Bad decisions made Barcelona late

Nice picture of the Parmesan wheel with Intel Inside(tm). =)

I may be blind or batty or quite possibly both, but I couldn't find in the article how quickly the meteorological simulations occur with the nappy new Xeons the good professor is now using. There was a remark that the difference was quite something, but that particular difference wasn't (I don't believe) ever mentioned in the article.

Did they say how much those particular models of wheels of cheese cost? Are they more expensive with or without the Intel Inside? Do they use performance numbers for those wheels of cheese to differentiate themselves from say, wheels of cheddar? Would Parmesan be P55000+ and Cheddars be C52000+? Any idea how hard it is to come up with some flashy number that doesn't conjure images of already existing and quite well known GPU or CPU products?

Thanks for existing, good and fun stories as usual.

Sincerely,
James White

Subject: Quid

seriously, wtf is a quid? Can you please speak real English so that we car understand what you're saying?

Arashed

Subject: Is this a joke?

you are telling us that some italian cheese specialist is using a xeon server and he likes it and says its fast...

WHO CARES!!!!

Saschakrohn

Subject: Barca late

Sorry I've never interacted with the Inquirer before so I don't know if the "Author Flame" was the best route to do this but the link was at the bottom of the article and I'm lazy (hence this run on sentence) but I have some insight on why the AMD Barces are late. Now mind you if anyone asks I'm not an official source and this information is wild, very lucky, spot on, conjecture made by one of your anomalous readers. I wasn't going to ever say anything about it and now that it's water under the bridge I don't feel to bad about it but I really thought the info would come out of another source and it is just making my skin crawl every time I read wild assumptions or just the plain lack of truth about the subject. Right, I'll get to the point now. AMD's newest fab was supposed to be a ground up build for 65nm wafer production. However due to skyrocketing demand for Athlons at the time, things changed. Several factors were taken into consideration, by AMD, such as the grossly underestimated time line and threat of Intel's (now dubbed) core architecture and the fact that they could shave several months off the production start up time at Fab 36 if they were to start at 90nm instead of 65nm. This decision was a heated and very openly contested debated among AMD execs which I'm sure everyone will agree should have been contested until it was rescinded. While the conversion of the facility to a 65nm process was fairly quick in coming it was still detrimental to the Barcelona's birth date. Full scale spinup work for the new chip could not begin until 65nm production was fully up and running. Even after the implementation of the new 65nm process was complete AMD management struck again. To increase output to satisfy demand of then current Athlon cores, mainstream partial die shrinks were fast tracked for the A64 and given priority over the Barcelona startups. While a lot of work was done during this time frame on Barce, the partial die shrink from 90nm to 65nm of the A64s was given more resources. All told the sad end product was at least a 4 month delay in the Barcelona launch. Bad decisions were only to blame in this instance not production/architecture problems. Well that and all the AMD fans complaining that Dell didn't sell AMD CPUs. In fact if people didn't love AMD so much back then and didn't buy so many CPUs they would of had a competitive product for almost half a year now. ;)

Cheers,

Dano

Subject: Baffling article on cheese and Xeon 7300s

You recently wrote an article about a cheese professor who switched to Xeon 7300s. From the article:

"he claims that until he installed Vpro running on Xeon 7300, typically simulations would take over five hours a day using two dedicated servers."

"This, however, is a pretty staggering difference for a system and we'll be interested to see independent benchmarks of this server compared to Intel's previous CPUs."

The problem is, you never wrote what the performance is with the Xeon. You provided datapoint "x", said that there's a staggering difference, but never provided datapoint "y".

So how fast were the simulations with the Xeon 7300? I'm curious.

Shuffman

[The Good Professor said it takes an hour now. Sorry. We added it into the story. Ed.]

Subject: Patent infringement

If you're going to write an article about patent infringement, I'd think it would be worthwhile to mention *which* patents are being infringed.

Not just the patent numbers, but something about what the patent is about.

Shuffman

Subject: Check your patent numbers

Is this really the patent numbers they are complaining about, or did you mess them up, I really don't think windows media player has a florescent bulb that needs inert gas supplementation. Of course winamp was out with a playlist before the other patent was filed, but thats patents for you.

Markitect

Subject: BBC Errors

"First stop was a behind-the-scenes computer company called Cadence. It designs and makes the machines that help companies in the hideously complex business of designing computer chips."

As one of the engineers given the boot by "Mister Fister" a couple of years ago, I can assure you that Cadence do not make machines iof any kind. They do make SOFTWARE that help companies in the hideously complex business of designing computer chips, though.

A Maccormack

Subject: Bosnostonian web site

Hi

i would like to add something to your article

as i am from estonia and estonian is my native language i can tell you that the css file that the bosnian embassy uses is a bit 'cute'

http://www.bhembassy.org/static/styles/additional.css

you might not notice it but:

"/* Stiilifail genereeritud baasiparingu tulemusel. */ /* Ara muuda kasitsi kuna muudatused lahevad skripti kaivitamisel kaduma. */"

this is clearly written in estonian also the CSS file is full of _estonian_ words and comments written in estonian

this is my 2 cents, if you would care.

Gish

Subject: 50 quid a year to run a microwave oven?

C'mon, a casual analysis shows that's totally bogus. Since I'm from the states, I'll convert it to dollars and use round figures to make the math simple. So 50 quid is $100, my power costs 10 cents per kwh so $100 buys me 1000 kwh per year. Figure that's about 3 kwh per day or 0.1 kwh per hour. That's a 100 watt draw.

Has a microwave oven been built in the last 20 years that takes 100 watts just to run the clock? I'll bet you'd have to look pretty hard to find any that take more than 10-15 watts, though I'd agree with those who'd say that's still very wasteful and they should only take 1 or 2 watts, and maybe have an option to disable the clock and be fully "off" if you've already got enough other items in your kitchen capable of telling you the time.

But overstating one's case by tossing out numbers that are totally bogus on the face of them completely undermines the point you were trying to make that standby power usage of many electronic products is wasteful and should be curtailed.

Doug

Subject: 2Clix suit

2Clix doesnt care about the negative publicity because they are rebranding to P1 anyway.

Ninjavap

Subject: no more core wars

Spot on article, more like this please ;)

Dirk

Subject: AMD press conference

Do you really wonder why AMD ignores you? They should ship you off to Shanghai and leave you there...

Randy

Subject: to Sami Perttilä on "Leave poor Microsoft alone!"

ooh come on! The Inquirer has its own style, and it's just fine and hilarious as it is. Some love it, some hate it, I just hope they don't change it.

"... but I just think a news article should be objective... " In some sort of twisted, sick way, the Inq is really more objective than any other bribeable source you could find on the net. You ought to learn and see between the puns, the sarcasm, the hilarious nicknames, the reality and everything else the other media try to hide.

Anyway, you could read something else if you actually can't endure it anymore, maybe something else "more objective and professional" at Other Plaice?

greetings from Mexico.

Raskolnikov

Subject: Great idea

Let's all outsource our jobs to people in India and other impoverished countries. That way, they get paid to make a bunch of products we won't have the money to buy anymore because we'll be out of a job to pay for it.

Somehow I cannot see this trend going anywhere good.

Pascal.

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