculous.
Well, there are a couple of factors to consider. First, AMD is the only company right now that offers 64-bit x86. Second, the price is going to be pretty high since these were just released. Models that are a couple of notches down from top-of-the-line are better values. Third, these are server chips, so you should probably be wondering when dual processor Athlon64's will be coming out.
This is an important step, at least for the Power5. It's immensely complex, and I think feedback from collaborators such as OS people is important when they (IBM) ask themselves if a design decision makes sense. For example, SMT adds 24% to the die area for each core (see here). Compare that with Intel's HyperThreading, which adds little area but is still complicated to verify. Getting feedback and involving other groups can help determine if design decisions/features are worthwhile.
The Integraph suit deals with Itanium stuff, as is stated here. The SSE/Hyperthreading suit is another company (MicroUnity) and another suit (same article).
Now, from what I understand, MicroUnity's MediaProcessor is a fine-grained multithreaded processor. There's limited information here and here, which may be the processor with the alleged patents that have been infringed upon. But what about University of Washington's SMT group? They put out their first paper in 1995. The Alpha EV8 (21464), before it got canned, was supposed to have SMT (and the Alpha group went from Digital to Compaq and then to Intel). I'm speculating that Intel got Hyperthreading from Alpha who got it from Washington. DEC/Compaq worked with Washington's SMT group, as Luiz Barroso is listed on the Washington SMT page (interestingly, he works for Google now. His Google article is quite interesting).
I really don't understand why we're still being subjected to this crap. Virus news isn't news. It's spam.
I understand where you're coming from, especially since the /. crowd is more tech-savvy. However, I think more information is better than less... and you could just skip this story, couldn't you? I would draw the line when friends start e-mailing you or posting virus alerts to listservs.
This change in CPU naming might indicate a recognition that its rivals may overtake it in clockspeed. Perhaps they're planning strategic changes that could take them below Apple or AMD in clockspeed and want to jump on the "clockspeed ain't everything" bandwagon as soon as they can.
Actually, the article says that this is going to start with their next line of Pentium M processors (Dothan). Intel is nearly unrivaled in terms of fabrication technology and capacity. But mobile parts bring in higher margins than desktops, so their initial strategy is to sell more of those Pentium Ms. As for the (near) future, it doesn't seem likely since the newly-released Prescott has 31 pipe stages. I think they'll rely on microarchitectural and transistor design tricks (like the trace cache, metal gates, multiple gate electrodes) to save power, as long as it doesn't significantly sacrifice performance.
Really, the technical community needs to sit down and figure out a universal cross-platform benchmarking method.
Well, there's SPEC and TPC. Other than that, benchmarks are both overrated and the best metric we have for evaluating performance. Then you have cases when a CPU is optimized for a particular benchmark to inflate performance numbers (hence the term benchmarketing).
Or was it the blue one? Anyway, as a Wisconsinite, I have to make a correction. I saw this article in the school newspaper this morning stating that Wisconsin has backed out of the Matrix.
Good for Indian people: more jobs.
Good for companies: cheaper labor. According to some of my Indian friends, the rupee is undervalued, so it's (currently) a win-win situation for the Indian people and the companies.
>All the computers are from Compaq. The basic software is from Microsoft. The phones are from Lucent.
Sure, that's good... until they outsource those jobs, too. What we should watch out for is that companies don't start a race towards the bottom, where everyone is fighting for scraps and the jobs go to the lowest bidder.
Most Big-Ten schools have renamed their EE dept. to be called "Electrical and Computer Engineering"
Actually, Washington is one of the schools where it's CSE (Computer Science and Engineering) and EE is another department.
As for advice, find out what you're good at and what you like doing... and don't choose your major based solely on how much money you'll make when you graduate (there are many miserable lawyers because of this). Industrial Technology Education (ITED) is like a hands-on approach to using computers and networks. Chemical engineers are instrumental in semiconductor manufacturing. If you're good at (and like) math, you should consider analog/power electronics, or signal processing (all EE). I have a friend who's a very smart computer engineer... he doesn't like coding in C/C++ that much, but he told me that he found his calling in digital signal processing.
The point is, if you're paying tons of money for school, it's worth it to take the time to find out what your skills are and what you like to do.
How much credibility is AMD really lacking when buck for buck they've almost always been a better deal for the speed than Intel?
You're right... they're not lacking credibility with the great majority of the computer-competent. And this is/was not a slam on AMD by any means. But in the business and server space, it takes much longer to penetrate the market. When they had problems shipping the K6 in volume to meet customer demands, they had to rebuild their image, and fortunately, Athlon helped them achieve that. There's a twist on an old saying that goes something like, "no one got fired for buying Intel." Unfortunately, a lot of people still don't trust "the other company." And many people still feel that lower cost also means lower quality.