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Yofie - government buying
I work across the hall from a company which is built on governmental computer reselling. They take care off all the issues based on requirements so that the different government agencies don't have to do it themselves.
I don't know all the agencies they work for, but in passing when talking to them, I've heard (in general terms) both military and domestic agencies mentioned.
I'm not sure how you get to:
"and most of the computers they purchase are normal consumer machines which will be purchased with Windows and Office already installed, so the Army will be paying twice for each machine."
so I can't comment on that, but I thought I'd shed a little light on the background.
neye
comb, buggi, cache density
I think I recall reading a post or two at Aces in which it seemed like it was conventional wisdom that AMD simply couldn't engineer the same cache density that INTC could - even before the SOI issue happened.
neye
fi - in general...
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/faqh2post.asp
(has stuff not only about images, but sound, formatting, etc)
neye
thanks buggi (eom)
tomshardware server doesn't like direct linking to images, hence the gif you saw. It's generally a good idea to post the articles as opposed to the pictures, as you've seen here.
neye
Opteron Pricing Stability
That remains to be seen. There has historically been a large gap between the list price for AMD processors and the price that it actually sells them for.
On pricewatch the 242's are still above $700 and the 244's are still above $800. I've forgotten the list prices, so I don't know how the PW prices compare to list, but maybe someone else here knows?
neye
Admit it, Spokes...
You already knew about the cool-running Bartons, and are building a desk just to have an excuse to upgrade
neye
I am in the process of building a desk, and I am designing it such that the computer is built-in and essentially invisible. My intent is to have a very elegant and light looking piece of furniture with no visible wires or devices. I also want it to be very quite. It looks like I should upgrade to a Barton.
I have a couple friends looking for laptops. This might be an option. Thanks,
neye
more about dual monitors
Win98 and WinXP could use monitor spanning better than Win2k when coming out of the same vid card. Win2k does fine when using multiple video cards (hooked 3 of them up this week for employees here who wanted more screen real-estate).
Got one of them a dual head card (GeForce4 MX - cheap, dual VGA output), and the others an extra PCI video card (even cheaper).
neye
speakers
I agree. I first read your post as "underpowered speakers", and from my experience, they mean the same thing anyway.
but yes, I love having a pair of them at the office to test the sound out on the various machines without having the hassle of powered speakers or headphones.
neye
OT - testing board function (not a premium member)
It seems that the "target=" in automatically parsed URLs have a target of "_new". This means that if you have two links:
http://www.intel.com
http://www.amd.com
clicking on one will create a new window. Clicking on the next will replace the content of that previously created window. Might it not be better to use the keyword "_blank" for the target so that *every* link generates its own window?
When I'm reading the posts I typically click interesting links, and keep reading through posts. At the end I'll look at all the links I've opened.
A matter of preference, to be sure, but non standard in terms of the message boards I frequent.
Let's hope the text of this post and the links I included to prove me a liar!
ephud - are you sure?
Anyone interested in seeing an absolutely beautiful eclipse show go outside and look.
I must be doing something wrong - I went outside to look for the moon but didn't see it!
neye
Klaus & Klaus
No, he isn't. ;)
Klaus aka ABurner
Ok, glad I have it sorted out now. Thanks both,
neye :)
Klaus - me too
For this reason, currently I just do what I am really good at: Nothing at all. :)
I'll eventually get burned for sitting on the sidelines (and already have to some degree). I think my next play will be on Apple after it comes back down and the new cpu is released.
I just don't have the confidence in AMD to compete well these days.
BTW, are you the same Klaus as ABurner from Ragingbull? (apologies if not)
neye
NotAShort - benchmark selections
just a general comment on Office 2000. I would guess that it, along with Windows 2000, will represent a disproportionately large percentage of OS and Office platforms compared to other EOL'd products as time goes on.
This is because Win2k is the only decent Windows that consumers can use with all their "stuff" that doesn't have product activation. IMO, the pirated stuff will still be used, and 2k is worth using more so than 98, Me, etc.
Similarly, while Office 2k isn't as big a jump over Office 97 as Win2k is over Win98, it's the last office release without product activation. So, people will probably be using that for a long time to come as well.
As for who this favors in benchmarks, I don't really know or care, but thought I'd throw it out there anyway.
neye
I won an AMD contest
remember a while ago when they had the "great moments in history" (or something like that) contest? Well, I got an e-mail from them, filled out an eligibility thing, and sent it in.
That was a couple weeks ago. When the fedex slip was hanging on the door today, I had completely forgotten about it. So, I went down to the fedex pickup builiding and retrieved the package.
I wasn't a "grand prize" winner (I believe that was the terminology), but I did get a pretty cool gift - "The Encyclopedia of World History" by Peter N. Stearns. Very nice book, good index (out of 1250 pages or so, the index alone is 160 pages).
This is the only "contest" like this that I've won, so I'm pretty happy with it.
neye
Elmer - that would be interesting
edited: blah blah blah - I didn't think through what I wrote, so it's gone now.
neye
SZ - very cool article - thx (eom)
Comb, sgolds, Keith, wbmw - Sun
Did you catch Aces's article about the future of sun? Pretty good read, and Chris, Brian and Johan seem to have confidence in Sun. I wonder if the three of them have as much business savvy w/r/t the chip market as they do tech savvy...? If so, Sun might be looking pretty good soon, at least relative to the current/near-past.
http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=55000245
neye
Matt - you can do better!
first, get one of these:
http://www.dviator.com/us/DVIator.html
which will allow you to connect one (or more, depending on your vid card) of these:
And, for just $1,999 a piece (23" diagonal - wide screen format), you can get two of them for the price of the dell quad ($4,049). More stylish, IMO (1920 x 1200 native res)
As if I could actually pretend to afford either of these "just 'cause"...!
neye
Matt - more about the AMD systems from alienware
a couple thoughts, as I just looked through those pages.
1) Good: I checked and you get the OEM version of windows when you get the system, instead of one of those really annoying "system restore" disks that dell/cpq/gtw/etc are shipping now, which limit you quite a bit.
2) Good: The upgrade to XP pro, if you want it from them, is only $53. That's a pretty good price.
3) Bad: the default AMD chip at the low end config (grey model) is only $47 less than the upgrade (2200 v. 2400). I'd definitely spend the extra dough to do that system config change instead of regretting it later.
4) Other: the P4 system actually seems to be a slightly better deal for the price they're charging (faster processor, more ram, very little extra cost). Not that I prefer to advertise this on the AMD board, but it's worth noting
Seems that a lot of the benefit to AMD systems these days are if you have specific desires that you know the AMD chips are better for, or if you're building your own budget system, in which case the Athlon systems give a great bang for the buck. Alienware is a bit of a botique outlet, and you are going to be paying more for their extras.
Good luck with whatever you buy next,
neye
chipguy - I'm game too
There are a lot of issues and it would honestly take far too much time to even scratch the surface. And it would probably bore most of the people here to tears.
I'm less technical than most here, but I'd love to hear about it as well. 4 to 0 so far, I think
neye
Elmer - that's funny
Actually it's "row to hoe" for the non farm types <G>.
When I was writing it, I was thinking to myself "this is a really stupid expression". Makes a bit more sense now
A larger cache A64 is going to be too expensive to make.
That may be true. I'm wondering if the A64 is going to die the duron's death at the hands of prescott, and if 1xx series opterons are going to take up the low end space. It would be a smallish cache opteron (256KB), but would have the benefit of the dual-channel memory, which would hopefully mask some of the cache problems without costing many $s of die space to do so.
neye
Don't want to miss out on the party
So, my general thoughts...
1) The benchmarks have clearly shown what a good architecture this has w/r/t per clock performance.
2) The benchmarks have also clearly shown that more Mhz is really needed, especially for the workstation apps.
3) So, these two together lead me, at this point, to agree with Elmer that SOI really does look like a very costly mistake.
With all the potential found in the uArch in the chip, it's rather sad for it to be constrained by the actual frequency, especially since it has the extra stages, uses SOI, yet fails to meet the frequency of other highly-overclockable AXP chips.
I guess over the next few months it will be a good sign if they can crank up the clock 400 - 600 Mhz. With prescott coming out, I'd think that the A64's would really need to be running at 2.6 Ghz to keep up. It may sound high, but because of:
1) prescott's improvements
2) the benchies we saw today
3) the fact that the A64 will have 1/4 the cache and 1/2 the bandwidth of the chip in the benchmarks today
... it's going to be a tough road for the A64 to hoe. Hopefully for AMD the team that got the tbreds from the A's to the B's can work some similar magic with the speedpaths constraining the hammers.
neye
hey - I'm 1 in 100K!
hat about the other 99.999% of the market, which includes people who would not spend $800 for a Windows 2003 Server license?
That is, I'm 1 in 100K with the other MSDN Pro and above subscribers who get this to test and develop with
yeah, so it's not for the masses, but it's not *quite* as bad as I think you may be implying. We'll just have to wait and see.
neye
Heh, I remember buying the Qs at $103 - ugh (nt)
sgolds - INTC as an investment
I think investors just don't know what else to invest in these days so they keep money in Intel as a relatively safe place, that's the only thing holding up their stock
I think positive earnings while their primary competitor keeps losing money doesn't hurt either, eh?
Hopefully AMD can turn this around. BTW, Johan has pretty much stated that he'll have an Opteron review up on the 22nd, though he hasn't stated explicitly that *he* did the benchmarking:
http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=95029243
neye
nice job INTC (eom)
yes, i believe this
All you need to do is insert a PC Card with 802.11x wireless and disable whatever is internal
for instance, in windows through device manager.
neye
AMD advertising
I was just thumbing through one of the free mags that get sent my way (Information Week), and saw that AMD had sponsored one of those "special advertising section" articles. It's a 4-page description of the Giga group's hypothetical opteron cost savings research. Same article we saw linked on the boards sometime in the past couple of months.
neye
chip, elmer, wbmw - history
historically speaking, does "the true story" about these products ever make it around the industry, even if a few years after the fact? Will we ever know what went down with the startup of this chip, regardless of how well or poorly it turns out eventually?
Or is this type of information kept tucked away with management and the chip engineers forever?
TIA,
neye
Elmer - who ya talkin to?
It's very small when it's gained by Intel's hyperthreading. Huge if from Opteron's ondie memory controller.
I'll assume that you're saying this for the benefit of others, because I don't believe I've ever scoffed at the 10% - 15% typically seen with iHT speed-up. Heck, that's as good as going from SDR to DDR in many cases (PC 133 -> DDR 266, is what I think of ballpark as 5% - 10% gains on average for the 2Ghz range processors).
I think both i and a HT are pretty darn nifty
neye
chipguy - thanks much! (eom)
chip guy - consistency question
If you could find magic zero latency memory most integer apps would improve in performance by only 40% or so. Going from 112 ns to 87 ns is a very small change in the bigger scheme of things and probably corresponds to a few percent higher improvement.
If, given your hypotheticals, a 112 to 0 "boost" in latency would give a 40% improvement, and going from 112 to 87 is a 22% improvement, then...
couldn't you apply a 40% performance gain on the 22% improvement, thus 0.4 * 0.22 = 9% improvement?
I realize that virtually nothing is linear, but a 10% gain is relatively large in the world of cpu's, and is double the 4% gain you hypothesized later:
I would be very surprised if it was more than 4% gain on
a 256 KB A64 and a 2% gain on a 1MB A64 on integer code.
TIA for any clarifications/explanations,
neye
spokes: http://www.sirlizzard.com
here's the wayback machine's page:
http://www.sirlizzard.com" target="_new">http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.sirlizzard.com
I still own the domain, but don't have it hosted anywhere anymore. I need asp-ability, so I think I'm just going to use dyndns.com so that I can serve from home.
neye
OT: spokes - going down in history
completely OT. I just went to the "wayback machine" at http://web.archive.org
and put in my old website. Turns out the only cached page there is the one when I first got my DNS working, and you and Fwapsk are mentioned.
Just a "whaddayaknow" type of thing.
neye
econo - AMD INTC prisoner's dillema
The similarities between AMD v INTC pricing and the prisoners dillemas may seem easy to draw, but I'd submit that there is at least 1 major flaw in this line of reasoning with respect to a large number of trials.
In the prisoner's dillema, each party takes his lumps and that's that. You get 5 years in jail, so be it, nothing else affects your utility from the situation.
Play it repeatedly, tit-for-tat or otherwise, and in the end, you still serve a given number of years in jail.
With AMD and INTC, however, you don't just have 1 magic $ or utility number in each of the quadrants. Instead, you have that number (the immediate benefit), plus some other component which would represent the benefit or cost of the opponent's situation.
Easiest example? If, in three trials INTC can hurt itself, but hurt AMD even more, to the point where AMD is forced to exit the business, then INTC will act in such a manner.
Unlike the examples you cited, AMD and INTC are playing neither just one trial nor an infinite number. They are going through a certain number of trials that is directly related to how each of them play it, where each would like to stop the game on their own terms (because that would lead to monopolistic rent-taking until another competitor enters the market) due to the other's failure. Thus, they are given them non-standard prisoner's dillema incentives.
or am I way off base?
neye
Sorry Klaus, don't know
<em>Occur whenever I click on preview and click submit then. Heard that before?</em>
sometimes things like that would happen (actually, with relative frequency) at ragingbull, but this is the first I've heard about it here.
This *always* happens, or just today or...?
neye
wbmw, comb - comments please
Combjelly, I see nothing in that link relating to 32-way enabled Opteron crossbars.
So what is Cray/Sandia doing? Do they just not need those super-fast (high-bandwidth) crossbars? And, if they do need them, would that mean that they custom built them from non-reuseable designs?
neye
Klaus (and other board members)
The link to the current thread is too long to be posted here as a valid link
neat site for these situations:
http://www.makeashorterlink.com
neye