Uhhh Crosshair? What was the second part of my statement? that it is up to the accuser to provide evidence, remember? if you accuse someone of breaking into your garage the cops are gonna want SOME kind of evidence other than you saying "He did it". they are gonna want independent witnesses or video or SOMETHING before they are gonna do anything.
And that is EXACTLY what we have here, Red Hat has ZERO evidence to back up their accusations and since they are in competition with the company in question frankly all should treat this no different than MSFT saying "Linux violates our patents, trust us they really do!"
Either RH puts up or they need to shut up, simple as that.
It just amazes me how many here have already forgotten their history, specifically the Pentium 4. Intel had originally designed that chip to hit 10Ghz, in fact if you search the net you can still find talks and papers from Intel where they state that was the goal from the start, and I know several people that managed to get Pentium 4 late models and Pentium Ds over the 5Ghz mark...so what happened?
HEAT is what happened, it was quickly realized that to get a P4 to 10Ghz it would need its own AC unit just to keep from frying! And in mobile its that much worse because you are squeezing the chips into this thin slice of plastic and glass, which is why we now see companies putting out 4 and 5 core ARM chips, to try to get the performance up without melting the device.
And just like with X86 now that they can't brag about "even faster!" we are starting to see the race to the bottom begin, just last year ANY tablet you got for less than $200 was just garbage, now there are several in the $100 range running 1.2Ghz chips and Android 4 and from what I've been told they are very nice to use. so what we are gonna see is no different than what we saw on X86, when the OEMs couldn't sell more units based on speed they sold on price to keep capacity up and we had a race to the bottom.
That is why I predict this time next year you'll see dual core smartphones and tablets in the $50 range, the quad cores in the $125-$150 range, and since they won't be able to make more than minor tweaks as you pointed out because of the thermal wall people will try them and go "Meh, this feels no different than the one i already have" and they'll just stick with what they have until it breaks.
Again the only one who won't face this, or at least not nearly as badly is Apple, because with Apple its as much about fashion as it is the device. that doesn't mean they are bad devices, just that its as unhip to be using last year's iPhone as it is to wear last year's fashion as far as Apple fans are concerned. But even they may feel some pain, as it seems Cook can't build the buyers into a frenzy like old Steve could, just look at how many "Meh" reviews there were for iPhone 5 and the iPad mini.
Thanks for saying it better than I ever could, i would only add the reason i have a 6 core CPU is...it was $105 with shipping and my youngest was running a Pentium D and thus could benefit from my previous chip that was a Deneb quad.
But you nailed it, I sell triples and quads over duals because it is often less than $15 difference and most folks would rather spend the extra $15 and have the extra power, even if they don't need it. In fact on the AMD side lately its been easier to find and cheaper to get the triples and quads than it is the dual cores anymore.
PETA doesn't believe in people period, hell they labeled fish as "sea kittens" to try to get people not to eat them, and I have even seen a PETA person arguing against FLU shots because the flu is "alive".
as for TFA I could wallpaper this page with links showing Indians that committed sex crimes, but why bother? Propaganda is propaganda, we've seen these same kinds of lies pointed at every group at one time or another throughout history. If India wants to look like a backwards ass third world bunch of looney tunes go right ahead, me i'm gonna go enjoy some meat lover's pizza.
Oh please! Now how many times has it been said here "The first 90% is easy, its that last 10% that is hard"? Anyone who has worked in an office for any length of time knows there are about a dozen features that the employees use...problem is its a DIFFERENT dozen for each bunch of employees. some might be Excel jocks and thus need the VBA macros, some might be hooked on Access and thus need the DB support (and I'm sorry but Base is a crashy POS, it really needs some of the love that Writer has gotten) and I'm sure a lot of them are using headers and footers and tracking changes...which lets face it LO/OO just don't do that very well.
Its all about using the right tool for the job, and like it or not for many businesses the right tool is MS Office. Does that mean LO is bad? Nope, in fact its part of my standard install on every HOME unit, because home users aren't using the funky features and thus only need the basics, which LO is great at.
And let us not forget the Open Document Foundation has only had control...what?.. a couple of years now? Its gonna take a LOT of work to fix what Sun screwed up by keeping strict control. Hell anybody that thinks LO is ready i invite you to go download and inspect the code...its a mess, those guys have got their work cut out for them.
So how about we give the Germans some slack, maybe LO/OO just isn't ready for their use case at this moment. I have no doubt in 4 or 5 years, once they have had a chance to make the code modular and clean up the cruft, that LO will be a dozen times better and may even have all the features that the SMBs want. But until then you can't expect someone to go with a tool that doesn't work because its "free". To use a/. car analogy that would be like you going in to buy a jack to fix a flat and someone goes "You don't need that, here is a free screwdriver!"...uhh..not really helping change the tire there, free or no.
I bookmarked this post, just so I can point and say "Look at #2" because until you pointed it out I honestly thought people would know what I was talking about. that is what I get for being in front of the damned machines too long, you assume that when you say "multi-threaded' that they will understand you mean true multithreading, to me coarse might as well just be two programs running on the same machine, if they aren't dealing with the same data...hell like you pointed out pretty much anybody with a copy of VS can bang out a program that does that.
But TRUE multithreading, without stalls and race conditions? that is DAMN hard to do, that is why most of the programs taking advantage of GP-GPU are just slicing up the data like transcoders, try to calculate how long each piece of the data will take AND not end up with a race or stall is damned difficult to pull off.
And as far as Win 8? Like I said when I get people that walk into my shop and I haven't seen in years and haven't said a single word to about win 8 go "Man what is UP with that? I tried out some laptops with Win 8 and its terrible!" you know you got a stinker. Hell I had more people try Vista and like it when I had the beta running in the shop...well until the stupid "Cancel/allow?" dialogs started bugging them, than I ever have with Win 8. In fact I have yet to hear anything but backhanded compliments like "It might be good on a tablet" which of course implies "But it sucks on this desktop".
At the end of the day you can use simple math to show why Win 8 is doomed. The last figures I saw had 300 million computers sold last year, lets say that is the average okay? Since I have been selling X3s or better since 2007 that is 5 years at 300 million computers or 1.2 BILLION computers that have more than enough power to run Win 8, so far so good right? Here is where the math bites Ballmer in the ass. Now even the cheerleaders of Win 8 have said "You really need a touch screen to appreciate Win 8" and I wish I had bookmarked it because one actually wrote "And it even works great on old systems! Here we have this touch screen Athlon laptop from 3 years ago.."LOL, like THAT is what the average PC is! So what IS the average PC as far as touch? Well the last figures I saw were 4% but that included kiosks and POS units, when you removed those you had MAYBE 2%, which if my back of the napkin math is right you are looking at around 24 million out of 1.2 BILLION that have a touchscreen!
Hell go to Best Buy, Staples, any B&M and actually count how many touchscreen desktops and laptops are there for sale VS how many that do NOT have touch, at my local wally world out of 27 units they had on display there was ONE that was touch, an HP iMac clone. desktops? Nope, Laptops? Nu uh.
And it is THIS that kills Win 8 like Raid kills bugs, you have a UI centered around touch yet fewer than 2% of the units in the world, both on sale now and that have been sold to date, actually have touch. And why the hell would the customer WANT touch, who wants fingerprints on their pretty new laptop? greasy smudges on their desktop screen? Tablets are treated like "cell phones that don't make calls" so nobody cares if they get Cheetos stains on their Android but they DO care if that nice new glossy laptop looks like shit!
So at the end of the day the math simply don't work. MSFT thought they could ram a UI down everyone's throats that wasn't designed for what it was running on and even the layman can take one look at win 8 and see the suck. Hell I'm "Mr Bleeding edge" and after a month of running the damned thing I wanted to gouge out my eyes with a spoon, and I KNOW all the keyboard shortcuts! Can you imagine what its like for the user that has spent over a decade learning everything by "clicky clicky" to use Win 8? Well wonder no more because here is video proof and it was THIS that I saw in my shop, only with more frustration and cursing than this sweet little old lady.
Riiiight, because nobody needs to type, email is a myth, and instead they'll all try to hold a screen with one hand and a BT keyboard with another. sigh,try to go without a PC today, just try. Hell one of the Apple loving pundits tried to go a month with just his iPad and iPhone...he failed and gave up after just 8 days because he said even with a BT keyboard it got to be too big a PITA to do anything.
Phones are good for instant on the spot info, what time does the movie start, how do I get to the place i'm going, tablets are good for media consumption and time wasters, but the SECOND you actually need to get anything done your ass better have a desktop or a laptop, or you are gonna be in a world of hurt.
I would give you a detailed reply, but I'm afraid tepples said everything better than i ever could. All I would add is here at the shop I see pretty much every kind of computer user and what you are describing isn't even 3% of the population, even the gamers I know don't run a bunch of heavy apps while gaming because the HDD quickly becomes the bottleneck. Heck I have a customer making his living designing insanely complex robotics in the latest version of Solidworks...is he on an Ivybridge? or maybe an Octocore Bulldozer? Nope he's running a Phenom I X3 I built him nearly 5 years ago and with the GPU taking the load on model rotation he is VERY happy with his performance.
Hell I often transcode WHILE gaming and even with that kind of load I don't peg out all 6 cores of my Thuban, and I paid a grand total of $110 for this chip a year ago, even a multitasker like me can't keep this chip fed for long, its just got more power than I can come up with tasks for it to do...don't mean i don't brag about having a 6 core though;-)
Thank you, nice to see someone understands. I mean let's take myself as an example, I'm anything BUT typical, I'm a multitasking monster! I'll have a game going WHILE doing a transcode AND having a browser with my email accounts running in the background...yet i STILL can't peg out this 6 core AMD I paid just $110 for over a year ago!
But when you look at a typical user, what are they doing? ONE thing at a time, they are listening to music OR watching a video OR burning a disc, OR surfing, they aren't even pegging out the AMD triple cores I was selling 5 years ago, much less these quad, hexa, and octo monsters that are selling now.
So I still stand by my challenge, those that are saying "poo poo multitask needs more cores poo poo" to show me ANYTHING that your bog standard average user does on a daily basis that would peg out even those bottom of the line Phenom X3s i was selling 5 years ago, much less actually require an Octocore or an Ivy bridge CPU, because working in the shop six days a week i see folks from all walks of life, doctors and lawyers to retirees and kids, business men and housewives...hell I have a customer that is running the latest version of Solidworks on one of those Phenom I X3 units I sold 5 years ago and is HAPPY, very happy, with his performance!
The simple fact is once we switched from MHz to cores the users just couldn't come up with enough useful work to peg out these fire breathing monster chips, like I said they are using a funny car to pick up milk at the store. So even if software were to take a leap, which frankly we have seen ZERO indication of happening, they would still have more than enough power to cover it for several years. Like I said my dad is as close to the perfect example of a bog standard typical user and even with him having a Phenom I with the TLB bug clocked at just 2.2GHz he has yet to get over 45% CPU usage, and from the two week log I ran his average usage was running less than 25% which isn't even making the chip work, that's barely above idling. Hell for most of my customers when they are surfing the chips are in idle almost the entire time!
They just can't come up with the work to slam the chips and as you pointed out you certainly aren't gonna change how the user interacts with the PC, which is typically one program in front and the background tasks on the second core. Everything else is just overkill and bragging rights, even a 6 core owner like me will admit that.
That's funny, here we aren't seeing drive by Chrome installs but Jesus tap dancing Christ on a crutch if I see one more damned McCrappy Security Scan stuck on a customer's machine I'm gonna snap!
And since I don't get much OEM desktops (most folks here prefer my builds, since they get them crapware free and i make sure its upgrade-able) but I have noticed more chrome installs on the new Inspiron laptops that come through here.
That don't change the fact that its becoming damned hard around here to find anybody using IE anymore though, we have a couple of companies trapped on IE 6 thanks to the moron that built ActiveX intranet apps, but other than those even our SMBs are either using FF or one of the Chromium variants, usually chrome or since i started recommending it Comodo Dragon. But IE just seemed to die out, at least around here, around 3 years ago, one day it just stopped showing up for FF and then Chrome.
Look up "Xbox Next" in whatever search engine you prefer, do the same for Playstation 4. Those that have gotten early dev kits are saying its an AMD quad APU, whether its the one with the ARM DRM chip added is unclear. will MSFT add the PPC chip for backwards compatibility? Who knows, all i can tell you is what the scuttlebutt going around the campfire has been and from the looks of it Nvidia got left out in the cold, as AMD got ALL the GPUs for the new systems (The HD4650 for the Wii U, the APU for the XBN and PS4).
Anyway if the rumors are true, and as i said these rumors are coming from those inside game companies that have gotten early dev kits, both MSFT and Sony have gone with AMD for several reasons, to cut costs, as the single APU cuts down the amount of support chips you need, and for more importantly to allow them to have games easily ported to/from the PC, which Sony especially has had trouble with. With AAA titles costing nearly 100 million you want to make it damned easy to port to your console and since the games are being written on X86 workstations using an X86 chip makes sense, it also lets them use more COTS parts which will lower the BOM.
I'm sorry AC but you are wrong and here is why: You have users that are doing tasks suitable for a compact car yet they have a fire burning funny car as far as performance goes!
The simple fact is writing software that can truly take advantage of even just two cores is REALLY hard, and to write software that can truly take advantage of 4 or more cores without having serious issue with stalls is INSANELY hard. But AMD and Intel have kept on adding cores, 4 cores on the Intel and 8 on the AMD. Hell look at the Steam specs page, even though we can have AMD 6 cores for $105 and Intel quads for less than $200 we see the number 1 setup being....dual cores, why? Because most games don't need more because again the software just hasn't kept up.
Will we see somebody come up with a way to use all those cores? Probably, but until we have a fundamental shift in the way software is built you'll have users with funny cars driving to the grocery store. Hell if they switched to quad cores tomorrow that would cover damned near every customer I have had since the Phenom I, that was...what? Five years ago? We just have more power, more RAM, more graphics, and more storage space than we know what to do with now.
I don't see how anyone could see "the grey room" as anything but a living hell. No sound, no windows, no books, no nothing but a square grey box, and the worst part is the no concept of time, you would be spending centuries for all you know because there is no clocks and no light/night cycle to give you any clue.
Fuck that, sometimes the most merciful thing you can do is kill them, don't leave them trapped like that, hell we wouldn't do that to a dog, why would you to a person?
Funny enough that isn't far from the truth, although to be more accurate today it would probably be Chrome instead of Firefox. Working here at the shop I get to see pretty much all walks of life and within the last 5 years I have seen a pretty fundamental shift, whereas before it was only the geeky types that had an alternate browser now EVERYBODY has one, even the little old folks that don't like change.
Now I can't tell you why, maybe its the fact like morons they fragmented the hell out of the userbase and people didn't like that they couldn't run the same IE on both their new laptop and their old desktop, maybe its the UI changes that frankly suck, who knows, but I can tell you pretty much ONLY the SMBs use IE anymore around here and even many of them are moving away from IE.
This is why I don't get why the EU and others are having a fit over IE, its fucking dying already, what is the point of kicking it as it quivers and bleeds? it would be like having a shitfit over the blink tag in Netscape after AOHell bought it and run all the users off, seriously what is the point? IE is dying, the fat lady has not only sang she is down the street having a sammich, nobody uses that crap anymore unless they absolutely have to and even those are looking for an exit strategy. Let the damned thing just die in peace already, let it join WinME, Vista, and Win 8 on the fail pile and move on.
And I'm sure if the guy could communicate more than yes/no he would be saying "Kill me" over and over and over.
this to me is the truly scary part of technology, how they can make someone a "head in a box" for all intents and purposes and leave you going for years trapped in some grey nothing (that is what one girl who awakened from a coma described it as, a grey room with nothing, no sounds, no doors, just a grey room...trapped forever with no concept of time) with no way to escape...fuck that, put a bullet in my brain, smother me with a pillow, OD me on morphine, don't leave me trapped in some grey hell for eternity.
Sorry, my bad, I thought from the tone of the conversation you were going for a low power file server, which those bobcats kick serious ass at.
The Piledriver is a decent chip, I do hope you're looking at the dual socket Opteron for that kind of a load, IIRC they are up to like 16 cores per socket with the G34s, that will give you PLENTY of headroom.
BTW if you ever need a chip to fill out or upgrade a unit you ought to check out Starmicro as i've been buying from these guys for years and you can get some crazy deals on chips from them, it just all depends on what they have in that week.
Actually AMD is already making a chip with one ARM core and 4 X64 cores, although IIRC they added the ARM for DRM for the new Playstation console, MSFT may also be using it in the X720 or whatever they call it as well.
I'll get hate for saying this but NOW does everyone see why words like "viral" get applied to the GPL? Here they gave code they wrote to the Linux SCSI team which they used. They can take that same code and make a proprietary version all they want because THEY WROTE IT yet the are being accused of violating the GPL because they have a proprietary version of their own code?
It is THEIRS, they wrote it, they can do what they will and license it any damned way they want! The only thing they CAN'T DO is take the code they gave and force anyone to give it back, anyone can do what they want with that. But they can take the same code word for word and do anything they want with it because they are the authors and that is how copyright works!
But now you can see why companies would be leery of dealing with anything GPL, because crap like this really does make the GPL look viral.
Its not just inertia, its the fact that other than the "Star Trek rule" stinkers (WinME/Vista/8) most folks? they are quite happy with Windows. And why shouldn't they be? After SP 2 WinXP was good, in fact its still being used over a decade after release because many are happy with it, and Win 7 is a damned good, rock solid OS with several features that make your work easier, breadcrumbs, jumplists, and superfetch just to name a few, so why shouldn't people just stick with what they like? XP is still good until 2014, Win 7 is good until 2020, why try to fix what ain't broke?
But as somebody that sells PCs and has since Win 3.1 I am really getting tired of the pundits and their "Post PC" horseshit, they have NO clue as to what is REALLY happening on the ground and nobody is replacing their PCs for a fricking cellphone!
I'll be happy to tell you what IS happening and what IS reality is...my dad. My dad is the perfect example of what is called a "typical user" today, he surfs, chats, uses FB, burns DVD, runs his Quickbooks, watches videos, he is as typical as you can possible get of an average Windows PC user. So when the price dropped on the Phenom IIs I thought to myself "Well it has been a few years since I built that cheap AM2 Phenom quad for my dad, maybe its time to build him a new system" so I set his PC to log his usage for a couple of weeks, then I came back and looked at the data. What did I find? 45%, that is what I found. Now we are talking a Phenom I with the TLB bug and a max speed of 2.2Ghz and the MOST he stressed that quad is 45% and that turned out to be a hung browser tab.
So the PC and MSFT are NOT going away, but when AMD and Intel hit the thermal wall and decided to switch from the MHz war to the core war the chips they produced, hell even for the low end like the Athlon triples or the first gen Core based Pentiums on the laptops, are just sooooo damned powerful the users just aren't stressing them so they just ain't needing replaced nearly as often.
I predict we have less than 3 years before we see mobile, which TFA thinks is to blame (Protip: Its not) have the same damned thing happen to it that happened to X86. i mean look at what is going on, they've switched to the core wars over MHz wars, and just like with X86 you are seeing a race to the bottom with even the low end starting to sport 1.2Ghz dual cores. i predict this time next year you'll see Android 5 dual core 7 inch tablets for $50, 10 inch quads for around $150, and just like with X86 everybody that wants one will have multiple units and will find there isn't any point in upgrading. The only except will be Apple, but as I've said before what saves Apple from hard times is they are NOT a tech company that makes fashionable devices but a FASHION company that just happens to make tech devices. That is why the only items you see people line up and camp out for are Air Jordans and Apple products, using last year's iPhone is as unhip as wearing last year's Jordans.
So MSFT and Windows won't be going anywhere, they just have to accept that people aren't gonna toss machines every 3 years like they did during the MHz wars. Hell as a gamer i used to have to replace my machine every year and a half like clockwork, now I'm gaming on an AMD Hexacore that was released nearly 3 years ago and see ZERO reason to upgrade more than the GPU. Hell even my low end system for the past five years have been a minimum of a triple core with 4gb of RAM and 500gb HDDs, what is the average user gonna do to slam that chip? Not a damned thing, which is why they'll hang onto it for years, if it ain't broke....
Just Google "Loongson Dragon X86 license" and you'll find it quick enough, its an IP issue with the X86 instruction set that Dragon has to accellerate X86 on the MIPS chips. Since the Chinese government backed them for their military computers they don't care about IP issues, it "works for them" is all they care about, but it means the west can't get say an ARM chip that can run X86 because of IP issues.
A LITTLE expensive? I could build a whole damned AMD server rack for the cost of the damned chip alone! THIS is why its gonna royally suck if AMD goes under, intel has been pushing Ultrabooks and the ultra high end for awhile, the ONLY reason you have chips like the i3 and the Pentium is to keep AMD from owning everything below $1000. if AMD goes under they won't bother as it'll be their way or the highway.
Hell put ME in charge of the damned company, i'll right it in 3 or all they'll pay is my room and board, I'd right that ship so damned fast they'd be asking if I was the new Steve Jobs.
And yes BEFORE in the early alpha builds (if you look around the net you can grab a copy to try it yourself) there was a simple.reg entry that allowed you to switch between metro and a bog standard Windows desktop, not the crippled "desktop mode" horseshit, but an actual honest to god Win 7 desktop minus the Aero gloss, and old Snickerdouche found out the.reg file was quickly being passed around so not only did he kill the reg entry, he even gutted the original desktop code so the ONLY thing you could get was that crippled half ass "desktop mode!
But most people don't know there IS a way to get an actual usable desktop in Win 8, in fact in Jan when I pick up my copy so I can learn how to deal with the Win 8 fuckups its the FIRST damned thing i'm gonna do to it! It costs $30 but its the best damned 430 you ever spent, its called AstonShell and it will give you the "look and feel" of damned near ANY WIMP UI that has ever been made, from Win9X-Win 7 on the MSFT side, hell even KDE or gnome or OSX if that melts your butter. They have a 30 day free trial so you can download the trial version of Win 8 and slap it on to see for yourself, but its a HELL of a lot nicer than that damned "LOL I Iz A Cellphone LOL" UI that is win 8.
In the end you're right though, you can't stick a damned marketing drone at the head of an engineering company, it just doesn't work. As I said with the bulldozer sticks what works great on one device does not automatically mean it'll work great on another completely unrelated device, and that is Win 8 in a nutshell, bolting a Caterpillar stick onto a car and calling you a Luddite when you point out it wasn't as good as what you had. I'm all for updating the WIMP UI but to make it better, not gut it. More visual feedback to the user for example, maybe even design keyboards with an actual knob like on digital audio workstations so the user could have actual tactical feedback when performing actions.
Finally office shows the same damned arrogance Snickerdouche showed during his reign, let the USER choose which is best! While I personally don't mind the ribbon (because i just killed the damned thing and made my own customization to the minibar to have what I use most in the same spot for muscle memory) I can see that with users that have never used office the ribbon is a lot more hand holding.,....that's nice for the NEW users, but what about those that have spent fricking decades giving their money to MSFT and have the muscle memory down cold? In the height of arrogance they fucked them over to give new users a simpler UI. If they would have simply allowed a simple switch, even buried in the options, that could be controlled by GPO so that old hats could have the classic UI while the newbies got the ribbon not a single thing would have been said.
But in the end that is why Ballmer has to go, its arrogance. To use a/. car analogy he sees Ferrari keeps selling so he slaps a ripoff of the Ferrari front end to a Ford along with a $100k price tag and is amazed, amazed i tell you, that nobody wants his $100k Ford. Apple is a completely different market, with users that wouldn't take MSFT anything on a bet, so by forcing Windows to be an ersatz iOS all he is doing is keeping his customers from buying his product while the Apple customers laugh at them as they buy their iPad. But instead of paying attention and listening to his customers he fragments the fuck out of his userbase for no damned good reason, IE, DX, burns customers with dumb moves like killing Windows messenger for Skype (You watch, numbers of users switching to yahoo or Google is gonna jump when that dumbshit happens) and is shocked that the stock tanks.
hell even their mobile division is savable, they have one of the most powerf
Actually they DO innovate AC, you're just not allowed to have any of their innovative designs thanks to the IP minefield that is the USA. Look up the Loongson Dragon chips, here you have a MIPS chip with hardware accelerated X86 which is currently at around 75% native speed. Now imagine what all those ARM devices would be like if you could run any X86 programs on it, thanks to hardware emulation of X86? be pretty sweet huh?
but sadly you can't have it as Intel won't license X86 under FRAND so its only for Asia, they can't sell them in the west. i have a feeling as our minefield gets worse so too will we see more cool things that can't be sold here for fear of being sued out of existence.`
Then you haven't tried them lately AC, I've been using AMD cards exclusively since they got rid of tying the software to.NET and I have to say its rock solid stable and works great. Not only do I sell them in my shop but I put my family, me, my two boys, and my GF, all on AMD graphics, and not a single hiccup or bug, it all "just works".
Of course if you download the beta drivers for ANY chip you should expect bugs, that is why they are beta, but if you stick to the WHQL releases you'll find they are nice, have all the features you'd want, and are solid. The "ATI drivers SUCK BALLS!" rep came from ATI tying the damned thing to.NET which was frankly buggy as fuck in the 1.0-2.0 days, as all MSFT software is on first release, and since the CCC was tied into.NET anything went wrong with.NET fucked up your driver. That hasn't been the case for a few years now and you can tell, its all smooth and easy peasy.
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Uhhh Crosshair? What was the second part of my statement? that it is up to the accuser to provide evidence, remember? if you accuse someone of breaking into your garage the cops are gonna want SOME kind of evidence other than you saying "He did it". they are gonna want independent witnesses or video or SOMETHING before they are gonna do anything.
And that is EXACTLY what we have here, Red Hat has ZERO evidence to back up their accusations and since they are in competition with the company in question frankly all should treat this no different than MSFT saying "Linux violates our patents, trust us they really do!"
Either RH puts up or they need to shut up, simple as that.
It just amazes me how many here have already forgotten their history, specifically the Pentium 4. Intel had originally designed that chip to hit 10Ghz, in fact if you search the net you can still find talks and papers from Intel where they state that was the goal from the start, and I know several people that managed to get Pentium 4 late models and Pentium Ds over the 5Ghz mark...so what happened?
HEAT is what happened, it was quickly realized that to get a P4 to 10Ghz it would need its own AC unit just to keep from frying! And in mobile its that much worse because you are squeezing the chips into this thin slice of plastic and glass, which is why we now see companies putting out 4 and 5 core ARM chips, to try to get the performance up without melting the device.
And just like with X86 now that they can't brag about "even faster!" we are starting to see the race to the bottom begin, just last year ANY tablet you got for less than $200 was just garbage, now there are several in the $100 range running 1.2Ghz chips and Android 4 and from what I've been told they are very nice to use. so what we are gonna see is no different than what we saw on X86, when the OEMs couldn't sell more units based on speed they sold on price to keep capacity up and we had a race to the bottom.
That is why I predict this time next year you'll see dual core smartphones and tablets in the $50 range, the quad cores in the $125-$150 range, and since they won't be able to make more than minor tweaks as you pointed out because of the thermal wall people will try them and go "Meh, this feels no different than the one i already have" and they'll just stick with what they have until it breaks.
Again the only one who won't face this, or at least not nearly as badly is Apple, because with Apple its as much about fashion as it is the device. that doesn't mean they are bad devices, just that its as unhip to be using last year's iPhone as it is to wear last year's fashion as far as Apple fans are concerned. But even they may feel some pain, as it seems Cook can't build the buyers into a frenzy like old Steve could, just look at how many "Meh" reviews there were for iPhone 5 and the iPad mini.
Thanks for saying it better than I ever could, i would only add the reason i have a 6 core CPU is...it was $105 with shipping and my youngest was running a Pentium D and thus could benefit from my previous chip that was a Deneb quad.
But you nailed it, I sell triples and quads over duals because it is often less than $15 difference and most folks would rather spend the extra $15 and have the extra power, even if they don't need it. In fact on the AMD side lately its been easier to find and cheaper to get the triples and quads than it is the dual cores anymore.
PETA doesn't believe in people period, hell they labeled fish as "sea kittens" to try to get people not to eat them, and I have even seen a PETA person arguing against FLU shots because the flu is "alive".
as for TFA I could wallpaper this page with links showing Indians that committed sex crimes, but why bother? Propaganda is propaganda, we've seen these same kinds of lies pointed at every group at one time or another throughout history. If India wants to look like a backwards ass third world bunch of looney tunes go right ahead, me i'm gonna go enjoy some meat lover's pizza.
Oh please! Now how many times has it been said here "The first 90% is easy, its that last 10% that is hard"? Anyone who has worked in an office for any length of time knows there are about a dozen features that the employees use...problem is its a DIFFERENT dozen for each bunch of employees. some might be Excel jocks and thus need the VBA macros, some might be hooked on Access and thus need the DB support (and I'm sorry but Base is a crashy POS, it really needs some of the love that Writer has gotten) and I'm sure a lot of them are using headers and footers and tracking changes...which lets face it LO/OO just don't do that very well.
Its all about using the right tool for the job, and like it or not for many businesses the right tool is MS Office. Does that mean LO is bad? Nope, in fact its part of my standard install on every HOME unit, because home users aren't using the funky features and thus only need the basics, which LO is great at.
And let us not forget the Open Document Foundation has only had control...what?.. a couple of years now? Its gonna take a LOT of work to fix what Sun screwed up by keeping strict control. Hell anybody that thinks LO is ready i invite you to go download and inspect the code...its a mess, those guys have got their work cut out for them.
So how about we give the Germans some slack, maybe LO/OO just isn't ready for their use case at this moment. I have no doubt in 4 or 5 years, once they have had a chance to make the code modular and clean up the cruft, that LO will be a dozen times better and may even have all the features that the SMBs want. But until then you can't expect someone to go with a tool that doesn't work because its "free". To use a /. car analogy that would be like you going in to buy a jack to fix a flat and someone goes "You don't need that, here is a free screwdriver!"...uhh..not really helping change the tire there, free or no.
I bookmarked this post, just so I can point and say "Look at #2" because until you pointed it out I honestly thought people would know what I was talking about. that is what I get for being in front of the damned machines too long, you assume that when you say "multi-threaded' that they will understand you mean true multithreading, to me coarse might as well just be two programs running on the same machine, if they aren't dealing with the same data...hell like you pointed out pretty much anybody with a copy of VS can bang out a program that does that.
But TRUE multithreading, without stalls and race conditions? that is DAMN hard to do, that is why most of the programs taking advantage of GP-GPU are just slicing up the data like transcoders, try to calculate how long each piece of the data will take AND not end up with a race or stall is damned difficult to pull off.
And as far as Win 8? Like I said when I get people that walk into my shop and I haven't seen in years and haven't said a single word to about win 8 go "Man what is UP with that? I tried out some laptops with Win 8 and its terrible!" you know you got a stinker. Hell I had more people try Vista and like it when I had the beta running in the shop...well until the stupid "Cancel/allow?" dialogs started bugging them, than I ever have with Win 8. In fact I have yet to hear anything but backhanded compliments like "It might be good on a tablet" which of course implies "But it sucks on this desktop".
At the end of the day you can use simple math to show why Win 8 is doomed. The last figures I saw had 300 million computers sold last year, lets say that is the average okay? Since I have been selling X3s or better since 2007 that is 5 years at 300 million computers or 1.2 BILLION computers that have more than enough power to run Win 8, so far so good right? Here is where the math bites Ballmer in the ass. Now even the cheerleaders of Win 8 have said "You really need a touch screen to appreciate Win 8" and I wish I had bookmarked it because one actually wrote "And it even works great on old systems! Here we have this touch screen Athlon laptop from 3 years ago.."LOL, like THAT is what the average PC is! So what IS the average PC as far as touch? Well the last figures I saw were 4% but that included kiosks and POS units, when you removed those you had MAYBE 2%, which if my back of the napkin math is right you are looking at around 24 million out of 1.2 BILLION that have a touchscreen!
Hell go to Best Buy, Staples, any B&M and actually count how many touchscreen desktops and laptops are there for sale VS how many that do NOT have touch, at my local wally world out of 27 units they had on display there was ONE that was touch, an HP iMac clone. desktops? Nope, Laptops? Nu uh.
And it is THIS that kills Win 8 like Raid kills bugs, you have a UI centered around touch yet fewer than 2% of the units in the world, both on sale now and that have been sold to date, actually have touch. And why the hell would the customer WANT touch, who wants fingerprints on their pretty new laptop? greasy smudges on their desktop screen? Tablets are treated like "cell phones that don't make calls" so nobody cares if they get Cheetos stains on their Android but they DO care if that nice new glossy laptop looks like shit!
So at the end of the day the math simply don't work. MSFT thought they could ram a UI down everyone's throats that wasn't designed for what it was running on and even the layman can take one look at win 8 and see the suck. Hell I'm "Mr Bleeding edge" and after a month of running the damned thing I wanted to gouge out my eyes with a spoon, and I KNOW all the keyboard shortcuts! Can you imagine what its like for the user that has spent over a decade learning everything by "clicky clicky" to use Win 8? Well wonder no more because here is video proof and it was THIS that I saw in my shop, only with more frustration and cursing than this sweet little old lady.
Riiiight, because nobody needs to type, email is a myth, and instead they'll all try to hold a screen with one hand and a BT keyboard with another. sigh,try to go without a PC today, just try. Hell one of the Apple loving pundits tried to go a month with just his iPad and iPhone...he failed and gave up after just 8 days because he said even with a BT keyboard it got to be too big a PITA to do anything.
Phones are good for instant on the spot info, what time does the movie start, how do I get to the place i'm going, tablets are good for media consumption and time wasters, but the SECOND you actually need to get anything done your ass better have a desktop or a laptop, or you are gonna be in a world of hurt.
I would give you a detailed reply, but I'm afraid tepples said everything better than i ever could. All I would add is here at the shop I see pretty much every kind of computer user and what you are describing isn't even 3% of the population, even the gamers I know don't run a bunch of heavy apps while gaming because the HDD quickly becomes the bottleneck. Heck I have a customer making his living designing insanely complex robotics in the latest version of Solidworks...is he on an Ivybridge? or maybe an Octocore Bulldozer? Nope he's running a Phenom I X3 I built him nearly 5 years ago and with the GPU taking the load on model rotation he is VERY happy with his performance.
Hell I often transcode WHILE gaming and even with that kind of load I don't peg out all 6 cores of my Thuban, and I paid a grand total of $110 for this chip a year ago, even a multitasker like me can't keep this chip fed for long, its just got more power than I can come up with tasks for it to do...don't mean i don't brag about having a 6 core though ;-)
Thank you, nice to see someone understands. I mean let's take myself as an example, I'm anything BUT typical, I'm a multitasking monster! I'll have a game going WHILE doing a transcode AND having a browser with my email accounts running in the background...yet i STILL can't peg out this 6 core AMD I paid just $110 for over a year ago!
But when you look at a typical user, what are they doing? ONE thing at a time, they are listening to music OR watching a video OR burning a disc, OR surfing, they aren't even pegging out the AMD triple cores I was selling 5 years ago, much less these quad, hexa, and octo monsters that are selling now.
So I still stand by my challenge, those that are saying "poo poo multitask needs more cores poo poo" to show me ANYTHING that your bog standard average user does on a daily basis that would peg out even those bottom of the line Phenom X3s i was selling 5 years ago, much less actually require an Octocore or an Ivy bridge CPU, because working in the shop six days a week i see folks from all walks of life, doctors and lawyers to retirees and kids, business men and housewives...hell I have a customer that is running the latest version of Solidworks on one of those Phenom I X3 units I sold 5 years ago and is HAPPY, very happy, with his performance!
The simple fact is once we switched from MHz to cores the users just couldn't come up with enough useful work to peg out these fire breathing monster chips, like I said they are using a funny car to pick up milk at the store. So even if software were to take a leap, which frankly we have seen ZERO indication of happening, they would still have more than enough power to cover it for several years. Like I said my dad is as close to the perfect example of a bog standard typical user and even with him having a Phenom I with the TLB bug clocked at just 2.2GHz he has yet to get over 45% CPU usage, and from the two week log I ran his average usage was running less than 25% which isn't even making the chip work, that's barely above idling. Hell for most of my customers when they are surfing the chips are in idle almost the entire time!
They just can't come up with the work to slam the chips and as you pointed out you certainly aren't gonna change how the user interacts with the PC, which is typically one program in front and the background tasks on the second core. Everything else is just overkill and bragging rights, even a 6 core owner like me will admit that.
That's funny, here we aren't seeing drive by Chrome installs but Jesus tap dancing Christ on a crutch if I see one more damned McCrappy Security Scan stuck on a customer's machine I'm gonna snap!
And since I don't get much OEM desktops (most folks here prefer my builds, since they get them crapware free and i make sure its upgrade-able) but I have noticed more chrome installs on the new Inspiron laptops that come through here.
That don't change the fact that its becoming damned hard around here to find anybody using IE anymore though, we have a couple of companies trapped on IE 6 thanks to the moron that built ActiveX intranet apps, but other than those even our SMBs are either using FF or one of the Chromium variants, usually chrome or since i started recommending it Comodo Dragon. But IE just seemed to die out, at least around here, around 3 years ago, one day it just stopped showing up for FF and then Chrome.
Look up "Xbox Next" in whatever search engine you prefer, do the same for Playstation 4. Those that have gotten early dev kits are saying its an AMD quad APU, whether its the one with the ARM DRM chip added is unclear. will MSFT add the PPC chip for backwards compatibility? Who knows, all i can tell you is what the scuttlebutt going around the campfire has been and from the looks of it Nvidia got left out in the cold, as AMD got ALL the GPUs for the new systems (The HD4650 for the Wii U, the APU for the XBN and PS4).
Anyway if the rumors are true, and as i said these rumors are coming from those inside game companies that have gotten early dev kits, both MSFT and Sony have gone with AMD for several reasons, to cut costs, as the single APU cuts down the amount of support chips you need, and for more importantly to allow them to have games easily ported to/from the PC, which Sony especially has had trouble with. With AAA titles costing nearly 100 million you want to make it damned easy to port to your console and since the games are being written on X86 workstations using an X86 chip makes sense, it also lets them use more COTS parts which will lower the BOM.
You can't prove a negative and it is up to the accuser to provide evidence of wrongdoing, end of story.
I'm sorry AC but you are wrong and here is why: You have users that are doing tasks suitable for a compact car yet they have a fire burning funny car as far as performance goes!
The simple fact is writing software that can truly take advantage of even just two cores is REALLY hard, and to write software that can truly take advantage of 4 or more cores without having serious issue with stalls is INSANELY hard. But AMD and Intel have kept on adding cores, 4 cores on the Intel and 8 on the AMD. Hell look at the Steam specs page, even though we can have AMD 6 cores for $105 and Intel quads for less than $200 we see the number 1 setup being....dual cores, why? Because most games don't need more because again the software just hasn't kept up.
Will we see somebody come up with a way to use all those cores? Probably, but until we have a fundamental shift in the way software is built you'll have users with funny cars driving to the grocery store. Hell if they switched to quad cores tomorrow that would cover damned near every customer I have had since the Phenom I, that was...what? Five years ago? We just have more power, more RAM, more graphics, and more storage space than we know what to do with now.
I don't see how anyone could see "the grey room" as anything but a living hell. No sound, no windows, no books, no nothing but a square grey box, and the worst part is the no concept of time, you would be spending centuries for all you know because there is no clocks and no light/night cycle to give you any clue.
Fuck that, sometimes the most merciful thing you can do is kill them, don't leave them trapped like that, hell we wouldn't do that to a dog, why would you to a person?
Funny enough that isn't far from the truth, although to be more accurate today it would probably be Chrome instead of Firefox. Working here at the shop I get to see pretty much all walks of life and within the last 5 years I have seen a pretty fundamental shift, whereas before it was only the geeky types that had an alternate browser now EVERYBODY has one, even the little old folks that don't like change.
Now I can't tell you why, maybe its the fact like morons they fragmented the hell out of the userbase and people didn't like that they couldn't run the same IE on both their new laptop and their old desktop, maybe its the UI changes that frankly suck, who knows, but I can tell you pretty much ONLY the SMBs use IE anymore around here and even many of them are moving away from IE.
This is why I don't get why the EU and others are having a fit over IE, its fucking dying already, what is the point of kicking it as it quivers and bleeds? it would be like having a shitfit over the blink tag in Netscape after AOHell bought it and run all the users off, seriously what is the point? IE is dying, the fat lady has not only sang she is down the street having a sammich, nobody uses that crap anymore unless they absolutely have to and even those are looking for an exit strategy. Let the damned thing just die in peace already, let it join WinME, Vista, and Win 8 on the fail pile and move on.
And I'm sure if the guy could communicate more than yes/no he would be saying "Kill me" over and over and over.
this to me is the truly scary part of technology, how they can make someone a "head in a box" for all intents and purposes and leave you going for years trapped in some grey nothing (that is what one girl who awakened from a coma described it as, a grey room with nothing, no sounds, no doors, just a grey room...trapped forever with no concept of time) with no way to escape...fuck that, put a bullet in my brain, smother me with a pillow, OD me on morphine, don't leave me trapped in some grey hell for eternity.
Sorry, my bad, I thought from the tone of the conversation you were going for a low power file server, which those bobcats kick serious ass at.
The Piledriver is a decent chip, I do hope you're looking at the dual socket Opteron for that kind of a load, IIRC they are up to like 16 cores per socket with the G34s, that will give you PLENTY of headroom.
BTW if you ever need a chip to fill out or upgrade a unit you ought to check out Starmicro as i've been buying from these guys for years and you can get some crazy deals on chips from them, it just all depends on what they have in that week.
Actually AMD is already making a chip with one ARM core and 4 X64 cores, although IIRC they added the ARM for DRM for the new Playstation console, MSFT may also be using it in the X720 or whatever they call it as well.
I'll get hate for saying this but NOW does everyone see why words like "viral" get applied to the GPL? Here they gave code they wrote to the Linux SCSI team which they used. They can take that same code and make a proprietary version all they want because THEY WROTE IT yet the are being accused of violating the GPL because they have a proprietary version of their own code?
It is THEIRS, they wrote it, they can do what they will and license it any damned way they want! The only thing they CAN'T DO is take the code they gave and force anyone to give it back, anyone can do what they want with that. But they can take the same code word for word and do anything they want with it because they are the authors and that is how copyright works!
But now you can see why companies would be leery of dealing with anything GPL, because crap like this really does make the GPL look viral.
Its not just inertia, its the fact that other than the "Star Trek rule" stinkers (WinME/Vista/8) most folks? they are quite happy with Windows. And why shouldn't they be? After SP 2 WinXP was good, in fact its still being used over a decade after release because many are happy with it, and Win 7 is a damned good, rock solid OS with several features that make your work easier, breadcrumbs, jumplists, and superfetch just to name a few, so why shouldn't people just stick with what they like? XP is still good until 2014, Win 7 is good until 2020, why try to fix what ain't broke?
But as somebody that sells PCs and has since Win 3.1 I am really getting tired of the pundits and their "Post PC" horseshit, they have NO clue as to what is REALLY happening on the ground and nobody is replacing their PCs for a fricking cellphone!
I'll be happy to tell you what IS happening and what IS reality is...my dad. My dad is the perfect example of what is called a "typical user" today, he surfs, chats, uses FB, burns DVD, runs his Quickbooks, watches videos, he is as typical as you can possible get of an average Windows PC user. So when the price dropped on the Phenom IIs I thought to myself "Well it has been a few years since I built that cheap AM2 Phenom quad for my dad, maybe its time to build him a new system" so I set his PC to log his usage for a couple of weeks, then I came back and looked at the data. What did I find? 45%, that is what I found. Now we are talking a Phenom I with the TLB bug and a max speed of 2.2Ghz and the MOST he stressed that quad is 45% and that turned out to be a hung browser tab.
So the PC and MSFT are NOT going away, but when AMD and Intel hit the thermal wall and decided to switch from the MHz war to the core war the chips they produced, hell even for the low end like the Athlon triples or the first gen Core based Pentiums on the laptops, are just sooooo damned powerful the users just aren't stressing them so they just ain't needing replaced nearly as often.
I predict we have less than 3 years before we see mobile, which TFA thinks is to blame (Protip: Its not) have the same damned thing happen to it that happened to X86. i mean look at what is going on, they've switched to the core wars over MHz wars, and just like with X86 you are seeing a race to the bottom with even the low end starting to sport 1.2Ghz dual cores. i predict this time next year you'll see Android 5 dual core 7 inch tablets for $50, 10 inch quads for around $150, and just like with X86 everybody that wants one will have multiple units and will find there isn't any point in upgrading. The only except will be Apple, but as I've said before what saves Apple from hard times is they are NOT a tech company that makes fashionable devices but a FASHION company that just happens to make tech devices. That is why the only items you see people line up and camp out for are Air Jordans and Apple products, using last year's iPhone is as unhip as wearing last year's Jordans.
So MSFT and Windows won't be going anywhere, they just have to accept that people aren't gonna toss machines every 3 years like they did during the MHz wars. Hell as a gamer i used to have to replace my machine every year and a half like clockwork, now I'm gaming on an AMD Hexacore that was released nearly 3 years ago and see ZERO reason to upgrade more than the GPU. Hell even my low end system for the past five years have been a minimum of a triple core with 4gb of RAM and 500gb HDDs, what is the average user gonna do to slam that chip? Not a damned thing, which is why they'll hang onto it for years, if it ain't broke....
Just Google "Loongson Dragon X86 license" and you'll find it quick enough, its an IP issue with the X86 instruction set that Dragon has to accellerate X86 on the MIPS chips. Since the Chinese government backed them for their military computers they don't care about IP issues, it "works for them" is all they care about, but it means the west can't get say an ARM chip that can run X86 because of IP issues.
A LITTLE expensive? I could build a whole damned AMD server rack for the cost of the damned chip alone! THIS is why its gonna royally suck if AMD goes under, intel has been pushing Ultrabooks and the ultra high end for awhile, the ONLY reason you have chips like the i3 and the Pentium is to keep AMD from owning everything below $1000. if AMD goes under they won't bother as it'll be their way or the highway.
Hell put ME in charge of the damned company, i'll right it in 3 or all they'll pay is my room and board, I'd right that ship so damned fast they'd be asking if I was the new Steve Jobs.
And yes BEFORE in the early alpha builds (if you look around the net you can grab a copy to try it yourself) there was a simple .reg entry that allowed you to switch between metro and a bog standard Windows desktop, not the crippled "desktop mode" horseshit, but an actual honest to god Win 7 desktop minus the Aero gloss, and old Snickerdouche found out the .reg file was quickly being passed around so not only did he kill the reg entry, he even gutted the original desktop code so the ONLY thing you could get was that crippled half ass "desktop mode!
But most people don't know there IS a way to get an actual usable desktop in Win 8, in fact in Jan when I pick up my copy so I can learn how to deal with the Win 8 fuckups its the FIRST damned thing i'm gonna do to it! It costs $30 but its the best damned 430 you ever spent, its called AstonShell and it will give you the "look and feel" of damned near ANY WIMP UI that has ever been made, from Win9X-Win 7 on the MSFT side, hell even KDE or gnome or OSX if that melts your butter. They have a 30 day free trial so you can download the trial version of Win 8 and slap it on to see for yourself, but its a HELL of a lot nicer than that damned "LOL I Iz A Cellphone LOL" UI that is win 8.
In the end you're right though, you can't stick a damned marketing drone at the head of an engineering company, it just doesn't work. As I said with the bulldozer sticks what works great on one device does not automatically mean it'll work great on another completely unrelated device, and that is Win 8 in a nutshell, bolting a Caterpillar stick onto a car and calling you a Luddite when you point out it wasn't as good as what you had. I'm all for updating the WIMP UI but to make it better, not gut it. More visual feedback to the user for example, maybe even design keyboards with an actual knob like on digital audio workstations so the user could have actual tactical feedback when performing actions.
Finally office shows the same damned arrogance Snickerdouche showed during his reign, let the USER choose which is best! While I personally don't mind the ribbon (because i just killed the damned thing and made my own customization to the minibar to have what I use most in the same spot for muscle memory) I can see that with users that have never used office the ribbon is a lot more hand holding.,....that's nice for the NEW users, but what about those that have spent fricking decades giving their money to MSFT and have the muscle memory down cold? In the height of arrogance they fucked them over to give new users a simpler UI. If they would have simply allowed a simple switch, even buried in the options, that could be controlled by GPO so that old hats could have the classic UI while the newbies got the ribbon not a single thing would have been said.
But in the end that is why Ballmer has to go, its arrogance. To use a /. car analogy he sees Ferrari keeps selling so he slaps a ripoff of the Ferrari front end to a Ford along with a $100k price tag and is amazed, amazed i tell you, that nobody wants his $100k Ford. Apple is a completely different market, with users that wouldn't take MSFT anything on a bet, so by forcing Windows to be an ersatz iOS all he is doing is keeping his customers from buying his product while the Apple customers laugh at them as they buy their iPad. But instead of paying attention and listening to his customers he fragments the fuck out of his userbase for no damned good reason, IE, DX, burns customers with dumb moves like killing Windows messenger for Skype (You watch, numbers of users switching to yahoo or Google is gonna jump when that dumbshit happens) and is shocked that the stock tanks.
hell even their mobile division is savable, they have one of the most powerf
Actually they DO innovate AC, you're just not allowed to have any of their innovative designs thanks to the IP minefield that is the USA. Look up the Loongson Dragon chips, here you have a MIPS chip with hardware accelerated X86 which is currently at around 75% native speed. Now imagine what all those ARM devices would be like if you could run any X86 programs on it, thanks to hardware emulation of X86? be pretty sweet huh?
but sadly you can't have it as Intel won't license X86 under FRAND so its only for Asia, they can't sell them in the west. i have a feeling as our minefield gets worse so too will we see more cool things that can't be sold here for fear of being sued out of existence.`
Then you haven't tried them lately AC, I've been using AMD cards exclusively since they got rid of tying the software to .NET and I have to say its rock solid stable and works great. Not only do I sell them in my shop but I put my family, me, my two boys, and my GF, all on AMD graphics, and not a single hiccup or bug, it all "just works".
Of course if you download the beta drivers for ANY chip you should expect bugs, that is why they are beta, but if you stick to the WHQL releases you'll find they are nice, have all the features you'd want, and are solid. The "ATI drivers SUCK BALLS!" rep came from ATI tying the damned thing to .NET which was frankly buggy as fuck in the 1.0-2.0 days, as all MSFT software is on first release, and since the CCC was tied into .NET anything went wrong with .NET fucked up your driver. That hasn't been the case for a few years now and you can tell, its all smooth and easy peasy.