Probably because of the psychological damage to the individual(s) pulling the trigger.

It's only cheaper because our capital punishment process is so badly broken. It should not take decades to complete the process; that's just dumb. On the other hand, there are flaw in how it's applied currently (moving to the second part of your issue with it), so those also need to be fixed. I support the death penalty, but with some pretty major reforms. And as a strong advocate of it, I would be open to suspending it until said reform has changed the process to one which is much faster, cheaper, more humane, more fair, more evidence-based, and more regulated. For starters, take all the stuff the Innocence Project is doing and integrate it directly into the process and provide wide open access to all information going into the process to any third-party groups wishing to provide sunshine/oversight.

Some individuals are so dangerous and destructive that all members of society (including prison guards, staff, and other prisoners) deserve permanent protection from them. I have no issue with extinguishing the existence of those who are so fundamentally broken that we can't contain their violence. However, we need to bend over backwards to ensure the process to do that is applied fairly, reasonably, and is designed to make it as close to impossible to execute an innocent person as we can reasonably make it.

Capital punishment certainly can be "revenge killing", but it is not necessarily so. Personally, I think that if it's fairly applied and handled reasonably, it can be as simple as a society determining that an individual is simply too dangerous and destructive to be allowed to continue existing. I have no problem with that. Prison guards, staff, and indeed other prisoners are people too and they have a right to be protected from particularly destructive and dangerous individuals. At some point, it's fair to admit that you cannot adequately control the violence unleashed at every opportunity by someone who is fundamentally broken in a way we cannot fix.

The US Constitution doesn't give a damn about the rest of the world. Frankly, the rest of the world has such a sordid history (and present) that we should be thankful for that.

Capital punishment is long-established in the US. Taking the "cruel and unusual" approach won't get anywhere. Now if someone comes up with a particular method that's different enough (e.g. giant catapult, throwing people out of an airplane, letting alligators eat them, etc), you can attack the methods.

Oh please; they just realized how the drugs were being used? Decades of repeated, public use and some executive finally picked up a newspaper? Give me a break. What actually happened is that they periodically reevaluated the amount of money they made off sales versus the PR hit they took for making those sales and eventually the numbers tipped in a new direction.

Murder is against the law; killing absent unlawful motive or negligence is not. Hence, the state can lawfully kill someone once their guilt is determined, their due process rights respected, and the penalty determined to be reasonable given the crimes committed. An individual whose life is at risk by the actions of another individual can also kill, legally. Justifiable homicides happen all the time. If I break into your home to try and murder you, you can kill me and the state has no interest in prosecuting your causing my death.

Capital punishment doesn't bring anyone back to life and if we're honest with ourselves, it likely has little deterrence effect on other criminals. However, the benefit is that it stops an individual who is so dangerous and destructive that society cannot afford to risk their continued existence. Locking them in prison subjects other prisoners, guards, staff, and even other members of society to varying levels of risk from that individual. When an individual is found to exhibit a certain level of danger and destructiveness, society's best option may just be to end that individual's existence in a fair and lawful process.

Unless you bake cakes ...

Part of it would depend on the relative OCs, of course. Also it would depend on if your encoder could use AVX2/FMA3 and if so, how much speedup it provides. For things that it matters on, there have been near 2X speed gains, but I don't know how applicable the instructions are to H.264 encoding.

Another option is if you can find an encoder you like that has a CUDA version, you could give it a video card to run on. However you'd want to check the implementation to make sure its quality is comparable. Also you might need to get a video card that has better double precision performance, as I'm given to understand single precision math isn't enough for top quality H.264 encoding. So like a GTX 480 or a normal Titan, the newer GPUs generally have less DP cores (to keep power/heat down).

Only applies if the encoder you want has CUDA support, of course, and if it knows how to use DP math.

Even being above average means you're surrounded by (relative) idiots. Hell, just stay informed about world events, history, literature, and then stand there in disgust as all people can talk about is the latest episode of "Naked and Afraid". This is by no means a recent thing either; every generation throughout history has repeated the same sorry story.

You'd want to look at a 5960X, if you can afford it. Particularly when overclocked (and they OC well with good cooling) they are the unquestioned champs for that kind of thing. They have plenty of power to be able to run a game well, plus have cores left over for good quality encoding.

Sorry but you are having some selective memory. AMD actually was only a performance leader for a very brief period of time, that being the P4 days. That was also not because of anything great they did, but rather because the P4 ended up being a bad design because it did not scale as Intel thought it would. Outside of that they were competitive during the P3 days, but behind other than that.

They also had serious problems outside of any business practices from Intel. The three big ones that really screwed them today:

1) Their disastrous chipset situation. When the Athlons came out, their chipsets were garbage. The AMD made chipsets lacked any advanced features. The VIA chipsets were full featured, but poorly implemented. I bought an Athlon, excited at the performance upgrade I'd get from my P2 and drawn in by the price. I spent two weeks fighting and fighting to make it work, before finally finding out that GeForce graphics card were just incompatible with the boards because of VIA's out-of-spec AGP implementation. I sent it all back, got a P3 on an Intel chipset, and it all worked from the word go. Experiences like that really put many people and vendors off of AMD (combined with things like lacking a thermal halt on the chip so if a heatsink fell off the chip would bur out).

2) Their utter lack of innovation/resting on laurels. AMD took FOREVER to get out any kind of real new architecture, that being the Bulldozer, and it was poor when it happened. For too long they kept rehashing their same CPU architecture, while Intel kept moving theirs forward. This became particularly acute when the Sandy Bridge came out, which was a really good architecture improvement. Having nothing new and just trying to glom more cores on the server products was not a winning strategy long term.

3) Ignoring the software side of things. One of the things that makes Intel chips perform so well is their excellent compiler. It generates faster code than any other compiler, in every single test I've ever seen. That matters in the real world since people aren't going to waste time hand-optimizing assembly. Only recently did AMD get a compiler out (I haven't seen benchmarks on how good it is), for most of their life they just relied on other compilers and whined that the Intel compiler was mean to their chips. That has been a problem, particularly in research settings where people need high performance but are not primarily programmers and need something good at automatic code optimization.

AMD has done a lot to screw themselves over long periods and it has built up to a situation now where they are struggling in a big way. If you think Intel is all to blame you've your head in the sand.

What is your proposal, people should purchase AMD chips as a charity?

Nobody other than Intel zealots wants to see AMD go away. However if AMD's products are not competitive for what they want, why should they buy them? Trying to argue charity buying is a non-starter and a very bad strategy.

AMD has been really screwing up on their processors as of late. Their performance is not that good in most things and their performance per watt is even worse. So for a great many tasks, they are not a great choice. Their "APU" concept is an interesting one, but one who's time seems to be up as Intel's integrated graphics have been very good lately and getting better with each generation so "a CPU with good graphics" is likely to just be what we think of as a CPU.

If AMD wants more sales they have to make a product that is compelling in some way. As it stands, it isn't compelling in that many markets.

Look up "Shadowplay" by nVidia. That is their software that uses the "nvenc" feature of their new GPUs. It has near zero CPU and GPU load, just load on the disk. All encoding is done by a special dedicated encoder on the chip. It's a fast encoder too, it can do 2560x1600@60fps.

The downside is it is not as good looking per bit as some of the software encoders (particularly X264) so if the target is something low bitrate you may wish to capture high bitrate and then reencode to a lower bitrate with other software later.

Bandicam also claims to support the hardware encoders of all the platform (Intel calls their QuickSync, AMD calls there's AMD APP).

Run Windows VMs and keep adding them until the boxes are under some level of resource contention (3:1, 4:1 vCPU:pCPU). If you don't see a difference, I'd be highly curious of your workloads and configuration.

This is exactly correct. I myself replaced a SQL Server cluster that was using boxes with dual 12-core AMD procs with one using dual 4-core Xeons a couple years ago. Performance and responsiveness went way up while the bill to Microsoft dropped massively.

I was a solid AMD enthusiast from the original Athlons all the way up until about 5 years ago. They went from huge underdog to reigning champion for a long time while the marketing guys ran Intel's product offering into the ground with everything from Northwood to Prescott and all the stuff in between. But the landscape has shifted for AMD. They've simply gone downhill. As of the last couple of years, I can no longer justify buying AMD procs at work and I'd already switched at home. That AMD could boast significantly more cores was the last leg they had to stand on in the server market; now they're a has-been.

I sincerely hope they recover and blow past Intel as they've done in the past. I think that's healthier for the market and I think we all win when that competition heats up. But at this point, there's little to justify their existence in the server space and the market share numbers reflect that (dropping from >25% share to ~3%).