Comment iPod Nano has FM Radio (Score 1) 350
The iPod Nano has had an FM radio for a while. So the performance with respect to battery, signal reception, etc should be known. I don't have one myself so I can't comment.
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.
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).
Compaq had to reverse engineer the PC BIOS using engineers who had never looked at the BIOS. These engineers wrote a spec that a separate set of engineers then had to implement.
That's not how it worked. The first team absolutely looked at the BIOS to create that spec. Its the second team that implemented the spec that had never seen the BIOS.
When you are big, you get to get stuff for a discount. At work we are a Dell partner and it means, at a minimum, that we get a 3 year basic warranty on their stuff for no charge, even for one off orders. If we are doing a big order, like a few hundred computers, you get additional discounts.
I realize Apple doesn't like to offer this kind of thing which is a reason NOT TO GO WITH APPLE. If they aren't willing to give you a price break when you are ordering tens of thousands of units then they aren't worth being a vendor.
This reeks of someone who is a complete fanboy deciding everyone has to have a shiny toy rather than any kind of consideration about what product might work well.
He decided to become an independent contractor, mostly because he was having so much trouble finding a job during the last big recession. He finally got a job as a contractor to a contractor basically. This firm is your typical contract programming shop, and they would contract to him, didn't bring him on full time. He's American, of Pacific Islander descent (native Hawaiian) the company is mostly Indian.
He continually faced a culture of "You can't know very much, you aren't Indian." Not stated outright, of course, but that attitude. He'd have Indian guys glommed on to a project he was doing who were utterly unhelpful, he'd consistently be the second or third choice, after Indian programmers had failed to be able to solve a problem, and so on. All the while he was kept contract.
Well, he's actually a really talented guy and got a really good reputation with the clients since he would deliver work on time, and as promised, and the rest of the consulting company was not so good at that. He ended up just getting more and more contracts on his own. Finally they realized what they were losing and tried to hire him full time, for an insultingly low figure, and he said no. Now they still bother him with jobs they want him to do from time to time, but he's booked solid, and not very interested in them.
This is a night and day difference with respect to reverse engineering...
No, it isn't. They had to go further out of their way to dance around that issue in order to make a legal clone.
The half of the clean room effort that does the implementation are the one's making the clone, they don't see source code, disassemblies, etc. The other half doing the reverse engineering in order to develop the specification have to discover the *intent* of the original developers with respect to functionality. That discover is easier when you have their commented source code rather than a disassembly of a binary.
The dancing you refer to is for non-clean room scenarios where the developer implementing the compatible non-infringing clone has access to the original copyrighted code. And that dance occurs regardless of whether he/she is working from a binary disassembly or commented source code. Lawyers literally look at the code and say these ten or so lines in the new are too similar to these ten or so lines in the original. Disassembly or source has this same problem. Now source still has the advantage of better divining the original intent, so having the source is also a win in the non-clean room scenario.
...and the fact that IBM didn't want a compatible BIOS to be produced does not change this.
It changes this part:
Compaq et al were able to create clones because the IBM PC was an open platform.
No, it didn't. The fact that IBM provided source code to all PC programmers as a way of documenting the BIOS API actually made things simpler despite such a desire. If IBM was to act in a manner more consistent with that desire so as to hamper Compaq et al they would have simply provided PC programmers with registers for input/output parameters and the interrupts to use to invoke an API call. As was done with DOS.
...the fact is those working on a compatible BIOS had the IBM source code with comments to work from
... they clean-room reverse engineered it.
A clean room design involves *two* teams. A dirty team that reverse engineers and writes a specification for a compatible device, and a clean team that does the actual implementation using only the provided specification. The "wall" is between these two teams, the implementation team has no contact other than the specification.
The dirty part of the team had a much easier time creating the specification given that they had commented source code. This source code, widely distributed by IBM to PC programmers, was the BIOS API documentation. This is a night and day difference with respect to reverse engineering and the fact that IBM didn't want a compatible BIOS to be produced does not change this.
Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.
