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Comment Yes.... but what about reliability? (Score 1) 131

First of all, I think that young Saudi princes, top European football players, and sons of Russian oligarchs will be very pleased with this car. What an accomplishment.

Second, in 1980s Formula 1 racing, the most powerful 1.5L turbo engines already delivered well over 1000hp in qualifying trim. And this is without the 21st century tech like electric motors, batteries, direct injection, variable valve timing, etc.

PS: I love watching vintage footage of 1980s Formula 1 racing. Those cars were basically go karts with 1000hp engine attached to the driver's seat, and they had manual H-pattern gear shifters. Ponder that.

Of course, in the 80s there were F1 cars with 1.5l and 1000hp... but how many kilometers do they lasted?

Comment Article has no details at all, just wait til 2020! (Score 3, Interesting) 92

From the interview:

Q: Will Intel’s new GPU architecture eventually migrate down onto the CPU or will the discrete and integrated solutions remain separate architectures?
A: Leveraging Intel’s broad portfolio of products is critical to building winning platforms: lots of performance, in compelling form factors, in compelling power envelopes. We’re excited by the opportunity to build technologies that will allow us to take experiences, features, and innovation to new and unique form factors, and to an install base of a billion screens around the world.

Are they going to improve the integrated graphics in their CPUs? (which currently is the weakest link in their offering, AMD Ryzen APUs have Vega GPU cores). According to the interview....... I don't know!

I think there is WAY more progress in the AMD and ARM front

Comment There is still no proper Windows ARM Ecosystem (Score 4, Informative) 81

Currently there are several problems with Windows 10 for ARM:
a) ARM processors (Snapdragon 835) have the same performance as an Atom chip ( https://www.techspot.com/revie... )
b) There are very few Windows 10 ARM apps
c) Windows 10 ARM does not run Windows 10 x86-64 applications
d) ARM processor does not run emulate Windows 10 x86-32 applications very quickly ( https://www.techspot.com/revie... )

a) / b) / d) can be solved with future ARM processors, c) can be solved in future Windows 10 versions

But I think the main problem is the price: you can have a Windows 10 ARM tablet (HP Envy X2 - https://store.hp.com/us/en/pdp... )... for 900 USD. Sorry,but I think it needs to be half the price (at least!)

Comment Re:"There's zero benefit a consumer gets from that (Score 2) 47

"I know there's a lot of noise because Apple did [64-bit] on their A7. I think they are doing a marketing gimmick. There's zero benefit a consumer gets from that," -Anand Chandrasekher, former Qualcomm CMO

According to Anandtech ( http://www.anandtech.com/show/... )

"Integer performance: The AES and SHA1 gains are a direct result of the new cryptographic instructions that are a part of ARMv8. The AES test in particular shows nearly an order of magnitude performance improvement. This is similar to what we saw in the PC space with the introduction of Intel's AES-NI support in Westmere. The Dijkstra workload is the only real regression. That test in particular appears to be very pointer heavy, and the increase in pointer size from 32 to 64-bit increases cache pressure and causes the reduction in performance. The rest of the gains are much smaller, but still fairly significant if you take into account the fact that we're just looking at what you get from a recompile. Add these gains to the ones you're about to see over Apple's A6 SoC and A7 is looking really good from a performance standpoint.

If the integer results looked good, the FP results are even better: The DGEMM operations aren't vectorized under ARMv7, but they are under ARMv8 thanks to DP SIMD support so you get huge speedups there from the recompile. The SFFT workload benefits handsomely from the increased register space, significantly reducing the number of loads and stores (there's something like a 30% reduction in instructions for the A64 codepath compared to the A32 codepath here).

The conclusion? There are definitely reasons outside of needing more memory to go 64-bit."

Comment New standard: SATA express (Score 2, Informative) 111

There is a new standard which will increase SATA speed ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... )

Currently, Apple computers use PCIe SSD disks, which increases their performance:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/...

"I'm very pleased with Apple's PCIe SSD, at least based on Samsung's new PCIe controller. Sequential performance is up considerably over last year's 6Gbps SATA drive. Go back any further and the difference will be like night and day, especially if you were one of the unfortunate few with an older Toshiba drive. Internal transfers are quicker, but to actually use the new SSD to its potential you'll really need a very fast external Thunderbolt array - even USB 3.0 can't completely tax it. There's still a lot more investigating that I want to do on Samsung's new controller, but my early results look very promising. It's sort of crazy that Apple now ships a mainstream consumer notebook with a PCIe SSD capable of almost 800MB/s. Now that Apple is off SATA, scaling storage performance should be much easier to do going forward. "

Comment Re:Will Dell resurrect Project Ophelia? (Score 3, Informative) 151

since they are no longer bound to share-holders; and can innovate for the sake of innovation? No need to bow down to MS Overlords and do as they or the so-called markets please. They can afford to lose a billion bucks in chasing their own dreams.

Well... MS Overlords have lent Dell $2 billion.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2048627/dell-goes-private-as-shareholders-approve-249-billion-deal.html

"Dell on February 5 announced that Michael Dell and investment firm Silver Lake had offered $24.4 billion, or $13.65 per share, to buy out the company. The offer, subject to shareholder approval, included a $2 billion loan from Microsoft, and debt financing from Bank of America, RBC Capital Markets, Merrill Lynch, and Barclays."

Comment Comparison with current CPUs (Score 1) 259

I was hoping to find a current review of the processor against current CPUs....

However, in AnandTech bench you can compare an AMD Athlon X2 4450e (2.3GHz - 1MB L2) with current CPUs. If you compare this to an Intel Core i7 4770K (3.5GHz - 1MB L2 - 8MB L3, one of the best CPUs right now), you can find that the Intel CPU is between 3 times faster and 9 times faster. Most of the times is about 6-7 times faster.

See http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/37?vs=836

However, if you could compare an AMD FX-51 with an Pentium 66 Mhz (best CPU in September 1993), I think that the difference would be way greater.

CPU process is currently focused on efficiency and lower power. However, in the ARM field, you can still find progress in CPU performance.

Comment Arstechnica reviews iOS 7 on the iPhone 4 (Score 1) 488

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/09/new-lease-on-life-or-death-sentence-ios-7-on-the-iphone-4/

"When asked whether you should install iOS 6 on an iPhone 3GS, we can say "yes" without hesitation or condition. When it comes to the iPhone 4 and iOS 7, our response is a more measured "do it if you like the new features, but have you considered a newer phone?"

iOS 7 on Apple's oldest-supported hardware is hardly a disaster, but it's apparent that the only reason Apple issued this update was because they were selling the iPhone 4 free with contract up until September 10. It has been their value option for a year, and in the Apple ecosystem, even people who bought a new iPhone 4 on September 9 will get at least a year's worth of updates. The A4 simply isn't up to the task of rendering iOS 7 as Apple intended, and the upgrade in general performance and apparent smoothness between even the iPhone 4 and year-newer 4S is significant (to say nothing of the iPhone 5, 5C, and 5S).

When it comes to launching apps, the iPhone 4's general slowness is only exacerbated by the too-long animation durations in iOS 7. This is also a problem on the faster phones and tablets, but at least there you've got faster underlying hardware to keep everything moving at a steady clip.

It's great that Apple isn't abandoning older iPhone owners really. People buying an iPhone 4 free with contract were still getting a phone that felt reasonably fast with iOS 6, and they weren't necessarily aware that they were getting an older single-core SoC with an older, slower GPU that would be ill-suited for Apple's new direction. At least they have the option to upgrade. That said, the iPhone 4 and iOS 7 just can't quite provide an experience that's up to Apple's usual standard. Apply the update if there's an iOS 7 feature (or an iOS 7-only app) that you need in your life, but our recommendation now would either be to wait for potential performance boosts in a future iOS 7 update or to start looking into a new iPhone 5C or 5S."

Comment ARM vs x86 (Score 5, Interesting) 88

There is a good comparison of ARM vs x86 power efficiency at anandtech.com: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6536/arm-vs-x86-the-real-showdown

"At the end of the day, I'd say that Intel's chances for long term success in the tablet space are pretty good - at least architecturally. Intel still needs a Nexus, iPad or other similarly important design win, but it should have the right technology to get there by 2014."
(...)
"As far as smartphones go, the problem is a lot more complicated. Intel needs a good high-end baseband strategy which, as of late, the Infineon acquisition hasn't been able to produce. (...) As for the rest of the smartphone SoC, Intel is on the right track."

The future for CPUs is going to be focused on power consumption. The new Atom core is two times more powerful at the same power levels than the current Atom core. You can see http://www.anandtech.com/show/7314/intel-baytrail-preview-intel-atom-z3770-tested:

" Looking at our Android results, Intel appears to have delivered on that claim. Whether we’re talking about Cortex A15 in NVIDIA’s Shield or Qualcomm’s Krait 400, Silvermont is quicker. It seems safe to say that Intel will have the fastest CPU performance out of any Android tablet platform once Bay Trail ships later this year.
The power consumption, at least on the CPU side, also looks very good. From our SoC measurements it looks like Bay Trail’s power consumption under heavy CPU load ranges from 1W - 2.5W, putting it on par with other mobile SoCs that we’ve done power measurements on.
On the GPU side, Intel’s HD Graphics does reasonably well in its first showing in an ultra mobile SoC. Bay Trail appears to live in a weird world between the old Intel that didn’t care about graphics and the new Intel that has effectively become a GPU company. Intel’s HD graphics in Bay Trail appear to be similar in performance to the PowerVR SGX 554MP4 in the iPad 4. It’s a huge step forward compared to Clover Trail, but clearly not a leadership play, which is disappointing."

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