I've had good luck with HP's dm1 with an AMD e-350. I upgraded it to 8GB, and can run VMs on it. The main area where I had issues with the speed are games (though it will play GW2 at 15-20 fps) and emulating an android device under eclipse.

Way back when I was a tech at a local computer shop, we'd see bad batches of drives. The one that stuck in my mind was 6GB IBM drives for a period of a few months. I think 1/3 of the drives were bad. We tested every system with a variety of tests including drive tests and even winbench, since it worked pretty well at catching flaky motherboards.

yeah, you're right. I guess I'm too old.

The 486 was the first x86 cpu that was:
pipelined
had cache (8KB)
had built in FPU (387)

Basically, they took concepts that were being done in risc processors and used them in the x86 world.

Following up... Pentium brought superscalar design, and IIRC, pipelined fpu. The Pentium MMX brought integer SIMD. The Pentium 2 brought Out of Order design.

It really depends on what you're doing and what you're spending. If your task can use all 8 cores of a piledriver cpu, it's very competitive. I have to wonder if a large part of amd's problem is intel is at 220nm, while amd is still stuck at 320nm. It would take an incredible design to be competitive.

If we are actually in a simulation, as some have suggested, then that would make the runner of the simulation a god. If someone believed that that was an unlikely possibility, but still a possibility, but didn't believe in other types of gods, would they still be an atheist?

Just because an OS company isn't going to survive long term doesn't mean you can't make money off their stock. I made decent cash off of BeOS stock in the 90s.

Fewer annoying smirks.

Xerox was the first commercial company to make a GUI. Both MS and Apple hired from the pool of people who worked at Xerox before the mac came out.

apple Market Cap: 229.19B
microsoft Market Cap: 253.10B

I wouldn't really call apple the little guy.

Larger caches are slower. Moving to a larger L1 cache would either require that the chip run at a lower clock rate, or increase the latency (increasing the length of time it takes to retrieve the data).

As for registers, they did increase them, from 8 to 16 with x64. IIRC, AMD stated that moving to 16 registers gave 80% of the performance increase they would have gained by moving to 32 registers.

"In 2003, Californians sent $50 billion more to Washington in federal taxes than the state received in federal expenditures. Representing a slight increase from levels that have held steady for three preceding years, the Golden State’s imbalance set a new record for any state, surpassing the previous mark (set also by California, in 2000 and 2001) of $48 billion."

http://www.calinst.org/pubs/balance2003.htm

Maybe if that weren't the case, California wouldn't be so broke right now.