Greetings! My name is Miriam Mbongo-Fleischmann, widow of late scientist Stanley Fleischmann. I have several half atom transistors developed by my late husband!
Please send me your social security number, credit card number, Pay Pal user name and password and I will FedEx them to you
That's because they are normal people that see Copenhagen as nothing more than a power grab by international bodies. If there is no AGW, there is no need for world homogenizing global treaties to come out of Copenhagen, is there?
People are rising up and making noise, because they are tired of the smug blowhards looking down their noses when some "ignoramus" dares question the veracity of the aloof chosen ones and their "consensus".
I wouldn't worry too much about international bodies. Kyoto came and went and in the EU only the UK and Sweden cut their CO2. In the UK case at least the cut was not expensive - it was a move from coal to gas which made economic sense at that point anyway. China and India were exempt, the US declined to sign and everyone else signed it and then ignored it.
And no national government would be dumb enough to cause its own voters economic pain cutting CO2 for its own sake, rather than as a side effect of doing something that is itself economically rational.
Measurements of oxygen isotopes from the GISP2 ice core suggest the ending of the Younger Dryas took place over just 40 – 50 years in three discrete steps, each lasting five years. Other proxy data, such as dust concentration, and snow accumulation, suggest an even more rapid transition, requiring a ~7 degree C warming in just a few years;[5][6][14][15] the total warming was 10 degree ±4 degree
This is 11000 years ago too, long before humans were emitting CO2. Warming didn't seem to hurt people back then - in fact the cool Younger Dryas seemed to be more stressful than the rapid warming that ended it.
Your assumption is like talking about a Dalek phase inversion apparatus, and assuming it has the same polarity requirements as a Gallifreyan warp transvortex node from a type 40 Tardis. With a polarity reversal modification by a rogue Timelord using a sonic screwdriver, the Dalek phase inversion machine will explode five minutes before then end of the last episode - but
I'm sorry, this analogy seems to have failed. I can sell let you have at a discount rate if you want to break it down for spares.
You don't need to port assembler. Consider. You write some application which is a bit close to the limit in terms of real time performance - e.g. a video codec. Everything is in C or C++ initially and you concentrate on getting the high level algorithms right. It works fine on a Core2 laptop.
Then you test it on a netbook. It stutters a bit or maxes out the CPU. So you profile it and write assembler versions of the critical parts. I.e. your code looks like this
#ifdef _X86 switch ( cpu_class ) case INORDER:
asm_inorder_inner_loop();// in asm, designed for an in order CPU like an Atom case OUTOFORDER:
c_inner_loop();// faster than asm version on a real OOe CPU #else c_inner_loop();// on x64 and others only the C version is used #endif
Now on low end netbooks (i.e. x86) the code runs smoothly. On high end laptops (x64) the processor is fast enough for the C code to work anyway. Later processors probably won't be that much faster, but they are unlikely to get slower. Actually netbooks are the one case where slower processors have suddenly become more common.
Now if at some later date ARM netbooks become common (I seriously doubt this) you'd be best off profiling once again and doing an ARM version of the hot spots in the code. The point is that you make sure your code will run without the inline assembler and bet on future processors being faster. Actually x86 changes quite drastically to the point where at some point the C compiler may well do a better job on compiling the C code than you did on the assembler anyway. From what I've read optimizing for Atom is pretty different from optimizing for Core2. And C compilers get smarter every year.
Of course for most non real time applications you're better off making sure you have an efficient C/C++ application. I've never written any PC code that needed this sort of treatment. Embedded systems sometimes do, but you can do the same there - write the whole lot in C and if you can't make it fast enough profile and hand optimize the bits that need it.
If this analogy were an analogy it would be an analogy that described a situation that wasn't at all analogous to the situation it was attempting to analogize.
I've only ever been asked to turn my laptop on once, and that was flying to Europe. Of course I had just run the battery out on the first flight, so I told the customs agent "well, if I can plug it in, I'll turn it on." He was fine with that. I was willing to turn it on, but he didn't make me.
NOTE TO SELF.
See if pulsed laser implosion black hole generator can be powered from a 240V 13A mains outlet. If so email Request for Bids to bin.laden@alqaeda.org. Also check with SMERSH.
That was based on reverse engineered Goa'uld technology from Antarctica though. This one is 100% human developed. Apart from the ZPMs. And the anti gravity drive.
The researchers predict a small decrease this year due to the recession, but further increases from 2010. "
Interesting that a historically rather serious recession can only cause a small decrease. It seems like cutting CO2 back to the levels needed to stop global warming would require or cause a much more serious recession.
In fact it's very noticable that now everyone is worried about a 30's style global depression pretty much everyone has stopped talking about cutting CO2 emissions in a follow up to Kyoto.
World CO2 emissions went up by 38% from 1992 to 2007. The US refused to sign, India and China were exempt and in the EU
As of year-end 2006, the United Kingdom and Sweden were the only EU countries on pace to meet their Kyoto emissions commitments by 2010. While UN statistics indicate that, as a group, the 36 Kyoto signatory countries can meet the 5% reduction target by 2012, most of the progress in greenhouse gas reduction has come from the stark decline in Eastern European countries' emissions after the fall of communism in the 1990s
When Taiwan democratised in 1990 there was a lot of emphasis on environmental issues. Taipei has rather poor air quality compared to Europe or even Japan, though it is much better than Shanghai. From what I've heard Taiwan used to be much more polluted than it is.
I've been to Hsinchu only a couple of times and it didn't seem smoggy. Of course pollution from semiconductor plants mostly affects groundwater and I have no quick way to check that. My tonsils are quite good smog detectors though.
To be honest I don't think Taiwan was ever as bad as Mainland China. Chinese speaking societies naturally have laws and bureaucrats to enforce them. Basically the limit is the amount of corruption in society. Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong have always had lower levels of corruption than China, though from what I've read Taiwan is quite a bit worse than Singapore.
Corruption undermines the rule of law because corrupt bureaucrats can be bribed to ignore violations of the rules. This is very bad for environmental regulations. The worst case is you have a kleptocratic society where bureaucrats spend all their time soliciting bribes and only enforce the rules on their enemies. This is pretty much what happened in China.
My guess is that in Taiwan's dictatorial period there probably was a lot of corruption, poor rule of law and pollution. Afterwards people voted for an environmentalist party and the laws and the rule of law were tightened up. So a clean up is in progress but is not yet complete.
Actually the most common model is that people design in Taiwan and manufacture in China. For chips most of the manufacturing is done in Taiwan because good fabs are not allowed to be built in China.
In fact I'm pretty much convinced there are unlicensed chips being made in Taiwan for the Chinese market. Some products are for export - they have multilingual software and manuals, are FCC approved and have legal licensed chips, but I suspect there are also "Taiwan/China" only designs which are only in Chinese, not approved and probably not licensed.
This is the reason that companies are unwilling to release source code of course - once you release it it is effectively in the public domain.
Quality control was sorely missing, which has been in anecdotes galore over the past few years.
Ha! You're not kidding. Even huge Taiwanese and US companies seem to be perpetually on the edge of a massive crisis which will doom the product, all because the factory can't produce things that work. My guess is the "Taiwan/China" only ones are even worse.
> Well but you wouldn't clone an i7 - you'd take some of the clever features and reimplement them in your > core. Or just build one i7 core rather than four on a chip. I'd much rather one i7 class core than an > Atom in a netbook for example.
Sure you can. But all of those things involve engineering, and teams of engineers. That puts you out of the "cheap knock-off" league that was back at the start of this whole subthread. I'm merely contending that there is no such possible thing as a "cheap Core i7 knock-off" even given the HDL. Anything you could possibly do using that HDL is going to require significant engineering effort, falling out of the "cheap" bucket.
You've clearly never been to China. I've been to companies there that employ thousands of engineers and are still firmly in the cheap knock off league. Any of these would be quite capable of taking the VHDL code for an i7 and turning it into a whole range of chips. So long as they sell them in China, they don't care about patents, licenses or copyrights.
In computing, symmetric multiprocessing or SMP involves a multiprocessor computer architecture where two or more identical processors can connect to a single shared main memory. Most common multiprocessor systems today use an SMP architecture. In the case of multi-core processors, the SMP architecture applies to the cores, treating them as separate processors.
You disagree with Wikipedia. That means you've been proven wrong in front of the whole Internet. Hang your head in shame.
It would be easy to test too. Religions that are not willing to publish their teachings on the web and give away free books are non profit, ones that sue people to take those teachings down are for profit and get to pay tax. Actually religions that try to stop other people talking about them should at the very least lose their tax free status and should probably be sued too.
Back to the "cheap Core i7 clone from the HDL" though, I suspect Core i7 is, or at least was, a stretch for even Intel's fabs. There probably are other fabs in the world that could build it, but not that many.
Well but you wouldn't clone an i7 - you'd take some of the clever features and reimplement them in your core. Or just build one i7 core rather than four on a chip. I'd much rather one i7 class core than an Atom in a netbook for example.
There are synthesizable cores sold - Phoronix just had an article about AMD coming out with a new one to compete with Atom. ARM has a whole business model based on them. I don't know whether they're blind pushbutton, or whether they come along with hints on how to guide place and route for best power/performance. Now that I think of it, I know a few people a few floors up that I can ask. I'm in a different part of the business, but not ignorant of that side.
Actually most ARM cores are hard macros - i.e. ARM port the CPU to a specific process e.g. the latest TSMC one. Of course you can buy synthesizable cores too - then you get the HDL and it's up to you to do the layout. Those are more expensive. Finally, and most expensive of all you can license the patents on the architecture and make your own chips.
Qualcomm have an architecture license and built their own ARM from scratch (with help from ARM), I think TI did the synthesis themselves and tweaked the layout. Most ARM licensees from what I've been told use a hard macro. There's a big difference in engineering work between each stage.
Still consider. If the ARM VHDL was released then there are probably hundreds of companies globally that could do what TI did, i.e. synthesize it themselves and tweak the layout. They could then all sell hard cores to lesser companies competing with ARM.
Even worse there are probably dozens of companies that go the Qualcomm route and do full custom ARMs that outperformed the ones ARM sell. They'd each have their own fork of the architecture.
Now maybe in the US this would be impossible because of patents, but you could probably get away with it in China, Thailand and quite a few other places where patents are not enforced. Basically it would be very bad for ARM - they'd be confined to countries where patents protected them. Grey imports from the outside would gradually kill them there too. They can't compete with people who have the technology for free and didn't need to pay for the R&D.
I can see Intel are different because they have the best fabs in the world, but not everyone needs a chip made on those.
Incidentally the patents on x86 should start to run out soon. My guess is that it will gradually transform into an architecture pretty much anyone can build. AMD will license the x64 extensions to anyone that wants them apparently - they've already done it to Via and Transmeta (Intel has access to AMD patents royalty free).
Of course that makes x64 a very smart move for AMD in the long run.
So go back to your super-sized non-optimized chip done with push-button tools - oh and by the way, you may have a hard time finding such tools with enough capacity. The resulting chip won't be a little bigger and a little slower - it'll be a LOT bigger and a LOT slower.
I'm not sure that's true. I read that most of the logic on an Intel chip is synthesized, only a small amount is done by hand. In a way it's a bit like applications - most code is written in a high level language and compiled an the most critical one percent or less is done in assembly. Actually my guess is that now the world is moving from x86 to x64, computers are fast and compilers are so smart that's not true for most mainstream applications and the whole thing is written in a high level language just because no one sees the need to translate a load of hairy x86 assembler into x64.
Now there are lots of foundries turning out unlicensed x86 cores that won't be imported to the US. And Via is turning out licensed x86 cores that will be sold in the US. AMD is quite a bit behind Intel in high end performance.
My guess is that Intel are not keen on the designers of these getting their hands on the HDL source code of an i7. It seems if you were a non Intel designer and had access to the code it might well lead to an "Aha" moment, just like a programmer might have one if he or she had access to the source code of a best selling application.
You say layout needs skills, but what's to stop someone outside the US taking the VHDL, tuning it to a common process and selling it as hard macro to the company that owns the factory?
Bifferboard type devices are quite common in Taiwan. I picked up a SD201BT for 1590 TWD, i.e. GB£29 or US$49. It's advertised as having a 150 MHz x86 compatible chip, i.e. pretty much the same as a Bifferboard.
Mind you that came with a case and AC adapter.
Actually I was seriously considering buying some of these and selling them online, perhaps with a pre done Linux port. Anyone got any suggestions?
Hey buddy! I see you're posting in this thread. This is a union thread. No one posts here unless they're in the Teamsters Comment Posters Union.
That's a nice car you've got there. Wouldn't want Mikey to bust it up would you? Best pay up your dues now. Oh yeah, if you payup Mikey and the boys will make sure you get a pay rise.
Despite all the ignorance, the UAW workers don't actually make that much more than their non-union counterparts in the South, but you get the same blind rage from people because ZOMG UNIONS~!!1!!11ONEONEELEVEN
He explained that in 2006, widely available industry and Labor Department statistics placed the average labor cost for UAW-represented workers at the former DaimlerChrysler at $75.86 per hour. For Ford it was $70.51, he said, and for General Motors it was $73.26.
“That includes the hourly pay, plus the benefits they’re receiving and all the other costs to General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, including legacy costs – retirement costs, pensions, and so on – so it’s looking at the total labor costs per hour worked for workers,” Perry said.
For U.S. workers at Toyota, however, the per hour labor cost is around $47.60, around $43 for Honda and around $42 for Nissan, Perry added, for an average of around $44.
Now the question I have here is that, in the rules, it doesn't explicitly state you will be permabanned or punished in any way if you murder people. Does this make the user terms of conditions unclear?
Slashdot Mirror
Greetings! My name is Miriam Mbongo-Fleischmann, widow of late scientist Stanley Fleischmann. I have several half atom transistors developed by my late husband!
Please send me your social security number, credit card number, Pay Pal user name and password and I will FedEx them to you
Yours in Christ!
Miriam Mbongo-Fleischmann
That's because they are normal people that see Copenhagen as nothing more than a power grab by international bodies. If there is no AGW, there is no need for world homogenizing global treaties to come out of Copenhagen, is there?
People are rising up and making noise, because they are tired of the smug blowhards looking down their noses when some "ignoramus" dares question the veracity of the aloof chosen ones and their "consensus".
I wouldn't worry too much about international bodies. Kyoto came and went and in the EU only the UK and Sweden cut their CO2. In the UK case at least the cut was not expensive - it was a move from coal to gas which made economic sense at that point anyway. China and India were exempt, the US declined to sign and everyone else signed it and then ignored it.
And no national government would be dumb enough to cause its own voters economic pain cutting CO2 for its own sake, rather than as a side effect of doing something that is itself economically rational.
Oh wait
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/09/15/taking_liberties/entry5314040.shtml
Depends what you mean by normal. The world has warmed much faster than it is today (0.74 ± 0.18 degrees C over 100 years according to the IPCC (see http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_SPM.pdf page 5)
E.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas#The_end_of_the_Younger_Dryas
Measurements of oxygen isotopes from the GISP2 ice core suggest the ending of the Younger Dryas took place over just 40 – 50 years in three discrete steps, each lasting five years. Other proxy data, such as dust concentration, and snow accumulation, suggest an even more rapid transition, requiring a ~7 degree C warming in just a few years;[5][6][14][15] the total warming was 10 degree ±4 degree
This is 11000 years ago too, long before humans were emitting CO2. Warming didn't seem to hurt people back then - in fact the cool Younger Dryas seemed to be more stressful than the rapid warming that ended it.
That's caused by evil M$ agents like Herr Buchner though.
I can do you one based on technobabble.
Your assumption is like talking about a Dalek phase inversion apparatus, and assuming it has the same polarity requirements as a Gallifreyan warp transvortex node from a type 40 Tardis. With a polarity reversal modification by a rogue Timelord using a sonic screwdriver, the Dalek phase inversion machine will explode five minutes before then end of the last episode - but
I'm sorry, this analogy seems to have failed. I can sell let you have at a discount rate if you want to break it down for spares.
You don't need to port assembler. Consider. You write some application which is a bit close to the limit in terms of real time performance - e.g. a video codec. Everything is in C or C++ initially and you concentrate on getting the high level algorithms right. It works fine on a Core2 laptop.
Then you test it on a netbook. It stutters a bit or maxes out the CPU. So you profile it and write assembler versions of the critical parts. I.e. your code looks like this
Now on low end netbooks (i.e. x86) the code runs smoothly. On high end laptops (x64) the processor is fast enough for the C code to work anyway. Later processors probably won't be that much faster, but they are unlikely to get slower. Actually netbooks are the one case where slower processors have suddenly become more common.
Now if at some later date ARM netbooks become common (I seriously doubt this) you'd be best off profiling once again and doing an ARM version of the hot spots in the code. The point is that you make sure your code will run without the inline assembler and bet on future processors being faster. Actually x86 changes quite drastically to the point where at some point the C compiler may well do a better job on compiling the C code than you did on the assembler anyway. From what I've read optimizing for Atom is pretty different from optimizing for Core2. And C compilers get smarter every year.
Of course for most non real time applications you're better off making sure you have an efficient C/C++ application. I've never written any PC code that needed this sort of treatment. Embedded systems sometimes do, but you can do the same there - write the whole lot in C and if you can't make it fast enough profile and hand optimize the bits that need it.
This. I've got several friends that are smart but not at all technical and they regularly send out emails with huge images in them.
If this analogy were an analogy it would be an analogy that described a situation that wasn't at all analogous to the situation it was attempting to analogize.
I've only ever been asked to turn my laptop on once, and that was flying to Europe. Of course I had just run the battery out on the first flight, so I told the customs agent "well, if I can plug it in, I'll turn it on." He was fine with that. I was willing to turn it on, but he didn't make me.
NOTE TO SELF.
See if pulsed laser implosion black hole generator can be powered from a 240V 13A mains outlet. If so email Request for Bids to bin.laden@alqaeda.org. Also check with SMERSH.
That was based on reverse engineered Goa'uld technology from Antarctica though. This one is 100% human developed. Apart from the ZPMs. And the anti gravity drive.
The researchers predict a small decrease this year due to the recession, but further increases from 2010. "
Interesting that a historically rather serious recession can only cause a small decrease. It seems like cutting CO2 back to the levels needed to stop global warming would require or cause a much more serious recession.
In fact it's very noticable that now everyone is worried about a 30's style global depression pretty much everyone has stopped talking about cutting CO2 emissions in a follow up to Kyoto.
Not that Kyoto cut CO2 of course
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol#Increase_in_greenhouse_gas_emission_since_1990
World CO2 emissions went up by 38% from 1992 to 2007. The US refused to sign, India and China were exempt and in the EU
As of year-end 2006, the United Kingdom and Sweden were the only EU countries on pace to meet their Kyoto emissions commitments by 2010. While UN statistics indicate that, as a group, the 36 Kyoto signatory countries can meet the 5% reduction target by 2012, most of the progress in greenhouse gas reduction has come from the stark decline in Eastern European countries' emissions after the fall of communism in the 1990s
I'm not really sure.
When Taiwan democratised in 1990 there was a lot of emphasis on environmental issues. Taipei has rather poor air quality compared to Europe or even Japan, though it is much better than Shanghai. From what I've heard Taiwan used to be much more polluted than it is.
I've been to Hsinchu only a couple of times and it didn't seem smoggy. Of course pollution from semiconductor plants mostly affects groundwater and I have no quick way to check that. My tonsils are quite good smog detectors though.
To be honest I don't think Taiwan was ever as bad as Mainland China. Chinese speaking societies naturally have laws and bureaucrats to enforce them. Basically the limit is the amount of corruption in society. Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong have always had lower levels of corruption than China, though from what I've read Taiwan is quite a bit worse than Singapore.
Corruption undermines the rule of law because corrupt bureaucrats can be bribed to ignore violations of the rules. This is very bad for environmental regulations. The worst case is you have a kleptocratic society where bureaucrats spend all their time soliciting bribes and only enforce the rules on their enemies. This is pretty much what happened in China.
My guess is that in Taiwan's dictatorial period there probably was a lot of corruption, poor rule of law and pollution. Afterwards people voted for an environmentalist party and the laws and the rule of law were tightened up. So a clean up is in progress but is not yet complete.
Actually the most common model is that people design in Taiwan and manufacture in China. For chips most of the manufacturing is done in Taiwan because good fabs are not allowed to be built in China.
In fact I'm pretty much convinced there are unlicensed chips being made in Taiwan for the Chinese market. Some products are for export - they have multilingual software and manuals, are FCC approved and have legal licensed chips, but I suspect there are also "Taiwan/China" only designs which are only in Chinese, not approved and probably not licensed.
This is the reason that companies are unwilling to release source code of course - once you release it it is effectively in the public domain.
Quality control was sorely missing, which has been in anecdotes galore over the past few years.
Ha! You're not kidding. Even huge Taiwanese and US companies seem to be perpetually on the edge of a massive crisis which will doom the product, all because the factory can't produce things that work. My guess is the "Taiwan/China" only ones are even worse.
> Well but you wouldn't clone an i7 - you'd take some of the clever features and reimplement them in your
> core. Or just build one i7 core rather than four on a chip. I'd much rather one i7 class core than an
> Atom in a netbook for example.
Sure you can. But all of those things involve engineering, and teams of engineers. That puts you out of the "cheap knock-off" league that was back at the start of this whole subthread. I'm merely contending that there is no such possible thing as a "cheap Core i7 knock-off" even given the HDL. Anything you could possibly do using that HDL is going to require significant engineering effort, falling out of the "cheap" bucket.
You've clearly never been to China. I've been to companies there that employ thousands of engineers and are still firmly in the cheap knock off league. Any of these would be quite capable of taking the VHDL code for an i7 and turning it into a whole range of chips. So long as they sell them in China, they don't care about patents, licenses or copyrights.
Yes, yes it is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_multiprocessing
In computing, symmetric multiprocessing or SMP involves a multiprocessor computer architecture where two or more identical processors can connect to a single shared main memory. Most common multiprocessor systems today use an SMP architecture. In the case of multi-core processors, the SMP architecture applies to the cores, treating them as separate processors.
You disagree with Wikipedia. That means you've been proven wrong in front of the whole Internet. Hang your head in shame.
Er, yeah
I meant to say
Religions that are not not unwilling to publish their teachings on the web and give away free books are not not not non profit
When writing sentences like this, this script might come in handy
It would be easy to test too. Religions that are not willing to publish their teachings on the web and give away free books are non profit, ones that sue people to take those teachings down are for profit and get to pay tax. Actually religions that try to stop other people talking about them should at the very least lose their tax free status and should probably be sued too.
Back to the "cheap Core i7 clone from the HDL" though, I suspect Core i7 is, or at least was, a stretch for even Intel's fabs. There probably are other fabs in the world that could build it, but not that many.
Well but you wouldn't clone an i7 - you'd take some of the clever features and reimplement them in your core. Or just build one i7 core rather than four on a chip. I'd much rather one i7 class core than an Atom in a netbook for example.
There are synthesizable cores sold - Phoronix just had an article about AMD coming out with a new one to compete with Atom. ARM has a whole business model based on them. I don't know whether they're blind pushbutton, or whether they come along with hints on how to guide place and route for best power/performance. Now that I think of it, I know a few people a few floors up that I can ask. I'm in a different part of the business, but not ignorant of that side.
Actually most ARM cores are hard macros - i.e. ARM port the CPU to a specific process e.g. the latest TSMC one. Of course you can buy synthesizable cores too - then you get the HDL and it's up to you to do the layout. Those are more expensive. Finally, and most expensive of all you can license the patents on the architecture and make your own chips.
Qualcomm have an architecture license and built their own ARM from scratch (with help from ARM), I think TI did the synthesis themselves and tweaked the layout. Most ARM licensees from what I've been told use a hard macro. There's a big difference in engineering work between each stage.
http://www.insidedsp.com/tabid/64/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/238/Qualcomm-Reveals-Details-on-Scorpion-Core.aspx
Still consider. If the ARM VHDL was released then there are probably hundreds of companies globally that could do what TI did, i.e. synthesize it themselves and tweak the layout. They could then all sell hard cores to lesser companies competing with ARM.
Even worse there are probably dozens of companies that go the Qualcomm route and do full custom ARMs that outperformed the ones ARM sell. They'd each have their own fork of the architecture.
Now maybe in the US this would be impossible because of patents, but you could probably get away with it in China, Thailand and quite a few other places where patents are not enforced. Basically it would be very bad for ARM - they'd be confined to countries where patents protected them. Grey imports from the outside would gradually kill them there too. They can't compete with people who have the technology for free and didn't need to pay for the R&D.
I can see Intel are different because they have the best fabs in the world, but not everyone needs a chip made on those.
Incidentally the patents on x86 should start to run out soon. My guess is that it will gradually transform into an architecture pretty much anyone can build. AMD will license the x64 extensions to anyone that wants them apparently - they've already done it to Via and Transmeta (Intel has access to AMD patents royalty free).
Of course that makes x64 a very smart move for AMD in the long run.
So go back to your super-sized non-optimized chip done with push-button tools - oh and by the way, you may have a hard time finding such tools with enough capacity. The resulting chip won't be a little bigger and a little slower - it'll be a LOT bigger and a LOT slower.
I'm not sure that's true. I read that most of the logic on an Intel chip is synthesized, only a small amount is done by hand. In a way it's a bit like applications - most code is written in a high level language and compiled an the most critical one percent or less is done in assembly. Actually my guess is that now the world is moving from x86 to x64, computers are fast and compilers are so smart that's not true for most mainstream applications and the whole thing is written in a high level language just because no one sees the need to translate a load of hairy x86 assembler into x64.
Now there are lots of foundries turning out unlicensed x86 cores that won't be imported to the US. And Via is turning out licensed x86 cores that will be sold in the US. AMD is quite a bit behind Intel in high end performance.
My guess is that Intel are not keen on the designers of these getting their hands on the HDL source code of an i7. It seems if you were a non Intel designer and had access to the code it might well lead to an "Aha" moment, just like a programmer might have one if he or she had access to the source code of a best selling application.
You say layout needs skills, but what's to stop someone outside the US taking the VHDL, tuning it to a common process and selling it as hard macro to the company that owns the factory?
Can you put a soundtrack on that? Like some 80s hair metal or something?
Bifferboard type devices are quite common in Taiwan. I picked up a SD201BT for 1590 TWD, i.e. GB£29 or US$49. It's advertised as having a 150 MHz x86 compatible chip, i.e. pretty much the same as a Bifferboard.
Mind you that came with a case and AC adapter.
Actually I was seriously considering buying some of these and selling them online, perhaps with a pre done Linux port. Anyone got any suggestions?
Hey buddy! I see you're posting in this thread. This is a union thread. No one posts here unless they're in the Teamsters Comment Posters Union.
That's a nice car you've got there. Wouldn't want Mikey to bust it up would you? Best pay up your dues now. Oh yeah, if you payup Mikey and the boys will make sure you get a pay rise.
Despite all the ignorance, the UAW workers don't actually make that much more than their non-union counterparts in the South, but you get the same blind rage from people because ZOMG UNIONS~!!1!!11ONEONEELEVEN
http://www.cnsnews.com/Public/Content/article.aspx?RsrcID=39499
He explained that in 2006, widely available industry and Labor Department statistics placed the average labor cost for UAW-represented workers at the former DaimlerChrysler at $75.86 per hour. For Ford it was $70.51, he said, and for General Motors it was $73.26.
“That includes the hourly pay, plus the benefits they’re receiving and all the other costs to General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, including legacy costs – retirement costs, pensions, and so on – so it’s looking at the total labor costs per hour worked for workers,” Perry said.
For U.S. workers at Toyota, however, the per hour labor cost is around $47.60, around $43 for Honda and around $42 for Nissan, Perry added, for an average of around $44.
That was a mistake. Now they have been appeased they will demand lebensraum on the servers of other sites.
Wikipedia should ban people for being murderers like Something Awful does
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Andrew_Allred#Public_Reactions
Also I just permabanned this guy because he murdered two people: http://forums.somethingawful.com/member.php?s=&action=getinfo&userid=84611
Now the question I have here is that, in the rules, it doesn't explicitly state you will be permabanned or punished in any way if you murder people. Does this make the user terms of conditions unclear?