Exactly. The potential loss in color resolution is a pretty steep price for two stops worth of sensitivity. There may be a niche market for this with sports or astro photos, but most users shoot most of their shots with available lighting or fill flash and don't need the extra sensitivity.
This might make a nice second camera for the serious user, but most folks would be better off with the current technology.
This aspect of dark matter has always been troubling. If dark matter reacts gravitationally with ordinary matter, shouldn't we find the two combined within some sort of object? Everyone talks about how dark matter explains galactic rotation and cluster movement, but no one seems to say anything about what happens when you mix them. Why wouldn't dark matter collapse into a stellar interior along with the ordinary matter? How would this affect the nuclear processes within the star?
Why would there be "stars" made entirely of dark matter, anyway? What keeps ordinary matter from falling in?
Note that AMD's claim is to be faster "at the same clock". When the P4 was pushing clock speeds into oblivion, AMD stressed the point that clock speed is irrelevant -- what really counts is how fast the system runs your software. How you get there is quite beside the point. How odd that AMD is now using clock speed as a key indicator.
Intel is already shipping 3GHz Clovertowns, and the article states that AMD has not released the Barcelona clock targets. It they ship substantially below 3GHz (2.4?), then Barcelona will probably still win on FP benchmarks (barely) but lose on everything else. This suggests it will be more competitive, but not compelling.
Not quite. Intel projects are usually named after local geographical features, not all of them rivers. For example, Banias, Dothan, Yonah, and Merom (Centrino/core2 duo project names) are not rivers in Israel. Also, the first PIII project was done in Folsom and named "Katmai" -- again, there is no Katmai river in Northern California.
It's quite common in the industry to give projects names that don't mean anything, and each company uses a different scheme for generating the monikers. One interesting story is what happened when Apple used an internal project name of "Sagan". Carl Sagan took exception to this use of his name and threatened a lawsuit. Apple responded by changing the project name to "BHA", a TLA for "Butt-Head Astronomer". Sagan filed a lawsuit over this but it was thrown out of court when the judge ruled the new name was a generic one since Sagan was probably not the world's only butthead astronomer. (As least that's what I recall of it. Perhaps someone who worked at Apple during this time can add more detail?)
The CPUs will still be multi-core. They will also integrate as many features as makes sense. However, there are limits on how big the die can be and remain feasible for high volume manufacturing. Using an external co-processor is both more flexible and more powerful.
The interesting thing about this whole co-processor approach is that the same interface used to connect multiple CPUs to each other is being opened up for other processing devices. This makes it possible to mix and match cores as desired. For example, you could build a mesh of multi-core CPUs in a more "normal" configuration, or you could mate each CPU with a DSP-like number cruncher and make a special purpose "supercomputer". It will interesting to see what types of compute beasts will emerge from this.
I just got a new desktop system with Vista last week. To my surprise, the "Cancel or Allow" popup windows aren't nearly as annoying as I'd expected. You encounter them during every application install, but it's just one more click out of the many needed to install an application anyway. Not much of an issue, IMHO.
That's not to say there aren't other issues, though. Oblivion installed okay but wouldn't run until I tracked down a missing DLL to put into the windows/system folder. The Photoshop Elements 3.0 installer quit with an error message. Adobe says they're only supporting version 5.0 on Vista, but despite all this the application appears to work anyway (at least for now). Also, an auto-update from last night disabled my PCI-wireless card and I had to reinstall the drivers to get it working again. It's working, but at boot the Netgear app exits with a couple of error messages.
I can't comment on whether Vista is more or less productive since I try really hard not to be productive on my home system!
The International Space Station is not "always in the Sun". With an inclination of 51.63 degrees, the ISS enters the Earth's shadow on every orbit. Perhaps you were thinking of a sun-synchronous orbit? It's possible for such an orbit to be continuously in sunlight if the orbital parameters are chosen for this purpose. The ISS orbit is nothing like this.
The parent's claim that more stages is more efficient is correct. A single stage rocket has to carry the entire mass of the booster all the way to orbit. Stages allow you to leave some of this mass behind by ditching the depleted stages as you go. Less mass reaches orbit and hence less energy is expended. More stages means more efficient.
Adding more stages does add more complexity and can potentially decrease the reliability. However, the energy and cost savings are well worth it. Without staging, you'd need a much larger booster.
This is an excellent point, but it cuts both ways. As you've pointed out, the available evidence during the Middle Ages made an Earth-centered universe viable. Thus, it was entirely possible to rigorously follow the scientific method and still conclude we are at the center.
Rigorously scientific, and quite wrong. This is something that's overlooked all too often -- Science can never promise Truth. The best any theory can hope for is to be very well verified. Please don't get me wrong -- the Scientific Method works better than any other method known to us. We can never know with absolute certainty that our conclusions are true, but using any other method is much worse. I'm not advocating that we replace Science with something else; I'm just pointing out that the conclusions are never absolute.
This is something to keep in mind with the current global warming debate. The evidence suggests that human burning of carbon fuels is a big part of the problem. A strong majority of Scientists across multiple disciplines are convinced we need to do something about it. But they could be wrong.
According to the AnandTech article you referenced, saying that "it looks good" is a bit of an overstatement. Here are a few quotes from the article:
"It's clear that these first 65nm chips, while lower power than their 90nm
counterparts, aren't very good even by AMD's standards."
"Performance and efficiency are still both Intel's fortes thanks to its Core 2
lineup, and honestly the only reason to consider Brisbane is if you currently
have a Socket-AM2 motherboard."
In every single AnandTech benchmark, Intel wins in both raw performance and performance per watt. And if raw power consumption is important to you, the winner was a 90nm AMD SFF part. In no case was a 65nm AMD better at anything.
The article does point out that a mature 90nm process is being compared to an immature 65nm process and thus future steppings are bound to be better. However, this doesn't change the fact that the current crop of AMD 65nm parts are a major disappointment.
This reminds me of another study to determine the relationship between height and basketball. Subjects were sorted into two groups: those who played basketball and those who did not. The basketball-playing group was, on the average, several inches taller. The conclusion? Playing basketball makes you taller!
A mechanical engineer, a systems analyst, and a software engineer had just completed their open source car. During the first test drive, the brakes give out while heading down a steep mountain grade. After a few harrowing minutes of high speed, tire-squealing, om-my-god-we're-going-to-die excitement, they run the car off the road and come to a safe stop.
The mechanical engineer says, "There must be a leak in the hydraulic system, and that caused the brakes to fail."
"Not so fast," said the systems analyst. "There could be many other causes. We need to do a thorough analysis before coming to any conclusions."
The software engineer said, "Why don't we drive back to the top of the hill and try it again?"
According to wikipedia, the term "speculative fiction" was actually coined by Heinlein in a 1948 essay. Today, it implies a super-set of science fiction that includes fantasy and horror. A speculative world is one beyond the one we know. Traditional sci-fi usually takes place on a future Earth or some other planet, but with this term you can include more whimsical worlds under one umbrella. Tom Clancy's books don't qualify because we're already familiar with the setting.
I'm not sure I like the term myself. In some sense it doesn't really matter where/when/how a setting is defined as long as there's a compelling story. Arthur C. Clark once said that all possible plots had already been written. That's not literally true, of course, but his point was that a sci-fi story doesn't need ground-breaking new physics to be good -- it just needs to make you care about the characters. Sci-fi stories take place in some fantastic locales, but eventually it all comes down to the characters.
A good point, but keep in mind that the performance and power differences between Prescott (90nm) and Cedarmill (65nm) were decidely underwhelming. The greater leakage current in Intel's 65nm process ate into most of the gains from the smaller process. It did make the die smaller and thus cheaper, but not much better in either performance or power consumption.
Perhaps the AMD/IBM SOI process will do better at 65nm in controlling leakage current and provide the needed performance boost. Intel plans to release the 45nm Penryn in 2H07, and claims to have greatly improved the leakage current situation. AMD needs to leapfrom Conroe's performance with their 65nm part to remain competitive. Schedule is critical here: if Intel is late, AMD will regain momemtum; if AMD is late, Penryn will make the 65nm AMD part unattractive.
Ah, but TFA also predicts an October release date would be followed by a steady stream of patches. The gist of the article is that several things are seriously broken and Microsoft should not ship Vista until it's ready, whenever that is. He admits he has no idea if that's this October or August 2007.
The article also raises the question as to why enterprise users are getting Vista first since they typically are slow to update. Perhaps because they're already paying for upgrades? TFA doesn't pose an answer -- the author just says he doubts very many will attempt an upgrade until SP1 and so why not give it to the consumers first.
As others have pointed out, the project name for the server market is "Woodcrest", not "Conroe". To answer your question, though, it most definitely will have an impact on AMD's market share -- a negative one for AMD. However, AMD's hypertransport does scale better than Intel's frontside bus architecture. This means DP systems (dual processor sockets) will perform better with Intel but that MP (multiple processor sockets; usually 4) may be a different story. I've not seen any published benchmarks, but AMD may still have a performance advantage in 4-way server systems (8 cores).
Bottom line: Woodcrest is a very attractive server solution. It will be faster in dual socket systems, will be at least competitive in 4-way systems, and consumes less power. This will definitely eat into the recent gains AMD has taken away from Pentium IV-based systems.
Yes, the market will decide the issue -- much like it did the CPU market. Intel didn't drop the PIV lightly, but were forced to do so when the costs of pushing the power envelope were hurting them in the market. They fell behind AMD in performance because the power limitations were slowing the clock speed pushes they needed to keep up. Intel eventually saw the writing on the wall and went with a design where power consumption was a primary consideration.
Eventually, the market will force GPUs down the same path. Raw performance is still the primary driving force today, but this will change when thermal limits slow the clock speed increases needed to reach the next performance level. When that happens, low power designs will win the day by providing more resources for the same power budget.
There are also other considerations such as fan noise. Many folks would willing trade raw graphic performance for less noise. This is a critical parameter for an HTPC, but it's also a virtue for standard desktops. Consumers will start demanding refunds if they have to shout to be heard over their blazing new graphics card.
You've got a few names mixed up. "Merom" means "high places" and is not named after any township. Also, the Intel design center is in Haifa at an industrial park named "Matam". This has nothing to do with the project name.
Your statement about AMD processors being "designed from scratch for the 64bit computing" is neither accurate nor meaningful. Internally, both AMD and Intel CPUs have used 64bit busses for a long time. (In fact, Intel just went to a 128-bit wide bus to the SIMD units to speed up SSE/2/3 instructions.) I have no idea at what point in their CPU design AMD decided to implement 64-bit registers and instructions, but I'm sure the CPU in which they debuted was based on an existing 32-bit design. Widening registers & ALUs and adding new instructions is non-trivial but pretty straightforward.
Besides, even if one design adopted 64-bitness earlier in the process than the other, of what benefit is this? If this is advantageous, it should show up in improved performance on 64-bit benchmarks. Is this the case?
Here are some quotes from Dawkin's essay that might shed some more light on his position:
"A spin-off benefit, which will perhaps have its greatest
impact in the United States, is that full knowledge of the
tree of life will make it even harder to doubt the fact of
evolution."
Here's another quote on the moral implications:
"'Pro life,' for example, in debates on abortion or stem
cell research, always means pro human life, for no sensibly
articulated reason. The existence of a living, breathing
Lucy in our midst would change, forever, our complacent
human-centered view of morals and politics."
Dawkins concludes the essay with a regret that he probably won't live long enough to tearfully shake Lucy's hand.
Slashdot Mirror
ROTFLWHT! (Rolling On The Floor Laughing While Holding Testicles)
Exactly. The potential loss in color resolution is a pretty steep price for two stops worth of sensitivity. There may be a niche market for this with sports or astro photos, but most users shoot most of their shots with available lighting or fill flash and don't need the extra sensitivity.
This might make a nice second camera for the serious user, but most folks would be better off with the current technology.
This aspect of dark matter has always been troubling. If dark matter reacts gravitationally with ordinary matter, shouldn't we find the two combined within some sort of object? Everyone talks about how dark matter explains galactic rotation and cluster movement, but no one seems to say anything about what happens when you mix them. Why wouldn't dark matter collapse into a stellar interior along with the ordinary matter? How would this affect the nuclear processes within the star?
Why would there be "stars" made entirely of dark matter, anyway? What keeps ordinary matter from falling in?
Note that AMD's claim is to be faster "at the same clock". When the P4 was pushing clock speeds into oblivion, AMD stressed the point that clock speed is irrelevant -- what really counts is how fast the system runs your software. How you get there is quite beside the point. How odd that AMD is now using clock speed as a key indicator.
Intel is already shipping 3GHz Clovertowns, and the article states that AMD has not released the Barcelona clock targets. It they ship substantially below 3GHz (2.4?), then Barcelona will probably still win on FP benchmarks (barely) but lose on everything else. This suggests it will be more competitive, but not compelling.
Not quite. Intel projects are usually named after local geographical features, not all of them rivers. For example, Banias, Dothan, Yonah, and Merom (Centrino/core2 duo project names) are not rivers in Israel. Also, the first PIII project was done in Folsom and named "Katmai" -- again, there is no Katmai river in Northern California.
It's quite common in the industry to give projects names that don't mean anything, and each company uses a different scheme for generating the monikers. One interesting story is what happened when Apple used an internal project name of "Sagan". Carl Sagan took exception to this use of his name and threatened a lawsuit. Apple responded by changing the project name to "BHA", a TLA for "Butt-Head Astronomer". Sagan filed a lawsuit over this but it was thrown out of court when the judge ruled the new name was a generic one since Sagan was probably not the world's only butthead astronomer. (As least that's what I recall of it. Perhaps someone who worked at Apple during this time can add more detail?)
The CPUs will still be multi-core. They will also integrate as many features as makes sense. However, there are limits on how big the die can be and remain feasible for high volume manufacturing. Using an external co-processor is both more flexible and more powerful.
The interesting thing about this whole co-processor approach is that the same interface used to connect multiple CPUs to each other is being opened up for other processing devices. This makes it possible to mix and match cores as desired. For example, you could build a mesh of multi-core CPUs in a more "normal" configuration, or you could mate each CPU with a DSP-like number cruncher and make a special purpose "supercomputer". It will interesting to see what types of compute beasts will emerge from this.
I just got a new desktop system with Vista last week. To my surprise, the "Cancel or Allow" popup windows aren't nearly as annoying as I'd expected. You encounter them during every application install, but it's just one more click out of the many needed to install an application anyway. Not much of an issue, IMHO.
That's not to say there aren't other issues, though. Oblivion installed okay but wouldn't run until I tracked down a missing DLL to put into the windows/system folder. The Photoshop Elements 3.0 installer quit with an error message. Adobe says they're only supporting version 5.0 on Vista, but despite all this the application appears to work anyway (at least for now). Also, an auto-update from last night disabled my PCI-wireless card and I had to reinstall the drivers to get it working again. It's working, but at boot the Netgear app exits with a couple of error messages.
I can't comment on whether Vista is more or less productive since I try really hard not to be productive on my home system!
This just reinforces an old mechanical engineering maxim:
"If you have a large enough hammer, anything can be made to fit."
And he voted for Blu-Ray before he voted against it.
Oops! Wrong politician! Sorry, sorry...
The International Space Station is not "always in the Sun". With an inclination of 51.63 degrees, the ISS enters the Earth's shadow on every orbit. Perhaps you were thinking of a sun-synchronous orbit? It's possible for such an orbit to be continuously in sunlight if the orbital parameters are chosen for this purpose. The ISS orbit is nothing like this.
The parent's claim that more stages is more efficient is correct. A single stage rocket has to carry the entire mass of the booster all the way to orbit. Stages allow you to leave some of this mass behind by ditching the depleted stages as you go. Less mass reaches orbit and hence less energy is expended. More stages means more efficient.
Adding more stages does add more complexity and can potentially decrease the reliability. However, the energy and cost savings are well worth it. Without staging, you'd need a much larger booster.
This is an excellent point, but it cuts both ways. As you've pointed out, the available evidence during the Middle Ages made an Earth-centered universe viable. Thus, it was entirely possible to rigorously follow the scientific method and still conclude we are at the center.
Rigorously scientific, and quite wrong. This is something that's overlooked all too often -- Science can never promise Truth. The best any theory can hope for is to be very well verified. Please don't get me wrong -- the Scientific Method works better than any other method known to us. We can never know with absolute certainty that our conclusions are true, but using any other method is much worse. I'm not advocating that we replace Science with something else; I'm just pointing out that the conclusions are never absolute.
This is something to keep in mind with the current global warming debate. The evidence suggests that human burning of carbon fuels is a big part of the problem. A strong majority of Scientists across multiple disciplines are convinced we need to do something about it. But they could be wrong.
According to the AnandTech article you referenced, saying that "it looks good" is a bit of an overstatement. Here are a few quotes from the article:
"It's clear that these first 65nm chips, while lower power than their 90nm
counterparts, aren't very good even by AMD's standards."
"Performance and efficiency are still both Intel's fortes thanks to its Core 2
lineup, and honestly the only reason to consider Brisbane is if you currently
have a Socket-AM2 motherboard."
In every single AnandTech benchmark, Intel wins in both raw performance and performance per watt. And if raw power consumption is important to you, the winner was a 90nm AMD SFF part. In no case was a 65nm AMD better at anything.
The article does point out that a mature 90nm process is being compared to an immature 65nm process and thus future steppings are bound to be better. However, this doesn't change the fact that the current crop of AMD 65nm parts are a major disappointment.
But who would clean up the mess?
(Boys from the Dwarf!)
This reminds me of another study to determine the relationship between height and basketball. Subjects were sorted into two groups: those who played basketball and those who did not. The basketball-playing group was, on the average, several inches taller. The conclusion? Playing basketball makes you taller!
Correlation does not imply causation.
A mechanical engineer, a systems analyst, and a software engineer had just completed their open source car. During the first test drive, the brakes give out while heading down a steep mountain grade. After a few harrowing minutes of high speed, tire-squealing, om-my-god-we're-going-to-die excitement, they run the car off the road and come to a safe stop.
The mechanical engineer says, "There must be a leak in the hydraulic system, and that caused the brakes to fail."
"Not so fast," said the systems analyst. "There could be many other causes. We need to do a thorough analysis before coming to any conclusions."
The software engineer said, "Why don't we drive back to the top of the hill and try it again?"
According to wikipedia, the term "speculative fiction" was actually coined by Heinlein in a 1948 essay. Today, it implies a super-set of science fiction that includes fantasy and horror. A speculative world is one beyond the one we know. Traditional sci-fi usually takes place on a future Earth or some other planet, but with this term you can include more whimsical worlds under one umbrella. Tom Clancy's books don't qualify because we're already familiar with the setting.
I'm not sure I like the term myself. In some sense it doesn't really matter where/when/how a setting is defined as long as there's a compelling story. Arthur C. Clark once said that all possible plots had already been written. That's not literally true, of course, but his point was that a sci-fi story doesn't need ground-breaking new physics to be good -- it just needs to make you care about the characters. Sci-fi stories take place in some fantastic locales, but eventually it all comes down to the characters.
"Open the pod bay doors, Hal."
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. Steve Jobs won't let me."
A good point, but keep in mind that the performance and power differences between Prescott (90nm) and Cedarmill (65nm) were decidely underwhelming. The greater leakage current in Intel's 65nm process ate into most of the gains from the smaller process. It did make the die smaller and thus cheaper, but not much better in either performance or power consumption.
Perhaps the AMD/IBM SOI process will do better at 65nm in controlling leakage current and provide the needed performance boost. Intel plans to release the 45nm Penryn in 2H07, and claims to have greatly improved the leakage current situation. AMD needs to leapfrom Conroe's performance with their 65nm part to remain competitive. Schedule is critical here: if Intel is late, AMD will regain momemtum; if AMD is late, Penryn will make the 65nm AMD part unattractive.
Ah, but TFA also predicts an October release date would be followed by a steady stream of patches. The gist of the article is that several things are seriously broken and Microsoft should not ship Vista until it's ready, whenever that is. He admits he has no idea if that's this October or August 2007.
The article also raises the question as to why enterprise users are getting Vista first since they typically are slow to update. Perhaps because they're already paying for upgrades? TFA doesn't pose an answer -- the author just says he doubts very many will attempt an upgrade until SP1 and so why not give it to the consumers first.
As others have pointed out, the project name for the server market is "Woodcrest", not "Conroe". To answer your question, though, it most definitely will have an impact on AMD's market share -- a negative one for AMD. However, AMD's hypertransport does scale better than Intel's frontside bus architecture. This means DP systems (dual processor sockets) will perform better with Intel but that MP (multiple processor sockets; usually 4) may be a different story. I've not seen any published benchmarks, but AMD may still have a performance advantage in 4-way server systems (8 cores).
Bottom line: Woodcrest is a very attractive server solution. It will be faster in dual socket systems, will be at least competitive in 4-way systems, and consumes less power. This will definitely eat into the recent gains AMD has taken away from Pentium IV-based systems.
This reminds me of my favorite Newton joke. I first saw this a few months after the Newton release:
Q: What's two plus two?
A: Farm
Yes, the market will decide the issue -- much like it did the CPU market. Intel didn't drop the PIV lightly, but were forced to do so when the costs of pushing the power envelope were hurting them in the market. They fell behind AMD in performance because the power limitations were slowing the clock speed pushes they needed to keep up. Intel eventually saw the writing on the wall and went with a design where power consumption was a primary consideration.
Eventually, the market will force GPUs down the same path. Raw performance is still the primary driving force today, but this will change when thermal limits slow the clock speed increases needed to reach the next performance level. When that happens, low power designs will win the day by providing more resources for the same power budget.
There are also other considerations such as fan noise. Many folks would willing trade raw graphic performance for less noise. This is a critical parameter for an HTPC, but it's also a virtue for standard desktops. Consumers will start demanding refunds if they have to shout to be heard over their blazing new graphics card.
You've got a few names mixed up. "Merom" means "high places" and is not named after any township. Also, the Intel design center is in Haifa at an industrial park named "Matam". This has nothing to do with the project name.
Your statement about AMD processors being "designed from scratch for the 64bit computing" is neither accurate nor meaningful. Internally, both AMD and Intel CPUs have used 64bit busses for a long time. (In fact, Intel just went to a 128-bit wide bus to the SIMD units to speed up SSE/2/3 instructions.) I have no idea at what point in their CPU design AMD decided to implement 64-bit registers and instructions, but I'm sure the CPU in which they debuted was based on an existing 32-bit design. Widening registers & ALUs and adding new instructions is non-trivial but pretty straightforward.
Besides, even if one design adopted 64-bitness earlier in the process than the other, of what benefit is this? If this is advantageous, it should show up in improved performance on 64-bit benchmarks. Is this the case?
Here are some quotes from Dawkin's essay that might shed some more light on his position:
"A spin-off benefit, which will perhaps have its greatest
impact in the United States, is that full knowledge of the
tree of life will make it even harder to doubt the fact of
evolution."
Here's another quote on the moral implications:
"'Pro life,' for example, in debates on abortion or stem
cell research, always means pro human life, for no sensibly
articulated reason. The existence of a living, breathing
Lucy in our midst would change, forever, our complacent
human-centered view of morals and politics."
Dawkins concludes the essay with a regret that he probably won't live long enough to tearfully shake Lucy's hand.