Well I had already heard of the Intel stuff, i had hopes that this wasn't tied to a single chip and certain chipsets since I've been AMD exclusive in the shop for a few years now. Thanks anyway but this just isn't something me or my customers can use. its just a shame nobody makes something CPU and preferably OS agnostic, something like what Seagate has done with hybrids only with you being able to choose the size of your SSD, as i wouldn't mind something similar to the hybrid only with say 20Gb-40Gb of caching SSD.
Because a completely UNPATCHED Linux is magically better, yes?
The problem is that YOU CANNOT UPDATE because of naturally the incredible amount of red tape and testing that MUST be done on a machine on which lives depend. It wouldn't matter if it was running Windows, BSD, or Linux as there would be ZERO PATCHES applied to the machine for most if not all of its life.
That is why frankly all machines of that type need to be running a custom built RTOS with as little OS as possible, preferably just enough to do the function. Now if you want to build that out of Linux, BSD, Windows, or even OS/2? Really makes no difference to me, whatever floats your boat. but since it will never get updated you damned well better make it as thin, stripped down and light as possible.
In the end this is exactly the kind of job that Windows and Linux embedded should be used for, but because its cheaper to just slap a copy of Windows Embedded with everything left at default instead of actually thinking about what the program actually needs to function and stripping out the rest you get dumbshit moves where things like PCs controlling respirators have a fricking web browser.
While that is certainly true, i'd add that back then there simply weren't that many manufacturers for chips and caps so you didn't get really chip shitty dodgy parts like you do today. back then the boards were thick, traces thick, caps were made by a few companies for primarily industrial uses so were built tough, there just wasn't tons of truly cheap shitty parts to build something like that out of.
This is why I'd argue that its easier, when comparing number existing VS number made of course, that its more likely that old VIC or Atari VCS will work well VS say your average PC from 1994 or the first Playstations, because by that time it was a LOT easier to cut corners by using cheap chips than it was in the late 1970s. There is a good reason why a lot of today's stuff is called 'designed for the dump" and that is because the parts are so thin and cheap that you can practically look at it funny and kill the damned thing whereas i can't even count how many times i knocked my old VIC off my desktop into the floor and it was still working when it disappeared during my last move 5 years ago.
Finally i have to wonder whether we'll have anything THAT old still working 36 years from now thanks to the new solder and tin whiskers. I have an engineering buddy and you want to hear an all day rant just bring up the new solder, he says he can't count the number of times he's opened up something fairly new that failed and couldn't trace it back to the new solder. So while I wouldn't be surprised if you'll be able to find PCs from the 70s and 80s still running i have to wonder if we'll see anything from our current era or will it all be in the dump.
Because so far nobody has been able to do shit about the crazy failure rates when it comes to SSDs and as they all become MLC and continue to have process shrinks those numbers are simply gonna get worse?
And before anybody posts that Google study please don't bother, I'd argue what Google sees is pretty fucking far from what a normal person sees when it comes to use. And what I've seen is unless you drop the things HDDs generally (not 100%, but I'd say 85%+) give you some warning before they shit themselves and die, usually enough to get your data off. that has NOT been my experience with SSDs, which just die. No warning, no errors to give you a heads up, no SMART, just flip the switch and all your stuff is gone.
That is why I tell my customers IF you are only using the SSD for the OS AND you have pretty damned regular backups of said OS? Then please go for an SSD. the nice thing about the hybrids is the entire SSD portion can die tomorrow and you STILL have a fully functional drive with NO lost data, as everything on the SSD is also backed up to the HDD. But until they can fix the problem with the crazy failure rate, which i bet is gonna get a hell of a lot worse as the chips keep shrinking, then its gonna be a gamble that I bet a lot of people after their first failure won't make again.
The numbers I'd really like to see is how many that switched to SSDs had a failure of the drive and how many chose to stay with SSDs after the failure. Because I bet a lot of people weren't too happy the first time they got told "All your stuff is gone" and i'd love to see how many preferred to continue the risk after failure.
It is NOT a good idea and here is why: because the suits at AMD never bothered to pick up the damned phone and call MSFT you have a situation where AMD's newest chip will ONLY run decently on Windows 8 and probably won't run WELL until Windows 9, 5 years from now. Which of course by then the chip will look like a Pentium D.
You see for this idea to actually work Windows has to recognize the BD for what it is and schedule the chips completely different to the way its scheduled chips on EVERY SINGLE CHIP ever made. its the same way that you can't run Hyperthreading on Windows like Win98 because it didn't understand WTF to do with hyperthreading. MSFT has released a patch but even they have admitted it'll be Win 8 at the earliest before the scheduler is even fixed, which means it won't ACTUALLY be fixed or optimized fully until Win 9, as we have seen MSFT is stuck in the "One shitty one good" Star Trek formula.
So you see friend, when you have the most popular OS that runs on your chip, that is on over 90% of X86 desktops and laptops AND of which nearly 70% are running previous versions making a chip that runs like it has a boat anchor tied to it unless you go buy a new version in Oct that is so far looking to be the next MS Bob is a BAD IDEA. It is an insanely bad idea, hell even netburst wasn't that stupid of an idea as at least you could run current Windows on it. as it is if you have XP, Vista, or Win 7 then bulldozer is faildozer and there isn't a damned thing you can do about it because MSFT has already said WON'T FIX. The best you get is a half assed patch that only added about 6% to the already piss poor numbers. Hell Thuban drinks Faildozer's milkshake on any of the above OSes damned near across the board!
So i'm sorry friend, if AMD were writing their own OS and selling it along with faildozer, like say Apple? THEN they could do this. But since they are at the mercy of MSFT and didn't even bother to give anyone at Redmond the heads up as to what they are planning Faildozer is screwed, on win 7 (which looks to be the next XP) even the Intel duals stomp all over it unless you OC the living shit out of it. its just not a good design when you can't get it to work without a low level OS rewrite when you don't control the OS.
Plus I'm sure even Seagate knows its product is designed for a very small niche, those that want SOME of the speed of the SSD but is NOT willing to give up the larger storage space of the spinning rust drives.
So I really don't see Seagate crying very much over a niche product that is experiencing positive growth without really costing them any significant R&D.
BTW if anybody has an article on these 'small caching SSDs for desktops" I'd sure like to read it. I've heard of small drives being used for servers, where it is basically just being used to bootstrap the OS into RAM, but I haven't seen anything about using small SSDs as caching drives on desktops. hell does Win 7 even properly support something like that, or is it just being used like Readyboost? Like i said if you have a link I'd sure like to read it, I've still got 3 SATA II slots free on my PC, wouldn't mind a cheap speed boost.
Compare the highest performing ARM and its IPC to a C2D, much less a C2Q, and you'll see its no contest, the smartphones are really much farther than a decade behind.
The same thing that has made X86 slow down in sales of laptops and desktops, the fact that X86 went past good enough into ludicrous speed, could give Intel a hell of a chunk of the market. lets face it, folks have gotten spoiled. They are so used to having laptops and desktops that do amazing things, that play HD video without a stutter, run a dozen programs at a time without skipping a beat, hell even the bottom o' the line Intel and AMD chips of today are so insanely overpowered that most users simply can't keep them fed with enough work to max them out.
The simple fact is that the best ARM chips can't get anywhere near the IPC of a 7 year old C2 or Athlon X2 and on Intel's FIRST TRY they got 30% higher performance while getting right in the middle of the pack when it comes to ARM power usage. Considering that isn't even on the latest process that is pretty damned impressive for a first try. You mark my words the way Intel is going it won't be but a couple of tick tocks until they have the Atom at 12nm, with probably equal or better than C2D or even C2Q performance and with equal or better battery life than the ARM. I don't care where you sit on the argument that's pretty damned exciting in MY book.
I don't think you need a term like de-evolution which a much more classical term applies MUCH better, and that is good old fashioned fascism. As we know fascism can take two main forms, where the corporate controls the state and where the state controls the corporate, but in the end its two sides of the same coin. In the end we get what we are seeing all over the planet, where a few men in the halls of power use their ever growing power of force to ensure their power never decreases by keeping those nasty peasants in a state of fear and closely monitored for "subversive behavior".
I would say its the Arab Springs that caused it but I think its been going on longer than that, its just the Arab Springs made them drop all pretense of being subtle. Now that they have seen that the "rabble" can actually cause men who have wielded power for decades to be brought before the courts or even killed I think we will be seeing the "kid gloves" come off more and more as those power mongers fight to keep what they consider divinely given, their absolute right to rule. Frankly I have a feeling things will be especially nasty here in the USA as the corps and govt have been in bed for quite awhile and the MSM gives the corp/gov hybrid a propaganda machine that would make old Joe Stalin green with envy. Just look at how quickly they were able to turn the conversation into "Assange is a rapist arrogant dirtball" from "Hey WTF HAS our government been doing?". I have a feeling if Watgergate happened today Woodward and Bernstein would join Deep Throat in Gitmo while the press talked about how wonderful Nixon was.
Which is why these patents scare the fuck out of me. Am I the only one that is more than a little worried that these GMOs are basically handing over control of the food supply to a single corporation? its bad enough when patents stifle innovations but we are talking about the fricking food supply folks, its not like you can just eat dirt. Since its already been proven that GMOs can contaminate nearby crops this lets them have a nice racket, where you either pay them to use their "product" or your field gets contaminated by theirs...and you pay them MORE. Does anybody else find that more than a little fucking disturbing? I mean if I dump shit in my neighbor's yard I can't force them to pay me for the privilege, so why can Monsanto do the same thing by patenting the shit?
Finally a little weird possibly but...does anyone else look at the nasty shit Monsanto pulls and gets reminded of that scene in "Damien: Omen II" where the head of genetics at Thorn is bragging about how with control of the food supply thanks to GMOs they can pretty much call the shots? Not saying Monsanto is the debil but the way they've got GMOs rolling it does strike me that they are climbing past Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, and Blackwater on the "Holy shit, that's fucked up" scale of corporate nastiness. I mean its pretty bad when a lot of your current gameplan seems like its nicked from a movie about the rise of the fricking antichrist.
No offense, but Linux and hardware acceleration? NOT the best of friends, in fact the only one I've seen do it consistently is Nvidia and that is only with proprietary drivers which rumor has it guts a lot of the graphics subsystem and replaces it with their own. This is why I prefer AMD on netbooks, because OOTB with Win 7 I could not only have every major format, including flash and DivX in full 1080p over HDMI, but I could do so while getting nearly 6 hours on the battery.
But the new Intel chip already beats ARM by 30% on their very first try, and while they haven't been good for gaming intel HAS been improving their HD decoder pretty steadily and quickly. Give Intel a couple of tick tocks and I have a feeling it won't be a contest. Again this comes down to money, Intel can afford to work out the bugs on the new shrinks quicker and they can afford insane amounts of R&D that frankly nobody else can. they can leverage their practically total control of X86 and pour some of that vast warchest into these new chips whereas nobody doing ARM, hell i doubt even Apple, will be willing to sink the kind of R&D that Intel is gonna be doing.
In any case the one I see winning is the consumer, because just as we saw with X86 when there is competition the products get better and cheaper.
Not to mention that might be a valid argument IF...Intel and AMD weren't already building GPUs into their chips, but they are. And in both cases the power draw has been dropping steadily while the IPC has been going up and up. Hell I get anywhere from 6 to 7 hours on my E350 and that's playing 720p video the entire time, if I'm only surfing and watching the occasional YouTube video, which is hardware accelerated BTW? that time goes up. And of course the Intel Atoms are getting more advanced on the GPU side every day, it won't be long at all before it surpasses the Radeon GPUs that AMD uses in their Bobcats.
In the end it all comes down to IPC where Intel has been stomping for half a decade. look at the benches i posted and see that on their FIRST TRY they got 30% higher performance for the SAME POWER DRAW which is just unreal. Now imagine...what do you think will happen after a couple of Intel's tick tocks? it won't even be a contest.
Everybody seems to be forgetting something though, people are pushing the ever loving crap out of these devices and IPC has been Intel's ball park for quite the long time. People want bigger games, higher def, better sound, the mobile is quickly becoming like the PC where it'll do damned near any job you can think of and that comes down to IPC. Don't get me wrong, ARM is a nice chip design, but if you've looked at the benches Intel is ALREADY getting 30% more out of their chip for the same watts as the ARM chips and this is only their first attempt. Now imagine what they are gonna be able to do with a couple of tick tocks and a couple of shrinks. It'll be like having a Core2 in your pocket, really cool to think about all you'll be able to do.
People may not give a crap what CPU is in their phone but they WILL give a crap that Bob's phone does more cool stuff than theirs does. Also don't forget that with a 30% performance lead they can probably emulate ARM no problem, especially if they put a little hardware emulation on chip, while ARM can't emulate X86 without slowing to a crawl.
You and the other poster seem to be forgetting ONE thing, which is nobody gives a shit how low the power draw is if it can't do what they want and what people WANT is MOAR, MOAR HD, MOAR games with MOAR graphics, MOAR MOAR MOAR.
We must have a LOT of puppies using AC accounts here now, because they sure don't remember their history. this is the EXACT SAME THING we went through on X86, with people happy for years with weak ass chips and then suddenly everybody wanted sound, then they wanted games, then video, then HD video, just one after another. people now want to be able to do a hell of a lot more than just email with their mobile devices, they want to watch videos, play the latest games, use it as a PMP, and ALL of that takes MOAR POWER.
ARM isn't "magical" and its been needing more and more extras like HD decoder chips to share the load because it simply can't get enough IPC to do the job on its own. That problem is only gonna get worse, as screens get bigger and HD, games get more complex and have better graphics, and the same fact is when it comes to doing all those tasks Intel can simply stomp ARM when it comes to IPC.
So i have NO doubt ARM is gonna run into a wall, just as X86 ran into the heat barrier at 4GHz only with ARM it'll probably be the "too many cores" problem. We are already seeing 4 and 5 core ARM chips, trying to squeeze more performance out of the chip, but you can only go so far that way. The simple fact is the amount of IPC one gets on even the lowest end Atom now is truly insane compared to ARM. Look at the benches and you'll see the Atom for smartphones does a hell of a lot more for equal or less power than ARM. And remember this is just their first try, imagine what they will have after a couple of shrinks and a refresh?
Did you miss the memo? Even Forbes pointed out what a piss poor CEO Ballmer is. Just look at the money he flushed down the crapper on Zune and kin, his idea of "leadership" is to buy something "kinda sorta" similar to something that was hip and then flush MORE cash flopping it around before giving up and letting it die.
Lets face it, other than the X360 (which nobody is even sure if they have made back all the cash they've blown and are really into the black on it, as you'd have to figure in the cash blown on XBox 1 and the 2 billion RROD fiasco) and Win 7 which if the rumors are true was basically left alone by Ballmer while he was busy with kin, Zune, and trying to buy yahoo the man's track record just stinks. Hell you could probably have a monkey throw shit at a stock page and end up with a better ROI than what the Ballminator has done with a decade at the fricking company. if it wasn't for the cash cows of Windows X86 and Office they'd be half dead already and it looks like Ballmer is taking a dump on one of those sacred cows because nobody wants a WinPhone and he won't rest until MSFT has put out a piss poor knockoff of every single thing Apple has done.
So the fact he's gonna blow another billion on a company he won't know fuck all what to do with? really doesn't surprise me at this point. I'd have to say he's giving the Pepsi guy at Apple a serious run for his money in the "Hey lets take a successful company and torpedo it!" dept. Seriously board how much damned longer are you gonna let that moron wipe his ass with money? hell does he even HAVE a strategy? Or is he like Dilbert's PHB merely playing buzzword bingo?
But that is like saying "Linux beats Windows if you count routers' which is probably true, except in both cases you are talking about tiny low margin embedded that while might be good from a numbers game frankly isn't a market one should be chasing. Its like how Apple doesn't make any of the low rent stuff yet is the richest company last i checked, you get that way by getting the good profit markets, not the low end crap ones.
In the end what will probably matter the most is money and despite the bigger numbers for embedded ARM Intel has it and ARM don't. Money gets you fabs, money gets you R&D, and frankly with the amount of both Intel has it can simply win by continuing on the current path. Both the CULV chips and the Atoms are dropping every rev, the IPC Intel has been getting with each new chip is just insane, and everyone wants their mobile devices to do ever more stuff, all of that plays straight into Intel's hands.
So I wouldn't be counting them chickens because after all ARM could keep every router and PMP on the planet and STILL lose, because if Intel can deliver sub 5w chips that can do HD video and play games and do all the other things folks want to do? I seriously doubt it'll be hard for them to sell it to the masses. Hell most folks don't even know what ARM is but they have sure seen plenty of "bong bong ba bong" Intel inside commercials.
Sadly no as that is just the desktop "app" (man I fucking HATE that word now) which you can see by the lack of a start button, From now on, whether you want it or not, Metro is gonna be running in the background sucking cycles whether you use it or not. Lets face it win 8 is a "supergigantic smartphone OS" which just confuses the crap out of regular users so while changing the colors of the "desktop app" isn't a big deal overall i'd say Win 8 IS a big deal, which is why other than any Win 8 units brought in for me to work on i'm sitting this one out, its just not a good OS and after Win 7 is a huge downgrade..
While this is true frankly its only been fairly recently that either AMD or Intel gave a crap about power, and look at how far they've come? Intel has gotten Atoms to less than 3w, AMD has gotten dual cores AND a decent GPU down to 9w in the C Series bobcats, and of course the Intel CULV Core chips can do a scary amount of processing on I believe their latest are sub 10w. Now according to ARM their A9 duals are just a hair under 2w. that of course isn't counting the chips like the hardware decoders typically found with ARM because it just can't do as many IPCs as X86.
So I'd say as folks demand more and more performance out of their mobile devices the advantage will probably swing to Intel.Tthey have the fabs and have been able to shrink quicker than anybody else so 1 or 2 more shrinks and its gonna be pretty damned close and with such a huge IPC difference between X86 and ARM in a damned close race I'm sure many would rather have the faster Intel chip, AMD will most likely be stuck at the niche they are now, at least as long as they stick with the faildozer "half a core" design so that just leaves Intel and ARM and with the money, the fabs, and the R&D budget that Intel has i think it'd be crazy to call it for ARM at this stage of the game.
After all it wasn't too long ago that everyone was making netburst space heater jokes and look how quickly that situation changed. I seriously doubt Intel is gonna sit this one out and when looking at their past record there is no reason to think they can't make a chip that'll compete.
Lucky bastard, some of us have elderly family here and can't go, not to mention my oldest is studying to be a doctor and I have a feeling if the crap hits the fan he'll be another Che Guevara as he is a big champion of the poor and seems to have natural leadership abilities.
I'm just glad we have plenty of relatives living in the country with good farm land and hunting weapons because as my late grandma taught me about the great depression when the crap hits the fan having a steady source of food is probably the best thing you can have. Fucking sad that we even have to speak of such things but more and more it smells to me like an old friend told me about those last years in Saigon, how outward signs were all "Everything is gonna be fine!" while those with money and power were quietly cashing out and slinking away. I wish i had the link but something like 18% of the fortune 100 top money earners have quietly cashed out and done as you did, it makes me think they know the real numbers and don't want to be here when it all falls down.
Have YOU ever taught anyone who has NEVER used a PC? because unless you are seriously arguing that the target market for Windows 8 is Martians its gonna be pretty fucking difficult to find someone who has NEVER seen or touched a PC in their lives. Maybe MSFT wants to get the under 4 market, is that what you are suggesting?
Hell your post just proves my point, that anybody who has ever used a PC will NOT WANT Windows 8 because it is NOTHING like anything that came before it. Change simply for change sake is NEVER a reason to change there should always be advantages to that change and frankly? Not seeing it. And more importantly neither are my customers which i judge a hell of a lot better barometer than this mythical person with money that has never owned or touched a computer. Click on that link if you dare, see for yourself. its become a bit of a meme to stick ordinary folks in front of Win 8 because it is so NOT discoverable it makes for the funny when ordinary users encounter it.
When your OS gets used for the geek version of "Punked" you know you're in trouble. I state it again, its not a good design, its really not. the sad part is as they were pointing out on LHB the Windows 8 Defenders are now using the crazy FOSSie lingo as excuses. You'll see "You don't need that", "Use esoteric workarounds", "our way is better", its the same shit we got from the koolaid drinkers when ubuntu went unity, the same excuses, the same ignoring of users, SSDD.
We'll see come Oct, but I'm betting those that short MSFT stock are gonna make a pretty penny as i think its gonna faceplant right out of the gate. I've slapped everyone from tweeners to LOL in front of Win 8 and have yet to find a demographic that likes it. Frankly I've NEVER had that happen before, even Vista had those that preferred it over XP, but I haven't found a single person yet that would trade XP/Vista/7 for the new OS at the shop friend, not a single one.
Those are nice but a little on the expensive side since we ARE talking about little kids its probably better to go cheap. The Acer Expresso is an Atom Dual core for $220 new or you can get the refurb from the Best Buy outlet for something like $160 and from what I understand the *Buntu builds have had OOTB support since 12.04 so shouldn't be an issue. Personally I like the Fusion APU version, its a little more expensive at $270 new or $220 refurb but since AMD opened up the specs its been supported OOTB since V 10.10, at least according to Phoronix. They also used to sell it with ubuntu as a choice (don't know if they still do or not) so he may be able to get one preloaded and just add the Edubuntu packages.
Not to mention there is another BIG problem. As i'm sure some have read the ONLY chance faildozer has with keeping up with Intel is to OC the crap out of them but as we saw with llano OCing tying more components into the chips limits the OCing thus making the AMD chips a worse value. the last bench i saw had them struggling to get a few bumps in speed with the APU but in some of the Faildozer CPUs they managed to get over 1GHz on air thus making the performance closer to the Intel chips.
So i wouldn't be surprised if this weak ARM chip killed any chance of OCing which has frankly been a lot of what has been keeping AMD in the game. What AMD needs to do is hire some good engineers, milk faildozer while they come up with a new design that will hopefully if not put them on top at least get them back in the game. Other than as a console chip i can't see TFA lighting any fires under those of us who bought AMD to buy again.
You are most welcome. Since i have a 24/7 net connection i just tried it again, latest version of Steam and all my games are updated, and after it timed out (about 15 seconds) up popped the "Do you wish to play in Offline Mode?" box so i can confirm that it does work, at least on Win 7 HP X64 with the latest version.
I couldn't play TF2 of course, i could probably do the practice mode but i fired up fear 3 (got it for $8 on the midweek madness sale but don't bother as they RUINED the game, damned weapons SUCK) along with HL2 just to make sure and they both loaded and ran fine.
If you DO have any problems though be sure to open a support ticket, i did when i had some glitches last year during the big Xmas sale and they contacted me right away about the glitch i was having, even did a follow up to make sure the fix worked. It turned out some of the DLC I bought was having trouble with the regular Steam client but they fixed it in the beta and had me upgrade until the next release, worked like a charm. Gotta give Valve credit, they were fast and very responsive which considering they were in the middle of a massive sale was all the more impressive.
I'm sorry but you are wrong as i had an old B&W G3 sitting up there at the shop for awhile for people who had never touched OSX to play with and they did just fine, it was VERY easily discovered and laid out pretty intuitive. if you click on the video i linked to above you'll see towards the bottom a guy that did that very test with his dad who had never run anything but XP, he had him try OSX and Win 8 and while he had NO trouble figuring out how to do basic tasks like go to the web or watch a video on OSX he had no luck at all on Win 8.
Its just not a good design friend. i have been able to say nice things about every MSFT OS since Win2K, even Vista which i ultimately didn't care for. For example while i ultimately gave up on Vista because of bugs I can say that it had better memory management than XP X64, it had better 64 bit support, its UI was nice (in fact i still use a Vista Black theme on win 7, I was never into Aero see through) and its user account was MUCH better than XP which was hell to run as a user instead of admin except on the X64 which of course was really 2K3 Workstation.
Frankly the only nice thing I can say about Win 8 is "it might be nice on a cell phone or tablet" because i honestly can't find any advantages to running it on a non touch device, i really can't. hell if you wanted that tweeting twitting 24/7 social crap you can get that now with Win 7 gadgets, so even that isn't a selling point. more than anything it reminds me of MS Bob, where if you don't know what the designer was trying to convey frankly you are lost, its just not discoverable. And as far as first run? Most OEMs replace that with their own startup so even if they include one I doubt many will see it, just as my oldest didn't see the Win 7 first run but the "welcome to HP" setup instead.
Who? The EU? Because sadly it won't be the USA as our DoJ seems to be toothless now. Hell after they didn't say shit about Intel using the "cripple code" to screw over AMD in benchmarks AND cut the throat of the competition by denying Nvidia access to the QPI and thus causing them to give up on the chipset business frankly if the MSFT antitrust trial were to be done over today they'd not only rule in favor of MSFT they'd probably pay their lawyer fees while they were at it!
I think though that the poster below is right, this smells more like a console chip than a general purpose CPU, but since AMD doesn't have the money to do "one off' designs they are probably hoping to make a little extra scratch by selling it as a poor man's TPM for budget tablets and laptops. After all one of the first things that gets cut from the budget builds are TPM units so that leaves AMD out in the cold. if they can make money off of it as a console chip and sell excess chips as poor man's bit locker support I say go for it, I just won't be buying any personally as i have no use for TPM and i sure as hell don't want extra DRM, thanks anyway AMD.
Exactly because even on the low end AMD APUs frankly you have some truly insane power at your command. Here is a video of someone playing L4D II on an E350 netbook and that is about the weakest chip AMD still has in production.
So with the amount of insane power the CPUs and GPU provides there really isn't a reason for an on-chip really wimpy ARM except for DRM, where you don't want the user accessing the code which they could on a general purpose chip. this is why I hate this announcement as we had all hoped AMD was gonna do something cool with ARM, personally I had hopes they were gonna somehow integrate a dual core A9 or something so that you could put the X86 to sleep when not needing all that power but with a chip like the A5 the only real use i can think of is to keep the user at bay for DRM. Yay AMD, way to make those of us that have been loyal feel like crap.
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Well I had already heard of the Intel stuff, i had hopes that this wasn't tied to a single chip and certain chipsets since I've been AMD exclusive in the shop for a few years now. Thanks anyway but this just isn't something me or my customers can use. its just a shame nobody makes something CPU and preferably OS agnostic, something like what Seagate has done with hybrids only with you being able to choose the size of your SSD, as i wouldn't mind something similar to the hybrid only with say 20Gb-40Gb of caching SSD.
Because a completely UNPATCHED Linux is magically better, yes?
The problem is that YOU CANNOT UPDATE because of naturally the incredible amount of red tape and testing that MUST be done on a machine on which lives depend. It wouldn't matter if it was running Windows, BSD, or Linux as there would be ZERO PATCHES applied to the machine for most if not all of its life.
That is why frankly all machines of that type need to be running a custom built RTOS with as little OS as possible, preferably just enough to do the function. Now if you want to build that out of Linux, BSD, Windows, or even OS/2? Really makes no difference to me, whatever floats your boat. but since it will never get updated you damned well better make it as thin, stripped down and light as possible.
In the end this is exactly the kind of job that Windows and Linux embedded should be used for, but because its cheaper to just slap a copy of Windows Embedded with everything left at default instead of actually thinking about what the program actually needs to function and stripping out the rest you get dumbshit moves where things like PCs controlling respirators have a fricking web browser.
While that is certainly true, i'd add that back then there simply weren't that many manufacturers for chips and caps so you didn't get really chip shitty dodgy parts like you do today. back then the boards were thick, traces thick, caps were made by a few companies for primarily industrial uses so were built tough, there just wasn't tons of truly cheap shitty parts to build something like that out of.
This is why I'd argue that its easier, when comparing number existing VS number made of course, that its more likely that old VIC or Atari VCS will work well VS say your average PC from 1994 or the first Playstations, because by that time it was a LOT easier to cut corners by using cheap chips than it was in the late 1970s. There is a good reason why a lot of today's stuff is called 'designed for the dump" and that is because the parts are so thin and cheap that you can practically look at it funny and kill the damned thing whereas i can't even count how many times i knocked my old VIC off my desktop into the floor and it was still working when it disappeared during my last move 5 years ago.
Finally i have to wonder whether we'll have anything THAT old still working 36 years from now thanks to the new solder and tin whiskers. I have an engineering buddy and you want to hear an all day rant just bring up the new solder, he says he can't count the number of times he's opened up something fairly new that failed and couldn't trace it back to the new solder. So while I wouldn't be surprised if you'll be able to find PCs from the 70s and 80s still running i have to wonder if we'll see anything from our current era or will it all be in the dump.
Because so far nobody has been able to do shit about the crazy failure rates when it comes to SSDs and as they all become MLC and continue to have process shrinks those numbers are simply gonna get worse?
And before anybody posts that Google study please don't bother, I'd argue what Google sees is pretty fucking far from what a normal person sees when it comes to use. And what I've seen is unless you drop the things HDDs generally (not 100%, but I'd say 85%+) give you some warning before they shit themselves and die, usually enough to get your data off. that has NOT been my experience with SSDs, which just die. No warning, no errors to give you a heads up, no SMART, just flip the switch and all your stuff is gone.
That is why I tell my customers IF you are only using the SSD for the OS AND you have pretty damned regular backups of said OS? Then please go for an SSD. the nice thing about the hybrids is the entire SSD portion can die tomorrow and you STILL have a fully functional drive with NO lost data, as everything on the SSD is also backed up to the HDD. But until they can fix the problem with the crazy failure rate, which i bet is gonna get a hell of a lot worse as the chips keep shrinking, then its gonna be a gamble that I bet a lot of people after their first failure won't make again.
The numbers I'd really like to see is how many that switched to SSDs had a failure of the drive and how many chose to stay with SSDs after the failure. Because I bet a lot of people weren't too happy the first time they got told "All your stuff is gone" and i'd love to see how many preferred to continue the risk after failure.
It is NOT a good idea and here is why: because the suits at AMD never bothered to pick up the damned phone and call MSFT you have a situation where AMD's newest chip will ONLY run decently on Windows 8 and probably won't run WELL until Windows 9, 5 years from now. Which of course by then the chip will look like a Pentium D.
You see for this idea to actually work Windows has to recognize the BD for what it is and schedule the chips completely different to the way its scheduled chips on EVERY SINGLE CHIP ever made. its the same way that you can't run Hyperthreading on Windows like Win98 because it didn't understand WTF to do with hyperthreading. MSFT has released a patch but even they have admitted it'll be Win 8 at the earliest before the scheduler is even fixed, which means it won't ACTUALLY be fixed or optimized fully until Win 9, as we have seen MSFT is stuck in the "One shitty one good" Star Trek formula.
So you see friend, when you have the most popular OS that runs on your chip, that is on over 90% of X86 desktops and laptops AND of which nearly 70% are running previous versions making a chip that runs like it has a boat anchor tied to it unless you go buy a new version in Oct that is so far looking to be the next MS Bob is a BAD IDEA. It is an insanely bad idea, hell even netburst wasn't that stupid of an idea as at least you could run current Windows on it. as it is if you have XP, Vista, or Win 7 then bulldozer is faildozer and there isn't a damned thing you can do about it because MSFT has already said WON'T FIX. The best you get is a half assed patch that only added about 6% to the already piss poor numbers. Hell Thuban drinks Faildozer's milkshake on any of the above OSes damned near across the board!
So i'm sorry friend, if AMD were writing their own OS and selling it along with faildozer, like say Apple? THEN they could do this. But since they are at the mercy of MSFT and didn't even bother to give anyone at Redmond the heads up as to what they are planning Faildozer is screwed, on win 7 (which looks to be the next XP) even the Intel duals stomp all over it unless you OC the living shit out of it. its just not a good design when you can't get it to work without a low level OS rewrite when you don't control the OS.
Plus I'm sure even Seagate knows its product is designed for a very small niche, those that want SOME of the speed of the SSD but is NOT willing to give up the larger storage space of the spinning rust drives.
So I really don't see Seagate crying very much over a niche product that is experiencing positive growth without really costing them any significant R&D.
BTW if anybody has an article on these 'small caching SSDs for desktops" I'd sure like to read it. I've heard of small drives being used for servers, where it is basically just being used to bootstrap the OS into RAM, but I haven't seen anything about using small SSDs as caching drives on desktops. hell does Win 7 even properly support something like that, or is it just being used like Readyboost? Like i said if you have a link I'd sure like to read it, I've still got 3 SATA II slots free on my PC, wouldn't mind a cheap speed boost.
Compare the highest performing ARM and its IPC to a C2D, much less a C2Q, and you'll see its no contest, the smartphones are really much farther than a decade behind.
The same thing that has made X86 slow down in sales of laptops and desktops, the fact that X86 went past good enough into ludicrous speed, could give Intel a hell of a chunk of the market. lets face it, folks have gotten spoiled. They are so used to having laptops and desktops that do amazing things, that play HD video without a stutter, run a dozen programs at a time without skipping a beat, hell even the bottom o' the line Intel and AMD chips of today are so insanely overpowered that most users simply can't keep them fed with enough work to max them out.
The simple fact is that the best ARM chips can't get anywhere near the IPC of a 7 year old C2 or Athlon X2 and on Intel's FIRST TRY they got 30% higher performance while getting right in the middle of the pack when it comes to ARM power usage. Considering that isn't even on the latest process that is pretty damned impressive for a first try. You mark my words the way Intel is going it won't be but a couple of tick tocks until they have the Atom at 12nm, with probably equal or better than C2D or even C2Q performance and with equal or better battery life than the ARM. I don't care where you sit on the argument that's pretty damned exciting in MY book.
I don't think you need a term like de-evolution which a much more classical term applies MUCH better, and that is good old fashioned fascism. As we know fascism can take two main forms, where the corporate controls the state and where the state controls the corporate, but in the end its two sides of the same coin. In the end we get what we are seeing all over the planet, where a few men in the halls of power use their ever growing power of force to ensure their power never decreases by keeping those nasty peasants in a state of fear and closely monitored for "subversive behavior".
I would say its the Arab Springs that caused it but I think its been going on longer than that, its just the Arab Springs made them drop all pretense of being subtle. Now that they have seen that the "rabble" can actually cause men who have wielded power for decades to be brought before the courts or even killed I think we will be seeing the "kid gloves" come off more and more as those power mongers fight to keep what they consider divinely given, their absolute right to rule. Frankly I have a feeling things will be especially nasty here in the USA as the corps and govt have been in bed for quite awhile and the MSM gives the corp/gov hybrid a propaganda machine that would make old Joe Stalin green with envy. Just look at how quickly they were able to turn the conversation into "Assange is a rapist arrogant dirtball" from "Hey WTF HAS our government been doing?". I have a feeling if Watgergate happened today Woodward and Bernstein would join Deep Throat in Gitmo while the press talked about how wonderful Nixon was.
Which is why these patents scare the fuck out of me. Am I the only one that is more than a little worried that these GMOs are basically handing over control of the food supply to a single corporation? its bad enough when patents stifle innovations but we are talking about the fricking food supply folks, its not like you can just eat dirt. Since its already been proven that GMOs can contaminate nearby crops this lets them have a nice racket, where you either pay them to use their "product" or your field gets contaminated by theirs...and you pay them MORE. Does anybody else find that more than a little fucking disturbing? I mean if I dump shit in my neighbor's yard I can't force them to pay me for the privilege, so why can Monsanto do the same thing by patenting the shit?
Finally a little weird possibly but...does anyone else look at the nasty shit Monsanto pulls and gets reminded of that scene in "Damien: Omen II" where the head of genetics at Thorn is bragging about how with control of the food supply thanks to GMOs they can pretty much call the shots? Not saying Monsanto is the debil but the way they've got GMOs rolling it does strike me that they are climbing past Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, and Blackwater on the "Holy shit, that's fucked up" scale of corporate nastiness. I mean its pretty bad when a lot of your current gameplan seems like its nicked from a movie about the rise of the fricking antichrist.
No offense, but Linux and hardware acceleration? NOT the best of friends, in fact the only one I've seen do it consistently is Nvidia and that is only with proprietary drivers which rumor has it guts a lot of the graphics subsystem and replaces it with their own. This is why I prefer AMD on netbooks, because OOTB with Win 7 I could not only have every major format, including flash and DivX in full 1080p over HDMI, but I could do so while getting nearly 6 hours on the battery.
But the new Intel chip already beats ARM by 30% on their very first try, and while they haven't been good for gaming intel HAS been improving their HD decoder pretty steadily and quickly. Give Intel a couple of tick tocks and I have a feeling it won't be a contest. Again this comes down to money, Intel can afford to work out the bugs on the new shrinks quicker and they can afford insane amounts of R&D that frankly nobody else can. they can leverage their practically total control of X86 and pour some of that vast warchest into these new chips whereas nobody doing ARM, hell i doubt even Apple, will be willing to sink the kind of R&D that Intel is gonna be doing.
In any case the one I see winning is the consumer, because just as we saw with X86 when there is competition the products get better and cheaper.
Not to mention that might be a valid argument IF...Intel and AMD weren't already building GPUs into their chips, but they are. And in both cases the power draw has been dropping steadily while the IPC has been going up and up. Hell I get anywhere from 6 to 7 hours on my E350 and that's playing 720p video the entire time, if I'm only surfing and watching the occasional YouTube video, which is hardware accelerated BTW? that time goes up. And of course the Intel Atoms are getting more advanced on the GPU side every day, it won't be long at all before it surpasses the Radeon GPUs that AMD uses in their Bobcats.
In the end it all comes down to IPC where Intel has been stomping for half a decade. look at the benches i posted and see that on their FIRST TRY they got 30% higher performance for the SAME POWER DRAW which is just unreal. Now imagine...what do you think will happen after a couple of Intel's tick tocks? it won't even be a contest.
Everybody seems to be forgetting something though, people are pushing the ever loving crap out of these devices and IPC has been Intel's ball park for quite the long time. People want bigger games, higher def, better sound, the mobile is quickly becoming like the PC where it'll do damned near any job you can think of and that comes down to IPC. Don't get me wrong, ARM is a nice chip design, but if you've looked at the benches Intel is ALREADY getting 30% more out of their chip for the same watts as the ARM chips and this is only their first attempt. Now imagine what they are gonna be able to do with a couple of tick tocks and a couple of shrinks. It'll be like having a Core2 in your pocket, really cool to think about all you'll be able to do.
People may not give a crap what CPU is in their phone but they WILL give a crap that Bob's phone does more cool stuff than theirs does. Also don't forget that with a 30% performance lead they can probably emulate ARM no problem, especially if they put a little hardware emulation on chip, while ARM can't emulate X86 without slowing to a crawl.
You and the other poster seem to be forgetting ONE thing, which is nobody gives a shit how low the power draw is if it can't do what they want and what people WANT is MOAR, MOAR HD, MOAR games with MOAR graphics, MOAR MOAR MOAR.
We must have a LOT of puppies using AC accounts here now, because they sure don't remember their history. this is the EXACT SAME THING we went through on X86, with people happy for years with weak ass chips and then suddenly everybody wanted sound, then they wanted games, then video, then HD video, just one after another. people now want to be able to do a hell of a lot more than just email with their mobile devices, they want to watch videos, play the latest games, use it as a PMP, and ALL of that takes MOAR POWER.
ARM isn't "magical" and its been needing more and more extras like HD decoder chips to share the load because it simply can't get enough IPC to do the job on its own. That problem is only gonna get worse, as screens get bigger and HD, games get more complex and have better graphics, and the same fact is when it comes to doing all those tasks Intel can simply stomp ARM when it comes to IPC.
So i have NO doubt ARM is gonna run into a wall, just as X86 ran into the heat barrier at 4GHz only with ARM it'll probably be the "too many cores" problem. We are already seeing 4 and 5 core ARM chips, trying to squeeze more performance out of the chip, but you can only go so far that way. The simple fact is the amount of IPC one gets on even the lowest end Atom now is truly insane compared to ARM. Look at the benches and you'll see the Atom for smartphones does a hell of a lot more for equal or less power than ARM. And remember this is just their first try, imagine what they will have after a couple of shrinks and a refresh?
Did you miss the memo? Even Forbes pointed out what a piss poor CEO Ballmer is. Just look at the money he flushed down the crapper on Zune and kin, his idea of "leadership" is to buy something "kinda sorta" similar to something that was hip and then flush MORE cash flopping it around before giving up and letting it die.
Lets face it, other than the X360 (which nobody is even sure if they have made back all the cash they've blown and are really into the black on it, as you'd have to figure in the cash blown on XBox 1 and the 2 billion RROD fiasco) and Win 7 which if the rumors are true was basically left alone by Ballmer while he was busy with kin, Zune, and trying to buy yahoo the man's track record just stinks. Hell you could probably have a monkey throw shit at a stock page and end up with a better ROI than what the Ballminator has done with a decade at the fricking company. if it wasn't for the cash cows of Windows X86 and Office they'd be half dead already and it looks like Ballmer is taking a dump on one of those sacred cows because nobody wants a WinPhone and he won't rest until MSFT has put out a piss poor knockoff of every single thing Apple has done.
So the fact he's gonna blow another billion on a company he won't know fuck all what to do with? really doesn't surprise me at this point. I'd have to say he's giving the Pepsi guy at Apple a serious run for his money in the "Hey lets take a successful company and torpedo it!" dept. Seriously board how much damned longer are you gonna let that moron wipe his ass with money? hell does he even HAVE a strategy? Or is he like Dilbert's PHB merely playing buzzword bingo?
But that is like saying "Linux beats Windows if you count routers' which is probably true, except in both cases you are talking about tiny low margin embedded that while might be good from a numbers game frankly isn't a market one should be chasing. Its like how Apple doesn't make any of the low rent stuff yet is the richest company last i checked, you get that way by getting the good profit markets, not the low end crap ones.
In the end what will probably matter the most is money and despite the bigger numbers for embedded ARM Intel has it and ARM don't. Money gets you fabs, money gets you R&D, and frankly with the amount of both Intel has it can simply win by continuing on the current path. Both the CULV chips and the Atoms are dropping every rev, the IPC Intel has been getting with each new chip is just insane, and everyone wants their mobile devices to do ever more stuff, all of that plays straight into Intel's hands.
So I wouldn't be counting them chickens because after all ARM could keep every router and PMP on the planet and STILL lose, because if Intel can deliver sub 5w chips that can do HD video and play games and do all the other things folks want to do? I seriously doubt it'll be hard for them to sell it to the masses. Hell most folks don't even know what ARM is but they have sure seen plenty of "bong bong ba bong" Intel inside commercials.
Sadly no as that is just the desktop "app" (man I fucking HATE that word now) which you can see by the lack of a start button, From now on, whether you want it or not, Metro is gonna be running in the background sucking cycles whether you use it or not. Lets face it win 8 is a "supergigantic smartphone OS" which just confuses the crap out of regular users so while changing the colors of the "desktop app" isn't a big deal overall i'd say Win 8 IS a big deal, which is why other than any Win 8 units brought in for me to work on i'm sitting this one out, its just not a good OS and after Win 7 is a huge downgrade..
While this is true frankly its only been fairly recently that either AMD or Intel gave a crap about power, and look at how far they've come? Intel has gotten Atoms to less than 3w, AMD has gotten dual cores AND a decent GPU down to 9w in the C Series bobcats, and of course the Intel CULV Core chips can do a scary amount of processing on I believe their latest are sub 10w. Now according to ARM their A9 duals are just a hair under 2w. that of course isn't counting the chips like the hardware decoders typically found with ARM because it just can't do as many IPCs as X86.
So I'd say as folks demand more and more performance out of their mobile devices the advantage will probably swing to Intel.Tthey have the fabs and have been able to shrink quicker than anybody else so 1 or 2 more shrinks and its gonna be pretty damned close and with such a huge IPC difference between X86 and ARM in a damned close race I'm sure many would rather have the faster Intel chip, AMD will most likely be stuck at the niche they are now, at least as long as they stick with the faildozer "half a core" design so that just leaves Intel and ARM and with the money, the fabs, and the R&D budget that Intel has i think it'd be crazy to call it for ARM at this stage of the game.
After all it wasn't too long ago that everyone was making netburst space heater jokes and look how quickly that situation changed. I seriously doubt Intel is gonna sit this one out and when looking at their past record there is no reason to think they can't make a chip that'll compete.
Lucky bastard, some of us have elderly family here and can't go, not to mention my oldest is studying to be a doctor and I have a feeling if the crap hits the fan he'll be another Che Guevara as he is a big champion of the poor and seems to have natural leadership abilities.
I'm just glad we have plenty of relatives living in the country with good farm land and hunting weapons because as my late grandma taught me about the great depression when the crap hits the fan having a steady source of food is probably the best thing you can have. Fucking sad that we even have to speak of such things but more and more it smells to me like an old friend told me about those last years in Saigon, how outward signs were all "Everything is gonna be fine!" while those with money and power were quietly cashing out and slinking away. I wish i had the link but something like 18% of the fortune 100 top money earners have quietly cashed out and done as you did, it makes me think they know the real numbers and don't want to be here when it all falls down.
Have YOU ever taught anyone who has NEVER used a PC? because unless you are seriously arguing that the target market for Windows 8 is Martians its gonna be pretty fucking difficult to find someone who has NEVER seen or touched a PC in their lives. Maybe MSFT wants to get the under 4 market, is that what you are suggesting?
Hell your post just proves my point, that anybody who has ever used a PC will NOT WANT Windows 8 because it is NOTHING like anything that came before it. Change simply for change sake is NEVER a reason to change there should always be advantages to that change and frankly? Not seeing it. And more importantly neither are my customers which i judge a hell of a lot better barometer than this mythical person with money that has never owned or touched a computer. Click on that link if you dare, see for yourself. its become a bit of a meme to stick ordinary folks in front of Win 8 because it is so NOT discoverable it makes for the funny when ordinary users encounter it.
When your OS gets used for the geek version of "Punked" you know you're in trouble. I state it again, its not a good design, its really not. the sad part is as they were pointing out on LHB the Windows 8 Defenders are now using the crazy FOSSie lingo as excuses. You'll see "You don't need that", "Use esoteric workarounds", "our way is better", its the same shit we got from the koolaid drinkers when ubuntu went unity, the same excuses, the same ignoring of users, SSDD.
We'll see come Oct, but I'm betting those that short MSFT stock are gonna make a pretty penny as i think its gonna faceplant right out of the gate. I've slapped everyone from tweeners to LOL in front of Win 8 and have yet to find a demographic that likes it. Frankly I've NEVER had that happen before, even Vista had those that preferred it over XP, but I haven't found a single person yet that would trade XP/Vista/7 for the new OS at the shop friend, not a single one.
Those are nice but a little on the expensive side since we ARE talking about little kids its probably better to go cheap. The Acer Expresso is an Atom Dual core for $220 new or you can get the refurb from the Best Buy outlet for something like $160 and from what I understand the *Buntu builds have had OOTB support since 12.04 so shouldn't be an issue. Personally I like the Fusion APU version, its a little more expensive at $270 new or $220 refurb but since AMD opened up the specs its been supported OOTB since V 10.10, at least according to Phoronix. They also used to sell it with ubuntu as a choice (don't know if they still do or not) so he may be able to get one preloaded and just add the Edubuntu packages.
Not to mention there is another BIG problem. As i'm sure some have read the ONLY chance faildozer has with keeping up with Intel is to OC the crap out of them but as we saw with llano OCing tying more components into the chips limits the OCing thus making the AMD chips a worse value. the last bench i saw had them struggling to get a few bumps in speed with the APU but in some of the Faildozer CPUs they managed to get over 1GHz on air thus making the performance closer to the Intel chips.
So i wouldn't be surprised if this weak ARM chip killed any chance of OCing which has frankly been a lot of what has been keeping AMD in the game. What AMD needs to do is hire some good engineers, milk faildozer while they come up with a new design that will hopefully if not put them on top at least get them back in the game. Other than as a console chip i can't see TFA lighting any fires under those of us who bought AMD to buy again.
You are most welcome. Since i have a 24/7 net connection i just tried it again, latest version of Steam and all my games are updated, and after it timed out (about 15 seconds) up popped the "Do you wish to play in Offline Mode?" box so i can confirm that it does work, at least on Win 7 HP X64 with the latest version.
I couldn't play TF2 of course, i could probably do the practice mode but i fired up fear 3 (got it for $8 on the midweek madness sale but don't bother as they RUINED the game, damned weapons SUCK) along with HL2 just to make sure and they both loaded and ran fine.
If you DO have any problems though be sure to open a support ticket, i did when i had some glitches last year during the big Xmas sale and they contacted me right away about the glitch i was having, even did a follow up to make sure the fix worked. It turned out some of the DLC I bought was having trouble with the regular Steam client but they fixed it in the beta and had me upgrade until the next release, worked like a charm. Gotta give Valve credit, they were fast and very responsive which considering they were in the middle of a massive sale was all the more impressive.
I'm sorry but you are wrong as i had an old B&W G3 sitting up there at the shop for awhile for people who had never touched OSX to play with and they did just fine, it was VERY easily discovered and laid out pretty intuitive. if you click on the video i linked to above you'll see towards the bottom a guy that did that very test with his dad who had never run anything but XP, he had him try OSX and Win 8 and while he had NO trouble figuring out how to do basic tasks like go to the web or watch a video on OSX he had no luck at all on Win 8.
Its just not a good design friend. i have been able to say nice things about every MSFT OS since Win2K, even Vista which i ultimately didn't care for. For example while i ultimately gave up on Vista because of bugs I can say that it had better memory management than XP X64, it had better 64 bit support, its UI was nice (in fact i still use a Vista Black theme on win 7, I was never into Aero see through) and its user account was MUCH better than XP which was hell to run as a user instead of admin except on the X64 which of course was really 2K3 Workstation.
Frankly the only nice thing I can say about Win 8 is "it might be nice on a cell phone or tablet" because i honestly can't find any advantages to running it on a non touch device, i really can't. hell if you wanted that tweeting twitting 24/7 social crap you can get that now with Win 7 gadgets, so even that isn't a selling point. more than anything it reminds me of MS Bob, where if you don't know what the designer was trying to convey frankly you are lost, its just not discoverable. And as far as first run? Most OEMs replace that with their own startup so even if they include one I doubt many will see it, just as my oldest didn't see the Win 7 first run but the "welcome to HP" setup instead.
Who? The EU? Because sadly it won't be the USA as our DoJ seems to be toothless now. Hell after they didn't say shit about Intel using the "cripple code" to screw over AMD in benchmarks AND cut the throat of the competition by denying Nvidia access to the QPI and thus causing them to give up on the chipset business frankly if the MSFT antitrust trial were to be done over today they'd not only rule in favor of MSFT they'd probably pay their lawyer fees while they were at it!
I think though that the poster below is right, this smells more like a console chip than a general purpose CPU, but since AMD doesn't have the money to do "one off' designs they are probably hoping to make a little extra scratch by selling it as a poor man's TPM for budget tablets and laptops. After all one of the first things that gets cut from the budget builds are TPM units so that leaves AMD out in the cold. if they can make money off of it as a console chip and sell excess chips as poor man's bit locker support I say go for it, I just won't be buying any personally as i have no use for TPM and i sure as hell don't want extra DRM, thanks anyway AMD.
Exactly because even on the low end AMD APUs frankly you have some truly insane power at your command. Here is a video of someone playing L4D II on an E350 netbook and that is about the weakest chip AMD still has in production.
So with the amount of insane power the CPUs and GPU provides there really isn't a reason for an on-chip really wimpy ARM except for DRM, where you don't want the user accessing the code which they could on a general purpose chip. this is why I hate this announcement as we had all hoped AMD was gonna do something cool with ARM, personally I had hopes they were gonna somehow integrate a dual core A9 or something so that you could put the X86 to sleep when not needing all that power but with a chip like the A5 the only real use i can think of is to keep the user at bay for DRM. Yay AMD, way to make those of us that have been loyal feel like crap.