Tethering is a service provided by the carrier. Mobile internet is a service provided by the carrier. Whether I use that service on the phone directly or on a computer attached to the phone shouldn't be any of the carriers business.
It's like an electricity supplier setting different rate structures depending on whether you use thier electricity to run aircon or computers.
I don't think it's up to MS. They just include the browsers the EU tells them to. The EU supposedly base the lists on "market share" though I haven't seen any reference as to exactly what they mean by that.
Although actually, I'm not clear on why you're so confident this is a move to "destroy state employee unions"? This wouldn't seem to displace any actual state employees Not immediately no but think long term for a minute.
Afaict previously the state departments had two options, give someone a job for life or pay a shitload of money to a contracting firm.
Now they have an option that is more attractive then either of the above so why would they do them?
Very high bandwidth I dunno if you were being serious or trying to make a joke but the bandwidth and hence the data rate of audio are very limited (yes better modulation and techniques like MIMO can get more data rate out of the same bandwidth but there are limits)
I bet you would really struggle to get even a couple of hundred kilobits per second reliably out of free space audio transmission and that's assuming it was acceptable to drown out all other sound over most of the audio band.
More than that even if you use LED lights you have the issue of the power supplies to contend with. I bet most PSUs won't pass through high frequency modulations.
So you are talking about either rewiring your lights with a low voltage distribution system of some sort (possible but the cables get very big) or replacing the LED PSUs with something that can carry a signal across (say homeplug one side LED modulation the other)
There is also the question of what to do for the return link.
All in all nice idea but it needs some work to turn it into a practical product.
Checking it again it looks like it's a maximum of two QPI hops to get between two processors but a maximum of three QPI hops to get from a processor to an IOH. I agree it looks like a bit of a bitch to route (but then 8 core boards are going to be expensive anyway so maybe high layer counts don't matter so much)
I remember most if not all vinyl albums i've seen had a change in the cutting density arround track breaks. This both marked the track boundried and gave you a wider target for dropping the needle without putting a hugely long gap in the music.
I think I even saw a record player once that could count the tracks and pick them by number but i'm not positive on that.
Personally I think if they broke a contract requiring them to only distribute complete copies of the work they should be required to do two things to make-good thier violations.
1: For each sale pay the royalties for the whole work. 2: Offer the complete work at no extra charge to people they sold part of the work.
True if you already have a platform that can support a chip with the performance you want it's often a better buy.
while for the intel high end stuff, you are locked into their 'premium' 1366 socket. True, BUT amd simply don't have anything comparable to the intel high end stuff anyway. AMD high end stuff is comparable to intel midrange stuff.
Will the AMD 6-core be better than a comparablly priced LGA1156 intel quad-core available at the time? The answer probablly depends on the workload (e.g. can the workload fill all the cores all the time, most can't).
Of course, most top supercomputers take years to plan and build Indeed and that means most of them were probablly designed before the xeon 5500 series (when intel finally got arround to replacing the FSB with QPI) was available.
And if you want more than 2 sockets or more than 6 ram slots (not that most of these big clusters do, they preffer to just use more nodes) on a system with a point to point based architecture AMD is still the only option.
when microprocessors have had on-die memory controllers since the stone age of computing is just silly IMO the innovation is multiple links out of the processor.
If you look at older computers (certainly stuff like BBC micros and i'm pretty sure eartly PCs were the same) nearly everything was on one bus (with maybe the odd bus buffer chip somewhere or maybe a DRAM refresh chip if the CPU didn't have that capability built in). This worked with the tech of the time but as things started to speed up it became a liability.
Gradually the busses split apart more and more due to the facts that a mixture of slow and fast devices had to be dealt with and the fact that fast busses and large numbers of devices are not a good combination but there was still a single shared bus linking the processors to everything else and this link was becoming a bottleneck especially in multiprocessor systems.
AMD eliminated the shared FSB and replaced it with on-chip memory controllers and point to point hypertransport links.
Intel did the same (but with quickpath instead of hypertransport) much later.
Not to mention that MMX had nothing to do with sound cards (Other than the fact that it enabled the CPU to natively do the vector math that DSP chips were doing at the time). Another thing that MMX brought that previous CPUs core stuff didn't have afaict was saturating arithmetic. Traditionally CPUs do modular arithmetic.
Saturating arithmetic is useful if you are trying to do stuff like audio mixing in software.
What really made dedicated sound cards obsolete though IMO was a combination of advancing general CPU power and the fact that intel made it really cheap and easy to hang an audio chip off thier southbridges (by integrating a lot of the functionality into the southbridge and providing relatively simple interfaces for the audio codec* chips to connect to)
*Note the term codec has at least two meanings in computing. In this context it reffers to a chip that is both an ADC and a DAC.
Can you provide links? A quick search for xeon vs powerpc benchmarks didn't turn up much other than articles about how the new intel macs were better than the powerpc ones.
But intel should have kept the 1156 socket around longer. They did jump to socket 1366 really fast They didn't jump from 1156 to 1366 at all (1366 is actually older than 1156). They created two different sockets for different markets (and I'm pretty sure there will be a third soon for the new processors with 8 cores, 4 QPI links and seperate memory buffer chips).
1366 is a socket really designed for dual-socket workstation and server stuff but also used for some high end single processor stuff. 1156 is the mainstream socket.
I maintain that bang per buck of processors alone isn't what matters.
Either you have a job that has to run on one machine in which case it's a matter of whether time saving/better experiance is sufficiant to make up for the cost difference or you are looking at a number of machines working together in which case you want to look at bang per buck of the entire node (including the costs of power and rackspace).
We all know top end Intel processors have a horribly low bang per buck (even when you take whole system bang per buck) but that isn't what matters when comparing intel to AMD. What matters is who can give a bettter price for a given performance and/or who can give a better performance for a given price.
The internet is missing a site that combine a comprehensive cpu-chart real-world benchmarks with current prices... Agreed
One thing to consider is that the cost of using a CPU is not the same thing as the cost of the CPU.
Every CPU needs to be put into a socket. That socket has to be on a motherboard*. That motherboard needs a case, a PSU, ram, a switch port, something to boot off (admittedly the onboard nic may allow this). It will also need to be put in a case and those cases stored somewhere (perferablly a proper rack)
When calculating the bang per buck of a given CPU choice you have to include these support components as well as the CPU itself!
Plus not all software is friendly towards being spread accross a cluster of machines.
*Yes you can have more than one CPU on a motherboard but both motherboards and processors increase in cost hugely if you want to do that.
I know that Intel destroys AMD in performance benchmarks and real-world performance, but AMD is FAR less expensive. hmm, are you aware of any good comparisions between the best AMD chips and the best intel chips available at a given price point?
but while doing it I realised that toms hardware mostly only tests high end stuff so it isn't a very usefull comparision (in partcular there was only one i5 quad core in that list)
1: do you know of any solid comparisons between those chips and current x86-64 chips using at least the same application software? (same OS would be nice too but it's difficult to chose one that is fair to all the candidates)?
2: do you realise just how much of the computing world is tied into either wintel or lintel?
Note that the particular chip mentioned in the current article is the desktop version, apparently there will be a dual-socket version but I haven't seen any recent information on when it will be released.
6 cores for under 200 bucks sounds nice doesnt it? That all depends on how those cores perform.
Personally given the choice I'd rather have a higher per core performance than more cores. there is still a lot of single threaded stuff out there and even some multithreaded stuff has single threaded stages and/or a lot of locking between threads.
The information i've seen indicates that there will also be a slightly slower non-extreme version of the i7 hex core, wikipedia claims a release price of $562 though it doesn't give a source fot that claim.
Slashdot Mirror
Where did you find that information and do you have any info on the methodology used to obtain it?
Tethering is a service provided by the carrier.
Mobile internet is a service provided by the carrier. Whether I use that service on the phone directly or on a computer attached to the phone shouldn't be any of the carriers business.
It's like an electricity supplier setting different rate structures depending on whether you use thier electricity to run aircon or computers.
I don't think it's up to MS. They just include the browsers the EU tells them to. The EU supposedly base the lists on "market share" though I haven't seen any reference as to exactly what they mean by that.
Is there any info on what depths we are talking? it seems that would have a huge impact on the difficulty of evacuation.
Although actually, I'm not clear on why you're so confident this is a move to "destroy state employee unions"? This wouldn't seem to displace any actual state employees
Not immediately no but think long term for a minute.
Afaict previously the state departments had two options, give someone a job for life or pay a shitload of money to a contracting firm.
Now they have an option that is more attractive then either of the above so why would they do them?
Sounds like a bullshit excuse to me.
Why can't they just put the DSLAMs in the hubs?!
The obvious usecases I can see for multitasking on a pda/smartphone are things like music players and chat clients. Maybe a VOIP client too.
Laser based systems have the advantage you can get an acceptable SNR over longer range. They have the downside that you have to aim them.
There is also the issue of needing absolute line of sight between the laser and receiver.
Very high bandwidth
I dunno if you were being serious or trying to make a joke but the bandwidth and hence the data rate of audio are very limited (yes better modulation and techniques like MIMO can get more data rate out of the same bandwidth but there are limits)
I bet you would really struggle to get even a couple of hundred kilobits per second reliably out of free space audio transmission and that's assuming it was acceptable to drown out all other sound over most of the audio band.
More than that even if you use LED lights you have the issue of the power supplies to contend with. I bet most PSUs won't pass through high frequency modulations.
So you are talking about either rewiring your lights with a low voltage distribution system of some sort (possible but the cables get very big) or replacing the LED PSUs with something that can carry a signal across (say homeplug one side LED modulation the other)
There is also the question of what to do for the return link.
All in all nice idea but it needs some work to turn it into a practical product.
The diagram I saw can be seen at http://techreport.com/r.x/2009_5_26_Intel_unveils_native_eightcore_Nehalem/8p_diagram.jpg
Checking it again it looks like it's a maximum of two QPI hops to get between two processors but a maximum of three QPI hops to get from a processor to an IOH. I agree it looks like a bit of a bitch to route (but then 8 core boards are going to be expensive anyway so maybe high layer counts don't matter so much)
I remember most if not all vinyl albums i've seen had a change in the cutting density arround track breaks. This both marked the track boundried and gave you a wider target for dropping the needle without putting a hugely long gap in the music.
I think I even saw a record player once that could count the tracks and pick them by number but i'm not positive on that.
Personally I think if they broke a contract requiring them to only distribute complete copies of the work they should be required to do two things to make-good thier violations.
1: For each sale pay the royalties for the whole work.
2: Offer the complete work at no extra charge to people they sold part of the work.
True if you already have a platform that can support a chip with the performance you want it's often a better buy.
while for the intel high end stuff, you are locked into their 'premium' 1366 socket.
True, BUT amd simply don't have anything comparable to the intel high end stuff anyway. AMD high end stuff is comparable to intel midrange stuff.
Will the AMD 6-core be better than a comparablly priced LGA1156 intel quad-core available at the time? The answer probablly depends on the workload (e.g. can the workload fill all the cores all the time, most can't).
Of course, most top supercomputers take years to plan and build
Indeed and that means most of them were probablly designed before the xeon 5500 series (when intel finally got arround to replacing the FSB with QPI) was available.
And if you want more than 2 sockets or more than 6 ram slots (not that most of these big clusters do, they preffer to just use more nodes) on a system with a point to point based architecture AMD is still the only option.
when microprocessors have had on-die memory controllers since the stone age of computing is just silly
IMO the innovation is multiple links out of the processor.
If you look at older computers (certainly stuff like BBC micros and i'm pretty sure eartly PCs were the same) nearly everything was on one bus (with maybe the odd bus buffer chip somewhere or maybe a DRAM refresh chip if the CPU didn't have that capability built in). This worked with the tech of the time but as things started to speed up it became a liability.
Gradually the busses split apart more and more due to the facts that a mixture of slow and fast devices had to be dealt with and the fact that fast busses and large numbers of devices are not a good combination but there was still a single shared bus linking the processors to everything else and this link was becoming a bottleneck especially in multiprocessor systems.
AMD eliminated the shared FSB and replaced it with on-chip memory controllers and point to point hypertransport links.
Intel did the same (but with quickpath instead of hypertransport) much later.
Not to mention that MMX had nothing to do with sound cards (Other than the fact that it enabled the CPU to natively do the vector math that DSP chips were doing at the time).
Another thing that MMX brought that previous CPUs core stuff didn't have afaict was saturating arithmetic. Traditionally CPUs do modular arithmetic.
Saturating arithmetic is useful if you are trying to do stuff like audio mixing in software.
What really made dedicated sound cards obsolete though IMO was a combination of advancing general CPU power and the fact that intel made it really cheap and easy to hang an audio chip off thier southbridges (by integrating a lot of the functionality into the southbridge and providing relatively simple interfaces for the audio codec* chips to connect to)
*Note the term codec has at least two meanings in computing. In this context it reffers to a chip that is both an ADC and a DAC.
Can you provide links? A quick search for xeon vs powerpc benchmarks didn't turn up much other than articles about how the new intel macs were better than the powerpc ones.
But intel should have kept the 1156 socket around longer. They did jump to socket 1366 really fast
They didn't jump from 1156 to 1366 at all (1366 is actually older than 1156). They created two different sockets for different markets (and I'm pretty sure there will be a third soon for the new processors with 8 cores, 4 QPI links and seperate memory buffer chips).
1366 is a socket really designed for dual-socket workstation and server stuff but also used for some high end single processor stuff. 1156 is the mainstream socket.
I maintain that bang per buck of processors alone isn't what matters.
Either you have a job that has to run on one machine in which case it's a matter of whether time saving/better experiance is sufficiant to make up for the cost difference or you are looking at a number of machines working together in which case you want to look at bang per buck of the entire node (including the costs of power and rackspace).
We all know top end Intel processors have a horribly low bang per buck (even when you take whole system bang per buck) but that isn't what matters when comparing intel to AMD. What matters is who can give a bettter price for a given performance and/or who can give a better performance for a given price.
The internet is missing a site that combine a comprehensive cpu-chart real-world benchmarks
with current prices...
Agreed
One thing to consider is that the cost of using a CPU is not the same thing as the cost of the CPU.
Every CPU needs to be put into a socket. That socket has to be on a motherboard*. That motherboard needs a case, a PSU, ram, a switch port, something to boot off (admittedly the onboard nic may allow this). It will also need to be put in a case and those cases stored somewhere (perferablly a proper rack)
When calculating the bang per buck of a given CPU choice you have to include these support components as well as the CPU itself!
Plus not all software is friendly towards being spread accross a cluster of machines.
*Yes you can have more than one CPU on a motherboard but both motherboards and processors increase in cost hugely if you want to do that.
I know that Intel destroys AMD in performance benchmarks and real-world performance, but AMD is FAR less expensive.
hmm, are you aware of any good comparisions between the best AMD chips and the best intel chips available at a given price point?
I tried to do one by taking a look at http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-desktop-cpu-charts-update-1/Performance-Index,1407.html, looking up prices on newegg and ingnoring pricessors that are either unavailable at newegg or are more expensive than a faster chip of the same brand and limiting myself to quad core chips I got the following in decreasing order of speed
Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition $969.99
Intel Core i7-950 $569.99
Intel Core i7-870 $569.99
Intel Core i7-920 $288.99
Intel Core i5-750 $199.99
AMD Phenom II X4 965 $194.99
AMD Phenom II X4 955 $160.99
AMD Phenom II X4 945 $150.99
Athlon II X4 630 $99.99
I got bored and stopped after this point
but while doing it I realised that toms hardware mostly only tests high end stuff so it isn't a very usefull comparision (in partcular there was only one i5 quad core in that list)
Two questions
1: do you know of any solid comparisons between those chips and current x86-64 chips using at least the same application software? (same OS would be nice too but it's difficult to chose one that is fair to all the candidates)?
2: do you realise just how much of the computing world is tied into either wintel or lintel?
Note that the particular chip mentioned in the current article is the desktop version, apparently there will be a dual-socket version but I haven't seen any recent information on when it will be released.
I just took a look at a toms hardware CPU chart ( http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-desktop-cpu-charts-update-1/Performance-Index,1407.html ), picked out the intel CPU that came immediately above the AMD CPU you mentioned and looked up the price on newegg ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115215&cm_re=i5-750-_-19-115-215-_-Product ) and it was $5 more.
6 cores for under 200 bucks sounds nice doesnt it?
That all depends on how those cores perform.
Personally given the choice I'd rather have a higher per core performance than more cores. there is still a lot of single threaded stuff out there and even some multithreaded stuff has single threaded stages and/or a lot of locking between threads.
The information i've seen indicates that there will also be a slightly slower non-extreme version of the i7 hex core, wikipedia claims a release price of $562 though it doesn't give a source fot that claim.