AMD's Fusion looks as innovative as Intel's gluing process

Subject: Viiv responds to Intel...

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Hennessy

Subject: Spy vs Spy...

Sure, it seems like the whole antivirus company versus virus author thing seems more than a little sick and even symbiotic, and I would love to see malware authors locked up in Riker's Island with "child rapist" tattoo'd onto their buttocks.

But saying "the antivirus companies are only in it for the money", "don't want to stamp out viruses", and are "cynically preying on people's paranoia to sell their products and their ... subscription services", seems a little harsh. Everyone needs to make money to house and feed themselves and buy iPhones, Escalades and summer houses in the Hamptons, after all.

Regardless, McAfee is getting all the props right now only because the babbling imbeciles at Symantec spent two years telling their customers who just lost days of productivity and gobs of data to the latest worm that Symantec won't detect it because they offer "anti-VIRUS" software. Farging bastiches.

Brad

Subject: Sony puts blu movies online

Like everything Sony this article looked interesting until I realised that there was no pron.

Vap

Subject: Intel Invite

Careful, don't darken this.

It is very difficult for us common folk to hear news of even what chip or chip-set Intel and AMD are using or planning to release anymore. If not for Inquirer and their reporters hard work.

All those numbers and code names become more clear after Inquirer translates them for us. It was all by unanimous request of the reading masses.

Respectfully, Harold.

(The Alice in Wonderland comparison was great)

Subject: Come on Mario.

Like always, we at AMD were shooting from the LIP !

Bring it on - our Phee-et-nom !

Suing and Puking-From-My-Gut And Gestapo Raids At Dawn,
Hector

Subject: Common Cold

"If they found a cure for the common cold, it's quite possible they'd withhold it and sell you cold remedies for the rest of your life instead."

Couldn't be truer, there have been medicines found which effectively combat a number of diseases, such as cancer, which companies have held back for years. Wheres the profit in selling a one off cure, when you can make people suffer for the rest of their lives for 20x the revenue?

god bless capitalism

Lum0wned

Subject: Thanks for your comments to Torrenza and Genoso

But Geneso has got its own camp now ... all the different cards for PCI-Express.

AMD has got some rare HTX-cards on its own camp ... and inside the Tech-Day presentation we can see, that PCI-Express is inside AMDs next step with Octacores + GPU inside ...

I saw at that Tech-Day nothing about HyperTransport and HTX and partners with HyperTransport CPUs (RMI has got an Octacore inside a Tyan-Server with HyperTransport Broadcomchipset ... but you saw nothing about all that. Why?

Martin

Subject: Intel product names

Well, simplifying the names is a start. But it's not enough. As much as Intel got hounded for their single-minded pursuit of higher clock speeds, and as much as AMD was teased for using "PR ratings" on their CPUs, at least the names were somewhat intuitive. It was possible to do a rough comparison of expected performance based on product names--an Athlon XP 3200 could be expected to outperform a Pentium 4 2.4GHz, and a P4 3.4GHz could be expected to outperform a Sempron 2800.

What's with the naming now? How much better is a Core 2 Duo 6300 than a C2D4300? Where do the two companies' lines of processors match up? What's with the 5xx and 6xx lines of Pentiums and the 3xx and 4xx lines of Celeron D's?

Abandoning the race for "more megahertz at any cost" was a good move. Abandoning a rating scheme that made sense wasn't.

Bill

Subject: Sony Ads

I think Sony is on to something. Other companies could benefit much from adopting Sony's more barbaric marketing stratagems of late. Take Dell for example, using Sir Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Hannibal Lecter:

"It's Dellicious."

Engorge yourself on the new "dual brains" Core 2 Duo computers; 2x the brains, 2x the fun! Only from Dell --Now shipping with Ubuntu."

Just the thing Dell needs to get their foot --or should I say femur --back into the door!

Jeff

Subject: Peeing in Public. UK vs Sweden

Smiled when I read your article.

Us strait-laced Brits always seemed to be envious of the Scandinavians attitude towards flaunting flesh.

Question: Describe the circumstances in the UK when a male cannot be prosecuted for flaunting his exposed member whilst "doing a Paula" (Radcliffe)?

Answer: When he has one hand on his car.

Yep - motorists taken-short can have a pee wherever they like provided the keep one hand on their (?a?) vehicle!

[Don't ask how energetically one must 'shake the drips off' with his other hand, to be prosecuted for indecent exposure.]

Ron Hughes

Subject: AMD seeks to outflank Intel on virtualisation

Mario, Your series is well done. I will give you some links to two white papers one from Sandia National Labs and the other from Lawrence Berkeley which continue your theme at the very cutting edge.

Here and here.

The government maintains these labs to stay at the very forefront of technology and in some cases such as SeaStar actually designs the technology. If you read this article that comes from Oak Ridge you will see that the Intel design handicaps are more significant that you think.

Hpcwire story

Note how Thunderbird literally falls off the table after messages become larger than 8k. Red Storm is the prototype for the Cray XT3 and Thunderbird is a Dell Intel design. RedStorm is now 4 years old and has better performance characterisiitcs than Abe at Argonne Labs which is a Dell Intel Cloverton cluster. RedStorm gets approximately 46Gflops/kw to 23.8 Gflops/kw for Abe. Very poor scalablity negates any advantages Intel would otherwise have. That is why AMD enjoys a 12 to 1 advantage in supercomputer sales to the US government. Roadrunner will have a 20x increase in performance when the Cell BE+ chips are installed.

lanl.gov/roadrunner

Ed Hinders

Subject: Dell Computer Horrors

I briefly read the letter you published about Dell's extremely poor service.

I have been having a lot of issues with Dell recently about the way software was loaded on my new XPS M1710 Notebook Computer. The technical help was worthless, and has resulted in wasted days of efforts.

Today, I received some Dell Warranty cards with the wrong address on the envelope. This after Dell shipped the computer to the correct address weeks ago. Following about a half-hour of being questioned by two different Dell representatives (who barely spoke English), the last one said she couldn't make the simple address change. What in the world has happened to Dell. Has their Managemen gone brain dead?

JH Dodds

Subject: Torrenza

How much longer are you going to blabber on about Torrenza being the saving grace of AMD? If AMD can't deliver on their core market, CPU's, then it won't matter what they have in the works because the little money they do make on CPU's will start to get smaller and smaller. They need to focus 100% on delivering K10 at higher speeds and greater quantity as fast as possible. If they can't reach 3Ghz K10 in volume until spring of next year then who cares what Torrenza might be able to do for them in a niche market? And another thing, AMD's Fusion won't be fusion as seen in articles posted on this site. It's a multi-die chip package that looks as innovative as Intel's gluing process. Even if Torrenza was the holy grail of super computer performance on a desktop it won't save AMD from itself.

Lazz

Subject: Antivirus hailed as greatest IT thing ever

I really enjoyed your article, "Antivirus hailed as greatest IT thing ever". Not only was it dead-on accurate, it also made me LOL several times!

Thanks and keep up the good work!

Patrick Day

Subject: AMD

While AMD may have all the vision and system focus in the world they still need to do one thing which they have been failing to do which is execute. They may have great things but if people can't buy them it doesn't really matter. AMDs vision seems to be flawed somewhat as well and not focused enough on the midrange cash cow where the bulk of money is made, selling to the masses. AMDs past vision of everyone having 64bit processors did/is coming to pass even though everyone is running 32bit OSes still which just makes 64bit home computing the biggest marketing sham of all time. If AMD manages to survive the next 2 years then everyone will have crazy super home virtualization that will not be used just like the 64bit madness. The average home users do about 4 things really. Myspace, IM, "Office", and play games. Games being about the only thing that will benefit from such hardware providing anyone adopts supporting it and given the upgrade cycle it will probably be about 4 yea

Pete

Subject: How AMD will seek to limit Intel's Core chip success

If you haven't figured it out yet, geneseo is all intel (and their partners) marketing hype.

David

Subject: Computing Technology Industry Association

Another load of crap from CompTIA. There are untold numbers of people dropping thousands of dollars learning how to pass the A+ certifications, but they don't know how to fix common computer problems. There are so many questions on the test that have no right answer it isn't funny. I would have to stay away from computers for at least a year to replace reality with the answers they want to hear.

DJ Stanton

Subject: No More Core 2 Duo but Dual Core Core 2?

"Storage compartments? Storage compartments?!?!" ~William Shatner trying to act in Star Trek: The Old Series, Troubles with Tribbles Episode~

"The What? The What?" ~William Shatner, same episode, 5 seconds later~

Okay... so Intel is dropping the Duo brand making it "Intel Core 2" right? and the Pentium 4 Dual Core is going to be a the Pentium Duet? Are they doing this because originally, they confused the hell out of customers mixing the "Core Duo" brand with "Dual Core" processors? "The Intel Dual Core Core 2 Duo" Heh, they could win awards for alliteral and palindromic poetic devices.

And oh my god, that's such a lame name for a pentium; Pentium Duet. They might as well start calling things after music.

The Core 2 Melody, The Pentium Harmony, The Celeron Symphony, and we all could click our heels three times and equate AMD products to the amount of cores customers get to sleep with: The Athlon Monogamy, The Athlon Bigamy, The Athlon Quadrogamy.

They really should exercise the principles of KISS: "Keep it simple, stupid" And emphasize on the 'stupid' part.

The Dude

Subject: French Barry Trotter

A Teen Pirate...what is that? Jack Sparrow with a fishing boat??

It's a funny thing really...all this copyright infrigement business is getting out of hand. So now they will try to make an example out of this kid? put on a circus show & come with the threatening legal jargon only a qualified pencil pusher could possibly hope to understand.

J.K. Rowlin would do well to slap some agents and publishers on the wrists for such slow translation for her work. After all, everyone knows it will sell & French is not exactly an obscure langauge.

And assuming the kid would have translated the entire literary work and submitted to the mutliple torrent forums online...SO?? Would that have broken J.K. Rowlin's piggy bank??

A french translation can ALREADY BE FOUND ONLINE. And guess what, the English version can be found too...what does that mean? it means that someone can translate it to french anyways.

Where ever there is a demand, there is a supply. In this case it was a gesture of good will. After all, so many people want that Bary Trotter nonsense. The kid decided to help out. It's not like he made money off it.

So whats the big fuss about? they got upset because they didn't release a translation in time and some TEENAGER beat them to it. Laughable.

W00tseaker

P.S.

J.K. Rowlin would probably not be able to have much say here. If any of you ever saw a book contract you would know there is so much crap there it wouldn't even pass for toilet paper. In other words, her hands are tied. (or so I assume)

Subject: INQ

I just read the Inquirer for the first time (the piece on T-Mobile's "generous offer")

and very much like your mix of hard fact and wise cynicism.

respectfully

Gershom Gale

Subject: Hill & Knowlton

Geesh, you still got sour grapes about us finally whipping AMD into submission. Get over it dude, it's only going to get worse from here. We always know we've won when the anti-trust suits come out.

Gordon Moore

Subject: geeks wear glasses

All the geeks I know (and yeah, I'm a programmer) were wearing glasses even before they entered the IT profession. What's more, many of them were wearing glasses before computers were common household items. The real question is why do analytically smart, socially incompetant people tend to have bad eyesight?

Zwong

Subject: Phishing's Pointless Stats

The real question is how many millions/billions vs. the number of residents in any given country, and how much lost per average income. That'll tell you something.

What's the make up of the phishing schemes? Are they for charity or something else?

The reason these questions are asked is that maybe the people of the US are more giving to charities. The number of citizens in the US is 300 million so you average that out. The average income tells you whether these people are the targets because they have more income to spend.

So, the number of billions is sort of pointless except to show bias toward the US.

JD Blaich

Subject: "all the latest Blu-ray content"

So that'll be a site with, what, 5 titles ?

And they make a Flash site for it ? Well, nothing like Flash to spend megabytes of bandwidth without saying anything, that's for sure.

Pascal.

Subject: Trustworthy paradox

Hm, I am getting very confused thinking about the trust subject concerning written media, beit on dead trees or electrons. You write that you are perceived trustworthy, but that would mean that if you aren't, then I cannot trust your article either. So, we have:

- you are trustworthy and I trust you
- you are trustworthy but I think you write crap
- you write crap but I trust you
- you write crap and I think you write crap

Only the first and the last item would be considered a good result as we agree on the content. However, the second and third makes it a bit more problematic. Evenmore if your original article falls in the intermediate categories.

So, the l'INQ paradox of {dis}belief, I suggest that you write crap and should not be trusted. Then I can get a good laugh for all the crap you choose to bring. This would make you a trustworthy source of crap which I can trust.

Greetings,
Bertho

Subject: Please !!!! "Open source" NOT "Open sauce"

Sirs,

It puts your publication in a very poor light when the computer industry correspondent makes an absurd mistake like this in the opening line!!! It isn't the first time this mistake has occurred, either. Check back.

Respectfully,

Richard Howell

Subject: Old phones

"we've got an average of 1.39 old handsets just laying around doing nothing."

Given your readership is going to mainly consist of gadget freeks like myself, I'm sure we can improve on 1.39... I'll start the ball rolling... (Vaguely in chronological order)

NEC P3 (at home somewhere)
Nokia 6130 (at home somewhere)
Nokia 6210 (at home somewhere)
Nokia 7650 (in car glovebox)
Nokia 6600 (in car glovebox)
Nokia N70 (in laptop sidepocket)
Nokia N95 (on desk next to me)

I'm sure there are some more, but I can't for the life of me remember the model numbers!

I always kept the old phone for when I go out and do something that might be destructive to the nice new shiney one. e.g. Snowboarding, motorcycling etc. Unfortunately when the new shiney one becomes the backup, I never seem to get rid of the older backup!

Steve