It's not a "nice:" tablet, it's a cut-rate excuse to get Tegra 4 in the news. If they had properly outfitted this thing, it would be the same price as the Nexus 7 2013 model (and exactly the same performance, which a shittier screen).

Any tablet that ships in this day-and-age with just 1GB of ram is not "nice." You just try and load more than 4 tabs in your web browser before running out of ram. And while benchmarks don't tend to care about memory capacity, it will certainly make a difference in games (which is the primary focus of this SoC).

Yup, Anand made the observation here that 4k @ 60Hz = over 14 Gbps of bandwidth. Since Thunderbolt 2 is not actually any faster than version 1, (just allows channel bonding), 20Gbps is a real limit! And you only get three of those.

So if you want to run 4K you have a measly 400MB/s available on a channel, which means you will need to dedicate 1 of the three per-display. And the HDMI port is attached to the third channel, which means you'll have almost nothing left when running triple display!

Apple's insistence on combining DisplayPort with Thunderbolt has come back to bite them in the ass. The very REASON the industry developed DisplayPort 1.2 (and soon 2.0) is because they need MORE BANDWIDTH! And on any other SANE architecture, the display outputs are all provided by the graphics card, instead of wasting bandwidth being shuttled across the PCIe bus to fight for bandwidth with what should have been a dedicated storage bus!

.

The Neural Network that creates prose!

The pig go.
Go is to the fountain.
The pig put foot. Grunt.
Foot in what? ketchup.

The dove fly.
Fly is in sky.
The dove drop something.
The something on the pig.

The pig disgusting. The pig rattle.
Rattle with dove.
The dove angry.
The pig leave.

The dove produce.
Produce is chicken wing.
With wing bark.
No Quack.

That and the placing of full responsibility upon those you caught tends to give them more reason to rat out their friends (they usually know at least one of the other perpetrators).

They can spread the restitution costs if they implicate others, and possibly get a more lenient jail sentence. Going easy on them will just give them all the more reason to keep their stupid mouth shut.

The book Starship Troopers was *not* critically attached to the concept of mobile infantry suits, it was simply there to hook the anti-social young adults attracted to Sci-Fi books in the 1950s. If Heinlein had written it more like a popularity contest, it would have (1) felt more like real war, something the kids were trying desperately to escape, and (2) it would have felt more like high school, something the kids were trying desperately to escape.

If you want your work to be popular, you target what your audience wants to hear, not what you think is cool. Heinlein did the right thing in his time targeting introverts, and Paul Verhoeven did the right thing making PEOPLE AND THEIR RELATIONSHIPS (and not technology/effects) the initial focus.

It would have been much harder to entice general movie audiences with a character who is a somewhat anti-social "god made by technology." Imagine selling people on a movie where Loki is the hero instead of Thor - Thor himself is already a tougher sell than most comic book heroes, and if you used Loki instead it would be impossible!

The story works surprisingly well without the mobile suits, and it NEEDED to if it was ever going to be put on film.

...and how does region locking play in to that? Best I can tell, you could prevent multiplayer piracy without locking people out of the game in central ohio because you think their located in London for some idiot reason.

Region locking allows them to sell the game for different prices to different regions. YES, you pay more for video games then someone in Nigeria does - get over yourself!

Also, the biggest benefit you get from region locking is the ability to do a staggered release. This is CRITICAL for a primarily multiplayer title BF4, because they don't have to deal with the server load spikes (and associated technical support peaks) you get with a simultaneous release. Or have you already forgotten what happened when Rockstar let everyone rush online at the same time?

This is a BUG - the players here were supposed to be included with the rest of the US block, but were not. But this is a bug that will fix itself, and rather quickly - they will not die from waiting another day.

Interesting. I'm surprised that they managed to pull that off over a PCI bus.

They were able to do it because the PowerVR chip processed a tile-at-once and only wrote the final rendered frame over PCI. Since you never have to read the frame buffer for more complex multi-pass effects (unlike all other cards at the time), you could get by with PCI throughput. The card had local memory to store textures and the scene draw ordering buffer.

Out of curiosity, did the PowerVR cards manage to behave well in that regard, or could you induce situations where firing up the 3d cratered throughput on any IDE/ethernet/whatever peripherals on the same PCI bus, or where frames dropped all over the place because your IDE controller decided that something needed to Get Written NOW, and grabbed mastery of the bus at the wrong moment?

This was a problem experienced on ALL early video cards, thanks to the mess that was early PCI busmastering. Most people just ignored it, just like tearing. The only time you really cared was if the video card caused your sound to stutter.

AMD designed this chip for maximum performance in minimum die space. They managed to cram Titan-level performance in 435mm^2. That's including a 512-bit memory bus AND 64 ROPs, so they're not exactly cutting corners!

The Titan uses a 551mm^2 die-size, and although some of that is fused-off, the majority of the difference is because Nvidia designed it wide and slow for power first, performance second. This is because the part was targeted first-and-foremost at professionals, where performance/watt and cooler noise is actually a concern.

By prioritizing die space over efficiency, AMD were able to offer their card at the $550 launch price-point. AMD is betting that hardcore enthusiasts won't care about power, especially when the card destroys the Titan at 4k resolutions. I guarantee you Nvidia could not make a profit at the same price, and that's why their reaction part (GTX 780 Ti) will be priced at $650.

You can't expect companies to work miracles when all they have is the same old 28mn process. You can emphasize efficiency or die size, but you can't do both!

Expensive pain in the ass? as in REAL hardware processing using a chipset instead of spare IO pins on the chipset and let the processor waste time doing the job?

Yeah, you needed that on a DV camera because transferring was a real-time thing thanks to the TAPE FORMAT. You had similar sync issues back when people had to load programs from cassettes. Buffers were expensive, so the channel had to be high-bandwidth and low-latency.

It was also a hard problem to solve because the format purposefully used a LOWER COMPRESSION RATIO than was possible at the time (roughly 30 Mbits/s for DVD-quality video). This was required to reduce the overall cost of the on-board processing hardware, and took advantage of the gargantuan size of the DV tape.

So, for an isolated corner-case, the Firewire system was developed. It had enough hardware support so that systems could maintain transfer rates with minimum latency, and added a reasonable amount of cost versus going with a higher video compression ratio. It was also forward-specced for the eventual release of HDV, which required roughly 100 Mbit.

Yeah... And explain why it was and still is the standard in pro video and audio? Oh it's because USB is crap for transferring huge amount of of data.

Momentum. USB 2 had more than enough bandwidth even for HDV. The worst-case read/write speeds I have seen have been 30/20 MB/s, and that's over twice the read speed you need for HDV.

USB 3.0 requires the "pain in the ass" that yu complain about as it requires a chipset to do the processing instead of being cheap crap that requires the processor to waste cycles on it.

And it introduced all those fancy features a decade after Firewire did. NOW it's incredibly cheap to package that extra processing power for accessories, because there's all sorts of free space in modern southbridge designs (they are usually pad-limited). And it's a whole lot easier to fit a complex feature in a 32nm process than it ever was inside of a 500nm process!

I was waiting for someone to bring up the RAM alternative so I could ask my stupid question: If it's 8Gb, why didn't they just use DDRx instead of flash?

Because Windows already takes care of this with SuperFetch. After you load the OS it immediately caches the applications you use most often into available ram, and removes them when you actually USE that ram. The cached applications load instantly, and the hard drive is none-the-wiser.

In fact, there used to be a grand push to put as much DDR cache in hard drives as was cost-effective, but the performance improvements have really disappeared after 32MB. The fact is that people access far too wide a range of large data files, and the OS has been smart enough to keep everything it needs memory-resident for awhile now.

The SSHD is an attempt to handle the two major weaknesses of SuperFetch:

(1) Boot time is still limited by the speed of your hard drive.

(2) Application loads are cached, but not data I/O. They are also removed from cache when memory is needed by other applications.

It does a surprisingly good job for such a small price premium. As long as you're not doing more server-oriented loads (i.e. streaming media to multiple users or serving large numbers of Bittorrent users) the non-volatile cache works well to compliment SuperFetch. It's a good compromise solution for people who don't want to pay the premium for an SSD + hard drive.

So, back to Surface (RT). Hated by many because it doesn't run desktop applications. It does run Windows 8, hated by many because of the tablet-centric start screen. What do people not hate? Surface Pro, because it allows people to spend 2x as the price of the iPad to run desktop applications on a machine built for touch UI. WTF.

When it was released, the Surface RT was an excellent value compared to...nothing. It was priced the same as the iPad 4, which had a much faster processor, and much beefier graphics hardware, and a much better screen. The RT actually required you to purchase a separate Touch Cover (~$100) to give you anything special over the iPad 4.

Unless you were dying for Office on a tablet, the RT had nothing special going for it. And let me stress that the Microsoft Office experience on a tablet was less than ideal - check out the reviews and you will find they had to abandon the touch screen to do things as simple as changing the size of a column in Excel. Where is the value of a touch-optimized version of

You also couldn't connect the device to a domain, and it didn't (at the time) come with Outlook. It really was a machine with a mixed message, and this was COMPLETELY IGNORING the mess that was the OS.

The other day, an article about Windows (RT) being useless because Haswell is good enough to run "proper" Windows x86 rather than having to rework everything to work on ARM. So where we're getting is to a state of affairs where x86 improves its efficiency so much faster than ARM that it is conceivable that machines of every size, shape and price can run x86 Windows (or Linux). Just my opinion: I find that hard to believe.

The only size where people care about x86 Windows compatibility is the 8-9" and up size class. At that size point, you can include a semi-usable keyboard and touchpad. Without these hardware accompaniments, running older x86 apps is a mess (both thanks to desktop scaling issues and difficulty emulating input devices seamlessly). Intel is more than capable of offering a high-performance, low-power product in the large tablet category.

The problem Microsoft has with the Surface is that it's right within the optimal device size class to handle x86 applications well (because the Touch and Type Covers define a minimum screen size for productivity), but x86 compatibility is not offered at all. This is a negative selling point for a device with "Windows" on it. This is why most pundits were suggesting Microsoft drop the 10" RT model down to 8" (where it's more of a consumption device), and offer the 10" model with an Atom. This didn't happen, so Microsoft is getting thoroughly beaten-down by the press.

Another problem is that they're trying to be full-purpose computing devices. People accept the limitations of an iPad (compared to the MacBook) because they understand it's a limited system. Microsoft is trying to say "hey, look, it's not just a tablet but a whole computer", but the touch-oriented user interface sucks for non-touch-oriented applications.

Yeah, the Surface 2 boggles the mind.

They are offering users more features than most of them need, and then have the audacity to charge extra for those features. Oh, did we mention that fancy Touch Cover is extra? It's just plain stupid; you can't expect to charge Apple prices until you have the Apple allure and market-share to tempt new and repeat buyers. Microsoft has neither of those.

Speaking of tempting new users, it's a lot more complicated than Apple versus Microsoft: since the Surface 2 is yet-another locked-down tablet platform, it has to compete on price, media offerings, and then perhaps nifty features like a kickstand and touch cover and Office. When you tell buyers that the Surface 2 costs $450 and the Amazon Kindle 9" costs $270 and the Nexus 10 is only $350 (all three use separate, locked-down ecosystems), you have to wonder if they'll still have any interest in Surface 2. Even Apple offers an option for the price-conscious buyer in this saturated market, but Microsoft has no real plans (aside from the slightly discounted Surface 1, which is terrible).

You say that a high price on flash will hurt development, but when you can fit Wikipedia English into 9GB + 1GB space for the bzreader index file (a good chunk of human knowledge right there), what more do you need?

You need a maybe 1-2GB more for an OS (not Windows) with office suite, browser, some learning tools, dev platforms, etc. Give yourself and the OS some breathing room, and we're only up to $16 of flash. That's a whole lot less than a fixed disk, and you've still got several GBs free.

So I still don't see how this is much of a problem. You could push prices below $1/GB, but it would take a huge sea change (drop to $.25 or less) to make a real difference in the price of the device they are installed in. There's already plenty of storage for a reasonable price, if you're willing to forgo luxuries like porn :D

If you're just making mid-tier or lower gear, releasing months after everyone else with mediocre specs, then you're going to fade into obscurity. This means you get less FREE ADVERTISING, because everyone ignores your press releases, so you are stuck charging lower prices for devices.

Just look at a company like VIA Technologies: they used to be relevant, producing competitive chipsets for Intel and AMD. But they were more complacent in their other "visible" product categories (x86 CPUs, GPUs) so they made little-to-no long-term brand-name recognition driven by the chipset sales. So when the chipsetm sales were stolen by AMD and Intel, they dropped like a rock.

Today the company has practically collapsed, with earnings more volatile than ever before (dropped from 500 million USD/yr to 140 million USD/yr revenue in 4 years). They make 2nd-run parts a year after top-tier component makers because being first to market would take too much R&D budget (and they can't charge high dollar for their 2nd-run parts either). They make "me too" ARM cores and try to sell people on gimmicky platforms, living life from one press release to the other.

AMD is getting DANGEROUSLY close to this line, and if they cross it they will likely not be able to afford to re-enter the top-end (due to the massive increase in R&D costs to remain there). Generic "just like everyone else" ARM server parts are just the beginning of this slide.

Does it turn all your radiation leaks into OMG!!! PONIES!!?