Arrogant dragon will have cause to repent
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Intel dines on magic mushrooms
THOSE OF US who follow Intel's Twitter account were flummoxed by a couple of tweets last night that looked like the outfit had been hitting the magic mushrooms.
One, which came with a picture of a bloke touching up a half-naked boy, had the message "Will.i.am is @Intel's new director of creative innovation - 'no more beach ball' waiting on PCs and devices w/ Intel Core & #Atom inside."
It seemed like someone had stuck a number of random words into a machine and made them into a sentence. A bit like an early David Bowie number, or working here, only we did not have a clue what was going on [so no change there. Ed].
Then someone remembered that Will.i.am was a member of the popular band Black Eyed Peas. The outfit played all the bad vampires in the first Twilight movie, and had a female vocalist who was famous for moving her breasts.
While that is clear the connection to Intel is less certain as is the beach-ball reference. It is up there with "there is no spoon" or "what's the frequency, Kenneth?"
It turns out that we are likely to get more of these sorts of tweets because Chipzilla has hired Mr Will.i.am to be its creative director. It looks like from now on we will have to be creative and guess what the press release means. How cool is that?
Other than that we are not sure what he will do. He is, what is called in the trade, a multi-instrumentalist. Last we looked, Sandy Bridge does not really need any phunking with its heart, and Intel certainly would not like to see any Boom, Boom, which is usually accompanied by smoke, smoke.
The last time we wrote a story that included the words Fergie and Will was when Princess Di was still dominating the press, and we would have thought that the link between Chipzilla and Black Eyed Peas was a tad tenuous to make the cover of Rolling Stone. µ
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His tweet makes complete sense - early macs had a spinning beachball when the cpu was busy - like windows' hourglass. He's just saying the cpus are fast, so you won't be waiting.
...we all need AMD. Without them those $400 32 bit CPUs you mentined would probably still be early 1990s technology 386 chips requiring a separate math coprocessor with chip speeds measured in megahertz like GPUs are today. Intel wouldn't have spent millions of dollars, if not billions, on R&D to make improvements with no competition.
A good parallel is the video card industry. Since AMD bought ATI and killed it there's been virtually no real advancements in GPU design and performance other than faster memory, more shaders, and tiny incremental speed increases. GPU technology is still stuck in the dark ages with single core sub 1 Ghz speeds. This is early 1990s technology reigning supreme to date in 2011.
I used to be an AMD fanboi, but they've certainly not executed well for years now. How long has Bulldozer been in development...6 years or more? I really really really wish AMD had never bought ATI, as we've all suffered from that lack of competition fiasco. And is Fusion finally here? Like Bulldozer, it's been in development for years. At least that friggin' nutcase Jen-Hsun Huang has apparently finally stopped popping amphetamines like they were M&Ms and is actually releasing some decent new designs that aren't melting the polar ice caps. They're still sub 1 Ghz dinosaurs, but what the hey.
And privacy concerns, it ain't just M$. I believe the Google Empire is the real monster hiding under the bed. Their previous claims of "Do No Evil" certainly turned out to be complete bullsh*t when they entered communist China's territory and agreed to that regime's strict censorship laws, etc. Even though they're out of that market now they have secret contracts with the CIA and NSA and there's no telling what sorts of spying and anti-privacy crap they're up to. While it's apparently not illegal for their street view camera cars to systematically collect personal data from unsecured home and business wifi networks within the US, my question is why are they doing it in the first place? I certainly don't believe their excuse that it was done "accidentally". Yeah...right!
Privacy for individuals? We've all heard of it, but it's becoming more of a rarity.
Thats another reason, DRM. I don't even care for for MS anymore. We are being overwhelmed with being spied on and we don't need cpu's sucking up power and cycles to police what we are doing. If I had the money I would snatch up a few more old duo cores while there still available if they are. I don't see AMD going down that road and am a big fan of AMD anyway, without them we would be stuck at $400 32 bit cpu's
...I've been reading that Intel's newest Sandy Bridge line of CPUs has built in DRM to appease the US media mafia. Not sure when or if the hackers will be able to thwart that type of built-in cancer. It's really sad that AMD has no competitive alternative, performance wise. Like you, I'll stick with my old kit until the dust settles on this embedded DRM fiasco.
My 6 year cpu a 2.1 duo core is still doing it's job fine but now runs at 3.4ghz. It is powerful enough for anything I need. I have upgraded the mother board and graphics card. I have no use for 4 cores and from what I have read they might actually run slower. Keep your old cpu. If Intel has run out of ideas for improving speed then it will have to boost marketing to sell new chips.I have a vague idea of how cpu's work and each platform has limits it seems, so buying new does not mean much to me anymore. I will use this cpu until it dies.