intel won't touch vista..

heh,

that's probably response to intel
decision not to touch vista:

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/06/23/intel-dumps-vista

Multi-core, software development, not a solution

I think it is pretty clear that Ballmer & Co. cannot write good software for just ONE core. And now he wants many cores. However, the multi-core design is DOA.

Intel, AMD multi-core processing approach doomed - UK multi-processing experts
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2008/04/10/43500/intel-amd-multi-core-processing-approach-doomed-uk-multi-processing-experts.htm

Spring Cleans/Autumnal Falls

Wow...... Steve has been keeping his Good Eye on the Industry and he must have sussed out the a new Processor Architecture ReConfigurations .... Neural Bridges in Coming Competitor Chips with all that he Needs and which Intel doesn't Feed.

That puts SMARTer Intelligent Design Architecture in the Chip, Pumping out New Information/Input as Clean Blood into the Operating System, the only likely thing to need to change to Change the Operating Systems Performance.

Which is also a Reflection of Action required in Motherboards2 ..... the Board Room.

Rich comments

These comments are indeed very rich coming one of Bill gates' crashware cronies.

Microsoft vista follows the traditions of many Microsoft products, whereby they crash alot, are poorly conceived and poorly implemented. Vista is up there with Windows 98, Windows ME and windows NT (reboot anyone?).

If innovation and progress means increasing features to the point the software is ultra heavyweight bloaty and unusable then Microsoft is the clear winner.

The longer the code path the more bugs, Microsoft can't even program a "minutes remaining" indicator accurately!

In short how dare Microsoft critiscize Intel when they churn out utter crap every day of the week. Go and check the vulnerabilities list for Firefox against Internet explorer if your not sure.

AMD are even worse, by comparison.

AMD are pushing multi-core chips even harder than Intel are... See those incredibly low prices on the AMD quadcores? Case and point.

A lot of AMD chips also run hotter than the Intel ones now as well... Nine of AMD's current desktop chips have a TDP of >100w, while Intel are only currently marketing four chips with >100w tdp.

Ballmer is a moron. If he's going to bash a company for pushing lots of hot-running cores; he should be bashing AMD.

To each their own

Everyone is entitled to a bad day, maybe Ballmer was having one. Never the less, he shouldn't be castigating the sponsor of the show how he did. There are more subtle ways of doing so, and they are usually more amusing.

Ballmer is talking out of his derriere...

Intel's engineering efforts are nothing short of outstanding. To think that only 15 years ago, the Commodore 64 was one of the most powerful home computers you could buy, seems sometimes unbelievable.

Especially when much of this brand-new technology is available to the average Joe, at an affordable price - Intel too, has made computers for the masses and not the classes, possible.

Microsoft needs to realise that the bigger-is-better approach is outdated, just as Ford has realised that SUVs just aren't selling. More and more people are going to buy Atom-like machines, and Microsoft needs to spend some serious R&D to catch up.

Computers just aren't a premium product anymore. Microsoft evidently does not realise this, as it still thinks people will pay just under 500 euros for what is just an operating system - especially when you can buy an Eee PC for a fraction of that price.

It is Ballmer that needs to wake up to the fact that his company is making a rubbish operating system, which no longer represents value for money in a world where alternatives do exist.

Rubbish? Hardly

You are definitely blowing his comments out of proportion. He's just stating the facts about CPU technology at present. You can only get the speeds of all these CPUs up so fast before you hit a wall. Intel and AMD (and others) are compensating by increasing core counts and parallelization (sp?) techniques. Ballmer is simply stating the situation as it is - including the fact that future OS designs will have to take this into consideration. This story definitely lives up to the "friction" aspect of "teh Inq".

You totally misinterpreted his words

Why don;t you actually look at what he's really saying instead of applying blatantly misguided spin just to get a sensationlist headline?

Balmer is pointing out the limits of physics that Intel and every other chip maker have to play by. The fact that atoms can only switch electricity so fast is not intel's (or anyone else's) fault, dicounting God who invented the way the universe works.

Actually, by saying that Intel is running at the limit of physics in chip design is a compliment to them for being able to get so close.

Neither does it actually follow that he's dissing intel for adding parallelism to their CPUs.. It sounds like he's more concerned about the amount of work MS have to do in order to make their operating systems beter capitalise on the features now offered by newer CPUs.

Intel not fast enough

not fast enough for vista or windos 7

That wacky guy Balmer

Ballmer and MSFT must be deeper in trouble than anyone imagined. Comments like that could cause trouble with the anti-trust monitoring on MSFT in the U.S. Could the problem be that MSFT has trouble writing code for multi-core processors? Darn. Linux does it very well, thank you. Even fully loaed PC's have struggled with Vista since it was introduced, and instead of seeing an improved operating system, MSFT tries the blame game. Note to Ballmer, you folks wrote Vista; you folks created your own problems. The plans for multi-core processors pre-dates Vista by several years.

Reply

Thanks for that genius insight mr balmer, but unfortunately the entire world was already aware that they moved to multi core because they were hitting a speed limit, several years ago already.
Perhaps you can do something from your end, the end you control, and streamline your silly software and speed it up using some assembler coded bits and dumping code from the 80's as found presently in your offerings.

Ballmer spits out Rubbish

Microsoft is just trying to paint lipstick on that Vista Pig.

Ballmer was trying to avoid negative press questions about Vista being soo slow.
He cant blame Intel for the fact that it still cant catch up to XP in speed and efficency. He has not vision and Microsoft has no real direction.

Bashing?

He's not bashing Intel at all. The limitations he's talking about are not caused by Intel and affect every chip maker on the planet.

Hey Wakeup

Hey Stevie....

Stop blaming others for your companies inability to clean up after itself.

What's the point in making the processors run faster if your company is just going to bloat up the OS to the point of making it slow as molasses?

Put your product on a diet, loose the bloat and tighten up the code. You'd be surprised at what your product can do...

PS.. If I wanted to be spoon fed every app someone thinks I might need in life, I'd buy a Mac.

Ballmer

So it's Intel's fault that Microsoft produces such crap? Heh, I can really see that playing well with the crowds. I wish someone in the audience would have tigged him back. He's like Steve Jobs, but without the smug, annoying yuppie factor. Instead he is just smug and annoying. And LOUD!

buy amd

may be microsoft should buy some microhard and integrated both software and hardware better? The argument sound a bit hollow when someone else (like apple) also use Intel "more processors" without complain (at least not openly). Hire few hardware guru instead of many software geek may be benefit. Ha, Ha, Ha, finally, someone acknowledge that software can't do "everything".

Runs Linux just fine...

Nobody's perfect but you have to admit that Intel's products cause far less headaches than Microsoft's. After all, Intel runs systems like Linux and OS-X just fine.

What Microsoft is historically really bad at is making systems that work on typical hardware. Their designers don't know how to husband resources or how to work within constraints. That's why they've not been at all successful in the embedded space -- all they have to offer is a confusing API and a pile of non-standard stuff "that everybody uses" (or rather, is forced to use). They've got away with it because they're rich and we've been able to expand the hardward platform technology cheaply. We're now approaching the limits -- time for elegance to substitute for brute force.

et tu msft

And MSFT, they cant create anything better than XP. They just made it shinier and eat more ram and at times lose all of ur settings requiring u to create another logon and start over......gee thanks.

RHT to the rescue?

So MS wants RHT? Nehalem's ability to shut down extra cores, and overclock one should help. If AMD can do what they've been alluding too, that should help too- something about combing cores to affect better single-core performance

Yes, quite

It is a well known fact that if it wasn't for microsoft's absolutely brilliant operating systems the PC would not exist.

Unsubscribe

Please unsubscribe me from this nonsense.

And while you are at it...

why not tie some old tin cans to his limo.

I read somewhere that shockingly Vista didnt make multicore optimisation much more of a priority than XP. Also other sources have alleged Vista is a bit of a resource hog.

How can a newer OS be less efficient than its predecessor? Maybe MS really didnt see the ceiling to chip speeds coming. It would make more sense than the idea that they knew but thought it didnt matter, wouldnt it?

Extraordinary

I must assume that Miss Emma is one of the unfortunates to have passed through our broken education system fairly recently. She clearly had NO understanding of the basis Balmer's comments. Could I suggest that the Inquirer sends an adult next time.
I hold no brief for Balmer by the way but if you don't understand what he's talking about, you really should not report him.

Bwuh?

Clock for clock, both AMD and Intel are faster than they have ever been. Balmer's just bitchy because these chips can't keep up with his company's kludgy, weak coding. Look how spectacularly Linux and Mac OSX run on current hardware.

Balmer, shut the f**k up and fix your products, then bitch about performance.

Welll Done Ballmer

Well done ballmer, finally someone who is prominent in the IT community has spoken up about the lunacy of Intel's multi-core madness rather than delivering true innovations and pushing forward pc architecture.

I actually have nothing but a new level of respect for Steve Ballmer now.

Steve is right!

Have you ever looked at the design of Intel?
It's still the same old crap, NB/SB/CPU design.

Simply look at AMD, sure they are a bit slower at 1 silicon, but as soon as you ad more silicons they totaly blow Intel away.
Why? NUMA.

More cores on 1 silicon brings you into a memory-bandweight restriction.
Intels way: More L3 cache!

But as soon as you start scaling up, it's Intel that fails BIG time!
Try scaling to 32 cores, AMD will multiply the memory bandweight to 8xDual-Channel-DDR800....what does Intel?
It all has to go thru the stupid FSB again...this is silly.

No wonder Steve has had it with Intel, Intel is nice at the desktop front, but on (medium/big!)servers they simply suck.

Ballmer sucks

Microsoft is just mad because they cant code a OS for one core let alone 8 or more.

Its time for software to catch up with hardware, and that means spending loads of cash.

What?

He has some cheek pointing the finger at intel when MS forced out competitors with more innovative hardware designs and lumped us with an age of x86, I don't see them trying to port windows to the PS3's core processor or any other architecture.
It took MS way to long just to get 64bit half right, they still can't match the competition for multitasking and memory management and now they are getting upset because they are expected to adapt to multiple cores? Are they not content with having all there external hardware drivers written for them, do they want the code for the platform too?

BIG BALLSMER

What balls! That pious sanctimonious egocentric son of a bitch has been cranking out broken bloatware for over a generation!

1st was the abomination call Windows Maelstrom (Millennium), the absolute king of the reboot/BSOD, bar none.

Then is the current generation multi billion dollar PIG/failure called Vista.

When INTEL CORPORATION REFUSES TO MIGRATE TO AN IN HOUSE OPERATING SYSTEM BECAUSE OF:

Hardware and software incompatibilities.
Poorly written and poorly executed code.
Stability Issues.
Ridiculously annoying security measures/user accounts

A BELL SHOULD START RINGING IN YOUR THICK SKULL!


FASTER switching speeds, he says? The switching speeds of transistors and the feature size of the current generation of Intel’s 45nM process with Hi-k have been revolutionary, to say the least!

What that IDIOT fails to comprehend is no hardware on the planet can run his code/bloat with 100% stability. 2 cores, 4 cores, or multicore, the hardware gets better and faster, and his GARBAGE get worse with EVERY successive generation.

He’s an asshole who is pissed because INTEL WILL NOT BUY INTO VISTA!!!

Neither will I.

SPARKS

WTF?

Is this site becoming the Daily Mail of tech sites? There was no mention of Intel being 'rubbish' at making chips, and nor was it implied.

Oh well, if it gets your hits up who am I to argue? But I imagine you're close to loosing a few as well.

Intel not holding up their end

Microsoft had always relied on Intel delivering consistently FASTER chips to overcome Microsoft's bloated, sloppy coding.

While some software writers emphasise tight, fast code that works well, Microsoft cranks out the sausage and depeneded on Intel to take up the slack by delivering faster processors. From Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98 to Windows XP that was the arrangement.

The flip side was that people NEEDED faster processors -- usually in the form of NEW computers to run the new OS. So, Intel won too.

What's different is that in the interim between XP and Vista, Intel focused on multi core processors instead of faster MHz. And 32-bit Vista in particular is not optimized to take advantage of that wrinkle. Microsoft was assuming faster processors so their Vista code is crap.

Now for Windows 7 Microsoft is trying to optimize the code somewhat to use multi-core processors -- but that's like generals who fight the last war over again when a new war breaks out. (Remember the French Maginot Line in WWII which was built for the trench warfare of WW1? Hitler ran right around that in his tank blitzkrieg.)

Vista's inability to take advantage of multi-core processors lets people see the bloated mess that OS is and how it does not compare well to the much older XP which will run faster on the exact same hardware.

But rather than blame themselves, Balmer wishes it was like the good old days when Intel would cover up Microsoft's sins.

Nothing New Los Alamos says Same Thing

It has been this way for over two years but most reporters in the IT field didn't realize it.

"Transistors are still shrinking, and the number per microprocessor is still growing, but performance measured in arithmetic operations per second has flattened out since 2002.

"The biggest reason for the leveling off is the heat dissipation problem,” says Ken Koch, one of the leaders of the Roadrunner project. “With transistors at 65-nanometer sizes, the heating rate would increase 8 times whenever the clock speed was doubled, outstripping our ability to carry the heat away by standard air cooling.” It would be like running a car at high speed with no water in the radiator."

"Another huge obstacle to increased performance is the memory barrier. In the not-too-distant past, the time to fetch data from the node memory and load it into the processing units (called the “compute core”) of a microprocessor was comparable to the time it would take that core to do the number crunching. Now the number crunching is 50 times faster than the time to fetch and load data. The time spent in data retrieval and communications can no longer be ignored."
http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/fuseaction/1663.article/d/200805/id/13277

Why else is the US government going to CPU/GPU/ FPGA architecture in Roadrunner, Lincoln, Cascade and Rainier. Ballmer is only saying what the pros have known for almost two years now. Ken Kennedy did a presentation at SC'06, Government Contracting News had article in November 2006. NVidia and ATI/AMD have said the same thing for 2 1/2 years. Does it take Ballmer telling the press the same thing to get the press to pay attention.

bigger aint better

With intel shoving more than 2 times the number of transistors onto it's C2Q cpu than phenom and beating it by a less than 20% margin in "most" applications. It begs to be said that the man is probably right.
While intel IS top dog in the cpu performance stakes at this point in time, they have thrown stupidly inefficient amounts of resources onto a die in order to do so and therefore will inevitably hit the wall long before anyone else. Sadly enough AMD currently lack the same technological brute force to produce processors with the same number of transistors and at the same size, or Intel would be in serious trouble

What about AMD?

The only equipment I have seen that runs Vista decently is Intel's. They use huge caches compared to AMD so decent AMD chips are sluggish with Vista as they have to thrash.

e.g. AMD64 5000 with 2X512 KB L2 cache and Core2 Duo with 4 MB of cache

Of course, an AMD 5000 running GNU/Linux will kick Vista's butt.

The end says it all...

“If we were to take advantage of the hardware, just that one change mandates and necessitates ongoing OS innovation”.

And we all know that Microcrap has no innovation capability what so ever. Why doesn't the OS just take advantage of the multi core capability. 2GHz x4 or whatever should be plenty to run on if you don't bloat the OS with needless junk. Even a old 3GHz x2 Pentium D runs my Gentoo box just fine.

vista talk

sounds to me like he is mad about vista not running right. When they made it, they thought intel would have a monster chip to run vista. But like crysis, you have something un useable to the average ( and vast majority) users.

Yep, thats ballmer for ya.

Coming from the guy who once screamed "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS", I know his comments are on the mark

[/sarcasm]

fud

I can't wait until intel publishes a reactionary article dissing vista. This could get fun :D

It's the L word.

I'm sure that he was not happy about Intel's support of various Linux projects to begin with. Intel buying OpenedHand (which is a Linux company) is probably what set him off today.

Now I can truely say he's f*cking stupid.

He's crying about Intel's vertical expansion of the cores only because programmers are having trouble in writing suitable code that takes advantage of all available cores.

So instead of shouting out some crap out of his mouth, he better invest some cash in training his programmers.

MS worried

As linux has far superior multiprocessor capabilities than than windaz and it will mean some huge rewrites to the vista kernel and application s/w to play catch up.

MS success in having its OS installed on most computers is it's achillies heel as it tries to please everyone with a one size fits all model which I'm afraid did very well for the 90s but the world has moved on since. It's like trying to steer the titanic around a formula one racetrack

MS needs midori and fast - within the next five years or else they are going to be so far behind as to be irrelevant.

So he's right

Ballmer can be right all he wants, but really he is the last in line when it comes to having any right to bite Intel.
With MS's proven history of collusion with Intel and hard disk makers, MS really should not go and bite the hand that keeps it fed.

And the line "If we were to take advantage of the hardware" makes me think two things : first of all, it would be nice if MS *did* take advantage of the hardware, for once.
Second, it makes me think that Ballmer is ready to blame anyone for anything except Microsoft for Vista (lack of) performance.

Take advantage of the hardware, Steve, write an OS that can correctly use multiple threads on multi-core chips.
Oh, and try to keep it under a terabyte, will you ? That would be nice.

Going the wrong Way

I have 3 p4 xp pro's in my house working just fine and been tossing around the idea of building new. I am seeing copper plumbing, bigger power supply requirements, different video card power connectors, ddr3 with power problems. The technology is to buid smaller and faster and less power. The computer industry is "Going the Wrong Way", a little john candy humor. I think I will wait.

Vista dilemas

If the current processor options have got users confused or worse, jaded, the OS selection has most of us bamboozelled and we will likely stay with what we know, and thats Ms.

I think Ms's biggest problem with all of this senario has been the pedestrian pace of 64 OS development. IMO this has been a missed opportunity for Ms, because early AMD 64 users were on the look out for justifying their future proofing purchase. Instead they found themselves overhauled by an archaic bunged together solution with added instruction sets aimed at key benchmarks, locked in on a 32bit OS.

Ms was from then on condemned to support VISTA and XP in both 32 and 64bit, whereas they would have better served to go into full development of XP 64 before A64 launch and then not worried about a VISTA 32bit derivative and brought forth the new world of 64bit OS. XP would then have been the transition OS already working and profitable, with a greater installment of 64 bit ready software and drivers for the new order.

Oh well, 20 20 hindsite I guess.

maybe Ballmer is right

Look at the positive side; why does Toshiba has to manufacture its own, a.k.a. HD Core chip to make its video class notebook runs more efficiently instead of relying solely on the intel chip. Hey, the Toshiba approach is quite simplistic yet effective engineering.

Years ago, the 486 was the fastest intel chip, and it could hardly run a VCD. On the other hand, a Toshiba chip built on an average player runs it flawlessly.

Enter the era of Hi Definition this and that and those... you think intel could handle those if you let your PC emulate a total breathtaking home theater experience? I mean a home theater ala Lucasfilm THX studio with all the gadgets controlled by a PC? I may sound so ridiculous for an ordinary techno weirdo, but with intel consumer grade chips, you simply cant.

Well, maybe, Ballmer is just right at the wrong intel time. But I did not say MS software is cute either. Nope.

Looks like someone's disappointed

Looks like someone is disappointed...

When Vista Bloat Premium and Ultimate rolled out, back in 2007, Balmer probably thought "it might be kind of slow now, but after one and a half year, the evolution of speed in processors will make it look fast, as always".
This has always being the game with Windows. Think of it. Windows 95, Windows NT4.0, Windows 2000... All of them were too slow when they first came out, and hardware companies always saved the day by releasing fastest chips.

Now that the focus shifted from power to mobility, and from GHz speed into multicore (because increased speed requires expensive cooling), not only did the evolution in processors didn't help speed up vista as Microsoft expected, but it made it look like the outdated dork, as Vista isn't much multicore nor mobile.

SO... Not only vista aren't getting significantly faster nowadays, they are becoming obsolete. AND BALMER IS DISAPPOINTED ABOUT THAT.

Multi core code

You're right. Microsoft can't write code effectively to make use of multiple cores.

They can't write code to accurately display the "minutes remaining" for any given task.

They can't write code to properly segment the operating system, this is how for example a miss behaving "Notepad.exe" can crash the whole of vista.

This is why many new laptops with vista now ship with a free "XP upgrade". Microsoft call it "XP downgrade", but all the users call it upgrade.

After ensuring a particular laptop doesn't have an Nvidia chipset my second mandatory requirement is that it has XP as an OS option.