Interesting but Apple developed iPhone over ~2 - 2.5 years. Depending on when the key players sat with Intel that likely would have been enough time to develop a first generation chip.

Remember, Intel was THE LEADER in cutting-edge ARM chips until they sold the ARM division to Marvell in June 2006. They even introduced high-end feature like Mobile MMX and SpeedStep, and pushed clock speeds higher than any of their competitors.

That's absolutely in the time-frame of iPhone development, plus a year into Paul's tenure. The fact that they sold the ARM division and decided to start back at square one with Atom (not exactly a power miser in the first revision) shows that they had no intention of going "high volume, low price" like Steve Jobs was asking.

And yet, I much prefer this method to having to watch ads, so long as the thread's priority isn't so high that it interferes with the running of the machine.

If you're going to drop cash, why do it indirectly through your electric bill? Just drop the app a buck or two!

Please read my grandparent post. Good bread can't survive a week, heavily processed bread-like foodstuff can. Folks in the US are not used to regular bread because of their supermarket fixation. Logistical problems affected food you eat, and after those years, you don't even know what what we call bread looks like, thus not understanding why we're so riled up about nasty American bread-substitutes.

Stop pretending you know what you are talking about.

My GF bakes me fresh bread every week. No preservatives. I keep it in my breadbox and it lasts 5-6 days (if I don't slice it). It's a little drier by day 5-6, but still perfectly usable for toast. If your bakery can't make a loaf last a week, I suggest you find a more competent bakery!

The bread on American store shelves is not as good quality as what my GF makes, but it does come a lot closeer than it used to. For example, on weeks when she doesn't have the time to bake, breads like this one are almost as good.

USB 3.0 has much higher sustained speeds due to adding full-duplex communication (USB 2.0 was single-duplex).

Also, they updated the signaling system to replace the outdated BOT protocol (USB 1-2) with UASP (USB Attached SCSI), giving it a similar feature-set and sustained throughput potential as Firewire.

This new standard for USB 3 is already supported on all Intel Ivy Bridge chipsets, and most new high-end devices. This 10 Gbps revision will almost certainly make it a mandatory feature (can't find confirmation, but it would be incredibly stupid to move that much data around with BOT). These moves make USB much more competitive and a better fit for high-end users.

Short of buying someone with a fab, Apple cannot just buy a fab. They need the knowhow as much as the physical plant. What will happen is they will buy rights to the output of a fab for X years for Y dollars. They could also buy a small Fab firm, but there are not that many of those left. Who short of Intel and Samsung is down to 22nm? And we both know Apple is not buying Intel or Samsung.

How about Sandisk?

They're a 6 Billion dollar a year company in terms of revenue (about a quarter of Samsung), and with a market cap of 14 Billion they're quite purchasable.

The company has a shiny outlook thanks to the increase in flash prices this year, so I would think that a takeover bid would be graciously accepted right now.

They have their own NAND fabs, have a growing SSD business (vertical integration with desktops?). The only stick point I can see is the Sansa music players, which might get buried during the buyout.

The reason they insist on C is for two reasons:

(1) It's more portable than most of those safer languages. When every design you build is custom hardware, you want to have easy code reuse for standard functionality and signal processing.

(2) VxWorks (not sure about 6xx, but previous versions this really stands) is built to be a front-end for C - it adds a multi-tasking thin OS (limited memory protection), debugging and logging tools, and that's about it. You get a marginal Tornado IDE supporting C and C++, and that's what you're supposed to run with.

Using other languages with VxWorks means you're not supported by the folks at Wind River. Trust me - I deal daily with the difficulties of getting Ada to run on top of VxWorks via a 3rd-party IDE (including making their conflicting task models work together). It's a complete pain!

No, Slot 1 was to allow them to put the cache on the same board as the processor soldered down so they could sell you the cache RAM instead of empty sockets you could fill with cheaper SRAM from another company.

There is actually a better reason Intel made this change with Slot 1:

They moved the cache to a Back-side bus (introduced on the PPro), which meant better cache performance (no shared bus traffic) and higher throughput (clock independent of FSB). Unfortunately this required faster cache chips (half core clock), so to guarantee compatibility AND quality Intel included them on a package.

In the days of Sockets 1-7, people often bought cheap bogus cache chips. This continued to be a problem in the later years (when motherboards came with already soldered cache) - second and third-tier motherboard makers often cut corners with fake cache chips, and unless you were an enthusiast/hacker you'd never be able to tell the difference. This gave Intel a bad name because people spent hundreds of dollars on their chips and got 486-class performance!

The on-package cache was an acknowledgement by Intel that this was a serious black eye on their reputation for quality, so they took the extra cost of selling slot packages instead of PGAs until they could offer an on-die solution (see Socket 370 only for Celerons, and later FCPGA socket for all Coppermine processors).

And no, for the last time - Intel made no additional money off reselling those cache chips. At the time they already had processors costing hundreds to thousands of dollars, and those price ranges didn't change with the introduction of the Pentium II.

You remember when credit cards used to have annual fees? They didn't just forget about those costs, they just found new ways to make money off you!

I think I've made my point: Diesel is not worth the cash premium in the USA unless you drive it into the ground.

You have chosen to ignore this point in every reply. Prove me wrong, or stop making the claim that diesel is worth the money.

And don't get distracted on your power worship - the only reason I brought it up was because you acted like your diesel was the queen of the dragstrip when I mentioned performance was similar/worse (with proof) to the I5.

I wonder - what's the resale on that gasser VW compared to the TDI. I know when I bought mine I bought new because no one would sell their TDI for a price that was reasonable and buying new made sense. It was one of THE only cars I've ever bought new and it's maintenance has been pretty much zippo....

As it should be in ANY quality car sold today!

My Scion Xb purchased in 2007 requires nothing but filter / oil / brakes / tires changes until 120,000 miles (YES, you have to change the spark plugs...after forever). And I expect the engine to last me well over the 150,000 mile mark, all for a car that cost me 18K (no diesel premium here)! So again, your anecdote against mine.

They don't get just 30MPG in the city unless your foot is flat to the floor full time. I drive a larger older Jetta and get 38MPG average over the 60K+ miles I've been driving it.

I assume you have not driven your Jetta purely in the city. Your figure would be what they call "combined" mileage, and your value sits right in between the city and highway ratings (30/42). I simply flagged the city number because, based on "official" mileage numbers it put the TDI engine in the absolute best terms (I ran both sets of numbers).

Also, most any vehicle I buy is likely going to need premium fuel unless it's a complete junker. I tend to like power and that usually requires premium to go with the turbo or higher compression.

See, this is how I know you've never even test driven a car with a 2.5 liter engine. The power provided is plenty (especially with the 5 cylinder design VW has, which bridges the torque gap nicely between I4 and V6).

In the 0-60 test the TDI is actually almost a second SLOWER than the standard Golf 2.5l (manual transmission), which shows you don't need a turbocharger to get plenty of off-the-line performance. Can you justify spending a $4,000 premium for LESS performance?

Further, the 2.5l I5 is designed for cheap cars, and is thus DESIGNED FOR REGULAR GASOLINE. Using Premium in an engine designed for regular is just a waste of your money. trust MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE: I drive a 2.4l Scion xB, I can get to 60 in under 9 seconds with a 4-speed slushbox and regular unleaded.

Oh yeah, head over to Fuelly.com if you want real world MPG numbers for your math. You may find that the gas vehicles have different MPG numbers too but not having owned one in a VW I dunno'.

Fuelly results for 2010-2013 VW Golf 2.5l: about 27mpg combined!

Fuelly results for 2010-2013 VW Golf 2.0 TDI: roughly 40mpg

This puts the numbers more in favor of the TDI, but you still have to drive it beyond 100,000 miles to break even:

Golf TDI: 40 miles/gallon * 1gallon/$4.00 = 10 miles/$
Golf 2.5: 27 miles/gallon * 1gallon/$3.60 = 7.5 miles/$

At 100,000 miles,

gas costs you a total of $9,333 ($13333 subtracting $4k starting cash)

diesel costs you a total of $10,000

Oh that and they say "but diesel is more expensive" without bothering to do any math whatsoever...

And I suppose you've actually done the math? Because if you had, you'd see Diesel doesn't add up in our country.

Cost of Diesel in my area: 40 cents above Regular (4 bucks versus 3.60 a gallon).

Sticker price premium to purchase 2-door baseline Golf TDI over Golf 2.5l: $6,400. Let's give you $2,400 off that to account for the larger alloys included, fog lights (very generous amount of money for just those features), for a total difference of $4,000 for an engine swap. And while you can argue torque differences all day, I guarantee you that a car as light as the Golf will drive with agility using either engine, so it's a valid comparison.

Now let's compare the city mileage numbers, manual transmission (these are the most in favor of the TDI):

Rated city mileage Golf TDI: 30 mpg
Rated city mileage Golf 2.5: 23 mpg

Now you can compute the miles per dollar, just for the fuel:

Golf TDI: 30 miles/gallon * 1gallon/$4.00 = 7.5 miles/$
Golf 2.5: 23 miles/gallon * 1gallon/$3.60 = 6.38 miles/$

if you start with $4,000 in your pocket after purchasing the gas engine, how long do you have to drive until the diesel catches up?

At 100,000 miles,

gas costs you a total of $11,673 (after accounting for starting cash)
diesel costs you a total $13,333

At 200,000 miles,

gas costs you a total of $27,347 (after accounting for starting cash)
diesel costs you a total $26,666

So it seems you will only make your money back if you drive it into the ground, and then only just.

And the scores scale linearly, so you can just divide the scores of the new Samsung quad core by 2 to get a rough comparison with the iPhone 5. This gives an estimate of SIMILAR single-threaded performance between the two.

There are variations not handled by the simple comparison method (e.g. bandwidth-limited scaling of more cores, or clock turbo/throttling depending on number of cores used), but it's a pretty quick and fairly accurate comparison.

1. You have no clue what you are talking about

2. You have no fucking clue what you are talking about!

This is a discussion about the combined GPU + CPU design for the Playstation 4, not about any announced products on the shelf from AMD or Nvidia. This is a TRUE part to be released only by Sony, and it will have access to 8GB shared GDDR5 with a 256-bit bus to feed the GPU/CPU combination.

But the price of the AMD solution goes up because they have to use GDDR5 instead of DDR3 for that memory pool. Estimates I have seen are 2-3x the cost versus DDR3, so it adds an extra 30-50 bucks to the BOM.

You would spend the same amount of money buying 8GB DDR3 plus 2GB GDDR5 for your GPU, and you could choose whichever combination of CPU/GPU you want! It would also mean you could use cheaper 1Gbit GDDR5 chips.

I think that Sony is betting on the unified memory architecture giving them an advantage in GPU compute, and we shall see if this really happens. But it is FAR from a cost saving measure - GDDR5 has and will continue to be a low-volume, upmarket technology with a sizable cost premium. Supplying 4x more of it than most mid-range GPUs ship with is a dangerous bet for a system that will eventually have to come down in price!

Online ads are so successful and profitable because they're the first form of advertisement where you can actually prove it's working.

That's only true if you're selling something directly. If you're trying to craft "image" or anchor the brand name, that still takes feedback surveys like it always has!

We already had a big collapse in ad payment rates about a decade ago because the entire early Internet advertising industry was based upon "assumed value," which meant you paid a fixed price per page view. That price was entirely made-up, but advertisers paid because they had no clue what the "right price" was.

After advertisers ran the numbers and found the ads made less impression on viewers than your average TV or radio spot, the pay-per-impression market collapsed. Now ads are often very distracting, and you only get paid serious money if someone clicks through and makes a purchase.

Truth be told, online ads today will only make you serious money if you put out a lot of effort buying old domains and turning them into ad farms, or if you're part of a larger website (that can still command impression money / site sponsorship) Most small websites with full-time backing from their authors only make ends meet by selling stuff in their online store, or asking for donations.