This chip seems insanely powerful. With 8 APU's capable of doing DSP, you would think that some countries would impose export restrictions on the thing. If you remember when the G4 came out Apple advertized that the military didn't want that thing leaving the country. But image a chip with the ability to do some serious SIMD operations?
I hope this is a joke. I really do.
If not, you've fallen for pretty lame marketing, IMO. I'm sure the US Government is losing sleep, with their supercomputers with thousands of processors. A chip that's going in a $300 game console just isn't going to compare, sorry.
It seems to me that this is a natural for Apple - it will give them a 5x - 10x performance boost over anything that's on the drawing boards over at Intel.
Don't believe the hype. Sony is using the same pattern of press releases and hype that they used regarding the Emotion Engine before the PS2 came out. They claimed it would be more than twice as fast as the highest end Intel chips.
When it actually came out, the performance it delivered wasn't even up to par with the mid range Celeron/P3 that the Xbox used. I'm sure in a few hand-selected calculations it excelled, and gave them the legal ability to claim it was more than twice as fast as the highest end PC chips. But real world performance paled in comparison to the claims.
But a 600 mhz G3 iBook was not exactly state of the art. The top of the line x86 chips you mention would better be compared to, say, a dual Powermac G4.
Let's be fair here...
You're bringing up a dual processor system to compete with the single processor that the original poster brought up. Let's not forget that there were also dual processor P4 machines at the time.
If you want to compare the fastest G4 of the time to the fastest P4 of the time, be my guest. But if you want to use a dual G4 for your comparison, then at least be fair and use a dual P4.
Say what you will about her policies, Fiorina was still one of only a handful of significant female CEO's in the world today
Who cares if she was female?
CEO's are hired for their policies, not their gender. You're saying that sure, her policies were bad, but she was a female CEO. So what? She sucked at the only purpose she had in the company. She made a bad CEO, and any CEO with her policies would be a bad CEO regardless if they were a man, woman, alien, or whatever.
An employee should be judged by their skill alone, and their race/sex/sexual preference should not play any part in that decision, since it leads to discrimination.
Sounds a lot like their Emotion Engine, which could "render Toy Story like animation in real time".
Too bad it couldn't come close to living up to the hype.
With all this talk about the Cell being 4x as fast as a dual core Opteron, I'm willing to bet that when the chip comes out its actual speed will be similar to a low/mid range P4/Athlon.
It won't kill AMD or Intel, it won't dominate the processor market, it won't take the computing world by storm, and it won't even take the performance lead.
The only thing this is taking by storm is the PR and marketing business.
Back in the Alpha days, Risc chips had a advantage in virtually all benchmarks, and conventional wisdom said that it would increase, but it still wasn't enough of an incentive to get significant numbers of people to switch over.
Which is my point really. It's not that x86 has an particularly good, it is that PPC and other Risc chips no longer better enough to make people switch.
It's also worth noting that modern x86 chips like the Athlon are essentially RISC chips at heart. Internally the chip converts x86 instructions into RISC-like instructions. The Athlon design is similar in many ways to the Alpha's , and even uses the Alpha's EV7 bus.
Here's some good info:
http://www.karbosguide.com/hardware/module3e08a. ht m
Who decides on immigration policy, the US? The UN?
I don't have the answers to your questions, but I will guarantee you that no matter who controls immigration to Mars, you're going to get Cubans that somehow manage to make the voyage in a converted 1959 Buick
No, the original poster was comparing apples to oranges. He started comparing the hardware aspects of the Mini vs. PC's, and I challenged him on his comments about the hardware.
He said:
find a PC for the same price with comparable features. Most people point to Dell/HP/etc boxes. They always end up having crappy integrated graphics cards, and things like that.
I then directly addressed his point about the hardware features such as integrated graphics.
Then he threw in the comment about OSX which isn't really an argument at all, since you cannot natively run OSX on the PC, so of course it's not going to come with it. You can't natively run WinXP on a Mac, either, but that doesn't mean that I can use that as proof that PC's are better.
If you want to compare them both, at least stick to the things which can be compared (you can objectively benchmark a processor, memory, or a video card, but your favorite OS is purely subjective)
Find a PC for the same price with comparable features. Most people point to Dell/HP/etc boxes. They always end up having crappy integrated graphics cards, and things like that. You won't find a PC for a comparable price.
A PC of the same price, such as the Dell you mentioned, will have much higher end hardware than the Mini. In the case of the Dell, it even includes a LCD monitor which is not included with the Mini.
In the case of graphics cards, the Radeon 9200 in the Mini is a very low end graphics card, on par with an integrated one. It only has a pitiful 32 MB of memory for graphics.
Read the review on Anandtech for an objective, logical review. You won't find that on here, you'll only find emotional outpourings from enthusiastic zealots who have already made up their mind.
Archimede's principle dictates that an object will displace its weight in water, which leads to the conclusion that the heavier something is, the lower it will sink in relation to other material surrounding it.
Uh, no. If it sinks it just displaces its volume, regardless of its weight. Example- you drop a solid block (1 cubic foot) of aluminum into the ocean. It sinks to the bottom of the ocean and displaces 1 cubic foot of water. Do the same with 1 cubic foot of lead, and it will sink to the bottom and displace the same amount of water even though it weighs many times more.
Computers are made up of meltable parts. By melting the computers down, would it not be possible to skim off various useful elements and compounds at certain depths? This is how they separate kerosene jet fuel from high octane gasoline. It's all together in a vat, but sucked out from different depths.
I'm sure there is a way to do what you're suggesting, but economics will dictate whether it's worth doing or not. If reclaiming the materials this way is more expensive than mining and refining new raw materials and nobody wants to pay the premium price to recycle, this idea won't succeed.
The way they have this written ensures that it won't pass. They're trying to put a flat tax on a "computer" which they can't really define.
The moment they try to define what makes a "computer" is the moment that they begin stepping on people's toes. If they try to describe which key parts in the computer makes it a "computer" and gets the tax, the manufacturers of those key part will have a great case to complain that they are being discriminated against while other electronics manufacturers get off free.
Also, the text of this bill is the same text that was in a previous bill that was shot down. Do they expect everyone to change their minds this time?
I think a more sensible bill would ditch the idea of a flat tax on a "computer", and instead levy an impact fee on the individual components of all electronics based on their materials content. That way the companies that put more toxic materials in their products must pay more tax, and the companies that make products using more friendly materials are rewarded with less tax.
Hello passengers- we've reached our cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. I am going to switch the seat belt sign off in a moment so feel free to stretch and move about the cabin. Those of you on the right can look out the windows and see the Grand Canyon, while those of you on the left can look up and see the OP's comments, passing harmlessly above the heads of the unsuspecting.
If every single computer user was a geek then you'd have a valid point, but you fail to realize 0% of the worlds computing population care about that stuff.
Surely geeks must make up some non-zero percentage of the computing population.
Why is the MoBo blue? Is there a signifigance to the color of the board? Or did Apple just pick it because on the order sheet it was "aqua"?
That is not a question for electrical engineers. It's more of a question for marketers or fashion designers. You can make the board any color you want. There are red boards, green boards, yellow boards, black boards, blue boards, etc. It's to look nice.
There seems to be a disproportionate amount of Apple news on this site when you consider how small of a share of the market they have.
I'm a hardcore computer nerd, but this Apple news isn't the slightest bit interesting to me.
(now all the Mac zealots are going to mod me down for saying that, even though a PC fan wouldn't mod down Mac fan for stating his viewpoint. "Thinking different" seems to be a one way street with Apple fans)
I am, by my own admission, a noob in this area But whatever orbit Space Ship One entered (decaying orbit ?) it is still very impressive. When the Soviets put the first man in space it must have been a similar altitude (about 100KM), and that was a whole country. Space Ship One's insertion was far more elegant. I just wish Nasa would build something more worthy. There is nothing inspiring about the space shuttle or the Soyuz rockets. It was refreshing to see a small craft get into orbitr without creating enough smog pollute a small country.
Spaceship one did not achieve anything close to any type of orbit at all. It did not have the speed or power possible to do that. It merely went up to an altitude high enough to be considered "space", then glided down. This is not remotely close to what the Soviets did with Yuri Gagarin.
As for the Soviets, they launched Yuri Gagarin up in a proper rocket capable of producing the power needed for orbit. It achieved orbital velocity of 24,000 km/hr, went up to an altitude of around 300 Km, and made an entire orbit of the Earth before landing.
The difference in the amount of energy needed to do this, compared to what Spaceship One did, is enormous. Spaceship One only had a few percent of the energy needed to go into orbit.
Spoken like a true Nasa zealot. It took the guys at Scaled composites to show you that they could build a cheap light, ingenious low-earth-orbit vehicle and launch it cheaply from its mother plane.
Spoken like yet another noob who has no clue what he's talking about.
SpaceShip One was NOT an ingenious low-earth-orbit vehicle. It was not a LEO vehicle at all.
Slashdot Mirror
This chip seems insanely powerful. With 8 APU's capable of doing DSP, you would think that some countries would impose export restrictions on the thing. If you remember when the G4 came out Apple advertized that the military didn't want that thing leaving the country. But image a chip with the ability to do some serious SIMD operations?
I hope this is a joke. I really do.
If not, you've fallen for pretty lame marketing, IMO. I'm sure the US Government is losing sleep, with their supercomputers with thousands of processors. A chip that's going in a $300 game console just isn't going to compare, sorry.
It seems to me that this is a natural for Apple - it will give them a 5x - 10x performance boost over anything that's on the drawing boards over at Intel.
Don't believe the hype. Sony is using the same pattern of press releases and hype that they used regarding the Emotion Engine before the PS2 came out. They claimed it would be more than twice as fast as the highest end Intel chips.
When it actually came out, the performance it delivered wasn't even up to par with the mid range Celeron/P3 that the Xbox used. I'm sure in a few hand-selected calculations it excelled, and gave them the legal ability to claim it was more than twice as fast as the highest end PC chips. But real world performance paled in comparison to the claims.
The reason it has so many transistors is because of the amount of onboard memory. Memory uses a lot more transistors than the logic circuits do.
A complicated CPU may have tens or hundreds of millions of transistors, but a single memory chip has billions.
So when you bump up the cache size on a CPU, the transistor count goes up greatly.
Actually the latest graphics processors from ATI and NVidia have about 200 Million transistors already and an Athlon has about 50 Million.
So a cell is probably going to be faster, smaller, cheaper and runnig cooler than the usual CPU+GPU system we have in most highend PCs today.
You're forgetting that a machine with the Cell processor still needs seperate GPU. The PS3 will use the Cell, but it is also using an Nvidia GPU.
So you can't compare the Athlon + GPU to a Cell, you need to compare the Athlon + GPU to a Cell + GPU.
But a 600 mhz G3 iBook was not exactly state of the art. The top of the line x86 chips you mention would better be compared to, say, a dual Powermac G4.
Let's be fair here...
You're bringing up a dual processor system to compete with the single processor that the original poster brought up. Let's not forget that there were also dual processor P4 machines at the time.
If you want to compare the fastest G4 of the time to the fastest P4 of the time, be my guest. But if you want to use a dual G4 for your comparison, then at least be fair and use a dual P4.
Say what you will about her policies, Fiorina was still one of only a handful of significant female CEO's in the world today
Who cares if she was female?
CEO's are hired for their policies, not their gender. You're saying that sure, her policies were bad, but she was a female CEO. So what? She sucked at the only purpose she had in the company. She made a bad CEO, and any CEO with her policies would be a bad CEO regardless if they were a man, woman, alien, or whatever.
An employee should be judged by their skill alone, and their race/sex/sexual preference should not play any part in that decision, since it leads to discrimination.
She was the worst thing to happen to HP (and Compaq) in recent memory. She destroyed those companies and everything they worked for.
The EE *is* twice as fast as a 733MHz P3 No, it is not anywhere close to being twice as fast as a 733 mhz P3. I'm interested in where you heard that.
Sounds a lot like their Emotion Engine, which could "render Toy Story like animation in real time".
Too bad it couldn't come close to living up to the hype.
With all this talk about the Cell being 4x as fast as a dual core Opteron, I'm willing to bet that when the chip comes out its actual speed will be similar to a low/mid range P4/Athlon.
It won't kill AMD or Intel, it won't dominate the processor market, it won't take the computing world by storm, and it won't even take the performance lead.
The only thing this is taking by storm is the PR and marketing business.
Back in the Alpha days, Risc chips had a advantage in virtually all benchmarks, and conventional wisdom said that it would increase, but it still wasn't enough of an incentive to get significant numbers of people to switch over.
. ht m
Which is my point really. It's not that x86 has an particularly good, it is that PPC and other Risc chips no longer better enough to make people switch.
It's also worth noting that modern x86 chips like the Athlon are essentially RISC chips at heart. Internally the chip converts x86 instructions into RISC-like instructions. The Athlon design is similar in many ways to the Alpha's , and even uses the Alpha's EV7 bus.
Here's some good info:
http://www.karbosguide.com/hardware/module3e08a
Who decides on immigration policy, the US? The UN?
n /59Buick.jpg
I don't have the answers to your questions, but I will guarantee you that no matter who controls immigration to Mars, you're going to get Cubans that somehow manage to make the voyage in a converted 1959 Buick
http://www.uscg.mil/hq/g-o/g-opl/AMIO/images/Cuba
And it runs OSX?
You're comparing apples to oranges.
No, the original poster was comparing apples to oranges. He started comparing the hardware aspects of the Mini vs. PC's, and I challenged him on his comments about the hardware.
He said:
find a PC for the same price with comparable features. Most people point to Dell/HP/etc boxes. They always end up having crappy integrated graphics cards, and things like that.
I then directly addressed his point about the hardware features such as integrated graphics.
Then he threw in the comment about OSX which isn't really an argument at all, since you cannot natively run OSX on the PC, so of course it's not going to come with it. You can't natively run WinXP on a Mac, either, but that doesn't mean that I can use that as proof that PC's are better.
If you want to compare them both, at least stick to the things which can be compared (you can objectively benchmark a processor, memory, or a video card, but your favorite OS is purely subjective)
Not everything will run perfectly - NASA dropped a fragile disc into the desert at 500m/s last year if you remember
It wasn't falling nearly that fast.
500 m/s would be faster than the speed of sound. In reality is was falling at about 200 mph (around 89m/s)
Find a PC for the same price with comparable features. Most people point to Dell/HP/etc boxes. They always end up having crappy integrated graphics cards, and things like that. You won't find a PC for a comparable price.
8 &p =1
A PC of the same price, such as the Dell you mentioned, will have much higher end hardware than the Mini. In the case of the Dell, it even includes a LCD monitor which is not included with the Mini.
In the case of graphics cards, the Radeon 9200 in the Mini is a very low end graphics card, on par with an integrated one. It only has a pitiful 32 MB of memory for graphics.
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=232
Read the review on Anandtech for an objective, logical review. You won't find that on here, you'll only find emotional outpourings from enthusiastic zealots who have already made up their mind.
Archimede's principle dictates that an object will displace its weight in water, which leads to the conclusion that the heavier something is, the lower it will sink in relation to other material surrounding it.
Uh, no. If it sinks it just displaces its volume, regardless of its weight. Example- you drop a solid block (1 cubic foot) of aluminum into the ocean. It sinks to the bottom of the ocean and displaces 1 cubic foot of water. Do the same with 1 cubic foot of lead, and it will sink to the bottom and displace the same amount of water even though it weighs many times more.
Computers are made up of meltable parts. By melting the computers down, would it not be possible to skim off various useful elements and compounds at certain depths? This is how they separate kerosene jet fuel from high octane gasoline. It's all together in a vat, but sucked out from different depths.
I'm sure there is a way to do what you're suggesting, but economics will dictate whether it's worth doing or not. If reclaiming the materials this way is more expensive than mining and refining new raw materials and nobody wants to pay the premium price to recycle, this idea won't succeed.
The way they have this written ensures that it won't pass. They're trying to put a flat tax on a "computer" which they can't really define.
The moment they try to define what makes a "computer" is the moment that they begin stepping on people's toes. If they try to describe which key parts in the computer makes it a "computer" and gets the tax, the manufacturers of those key part will have a great case to complain that they are being discriminated against while other electronics manufacturers get off free.
Also, the text of this bill is the same text that was in a previous bill that was shot down. Do they expect everyone to change their minds this time?
I think a more sensible bill would ditch the idea of a flat tax on a "computer", and instead levy an impact fee on the individual components of all electronics based on their materials content. That way the companies that put more toxic materials in their products must pay more tax, and the companies that make products using more friendly materials are rewarded with less tax.
Yet another oblivious Slashdot fool who cannot spot a joke unless it hits them in the face.
The sarcasm eludes you.
Hello passengers- we've reached our cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. I am going to switch the seat belt sign off in a moment so feel free to stretch and move about the cabin. Those of you on the right can look out the windows and see the Grand Canyon, while those of you on the left can look up and see the OP's comments, passing harmlessly above the heads of the unsuspecting.
Both the mirror and sunshade won't fit onto the rocket fully open, so both will fold up and open only once JWST is in outer space.
JWST will reside in an L2 Lissajous orbit, about 1.5 million km (1 million miles) from the Earth.
Sounds risky. If anything goes wrong with this one, it'll be too far away to reach, and they'll wish it only cost $2 billion to fix!
If every single computer user was a geek then you'd have a valid point, but you fail to realize 0% of the worlds computing population care about that stuff.
Surely geeks must make up some non-zero percentage of the computing population.
This is for the electrical engineers:
Why is the MoBo blue? Is there a signifigance to the color of the board? Or did Apple just pick it because on the order sheet it was "aqua"?
That is not a question for electrical engineers. It's more of a question for marketers or fashion designers. You can make the board any color you want. There are red boards, green boards, yellow boards, black boards, blue boards, etc. It's to look nice.
There seems to be a disproportionate amount of Apple news on this site when you consider how small of a share of the market they have.
I'm a hardcore computer nerd, but this Apple news isn't the slightest bit interesting to me.
(now all the Mac zealots are going to mod me down for saying that, even though a PC fan wouldn't mod down Mac fan for stating his viewpoint. "Thinking different" seems to be a one way street with Apple fans)
I am, by my own admission, a noob in this area But whatever orbit Space Ship One entered (decaying orbit ?) it is still very impressive. When the Soviets put the first man in space it must have been a similar altitude (about 100KM), and that was a whole country. Space Ship One's insertion was far more elegant. I just wish Nasa would build something more worthy. There is nothing inspiring about the space shuttle or the Soyuz rockets. It was refreshing to see a small craft get into orbitr without creating enough smog pollute a small country.
Spaceship one did not achieve anything close to any type of orbit at all. It did not have the speed or power possible to do that. It merely went up to an altitude high enough to be considered "space", then glided down. This is not remotely close to what the Soviets did with Yuri Gagarin.
As for the Soviets, they launched Yuri Gagarin up in a proper rocket capable of producing the power needed for orbit. It achieved orbital velocity of 24,000 km/hr, went up to an altitude of around 300 Km, and made an entire orbit of the Earth before landing.
The difference in the amount of energy needed to do this, compared to what Spaceship One did, is enormous. Spaceship One only had a few percent of the energy needed to go into orbit.
http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/images/iProduct.gif
Spoken like a true Nasa zealot. It took the guys at Scaled composites to show you that they could build a cheap light, ingenious low-earth-orbit vehicle and launch it cheaply from its mother plane.
Spoken like yet another noob who has no clue what he's talking about.
SpaceShip One was NOT an ingenious low-earth-orbit vehicle. It was not a LEO vehicle at all.