ARM fanboy quote from 2013: "So what if the [ARM server part] power envelope is larger if they spend more time in a lower power state?"

Intel fanboy quote from 2008: "So what if the [Intel Atom parts] power envelope is larger if they spend more time in a lower power state?"

Watch the wheel o' time turn & turn.

The Kaveri-based APUs in servers are certainly not going to be great for every workload, but for servers that can take advantage of GPU compute, they give AMD a unique advantage in a competitive server environment.

Those ARM parts on the other hand have proven one thing: Just because ARM (and more importantly, Qualcomm) make good chips for smartphones doesn't mean that ARM is magic and can avoid physics.

  The 8 core Cortex A57 parts on AMD's roadmap for late 2014 have a 50% higher power envelope than the high-end 8-core Avoton parts that Intel has on sale *this year* (30 watts vs. 20 watts). By the time they launch, Intel will either have launched or be on the verge of launching 14nm microserver parts. These things are a nice prototype, and AMD is easily the best vendor for ARM servers since it has experience in the server world, but ARM ain't about to take over the server room at this pace.

I'm seeing lots of hyperbolic statements from people like you who:
1. Are convinced that the NSA runs Intel because... uh... conspiracy?
2. Are convinced that Via (to name one example) isn't on the NSA list.. which is why this is just a thinly disguised 2 minutes of hate on Intel with a veneer of "it's for the people!"
3. While you are 100% convinced that every number from RdRand is an NSA conspiracy, you flat out refuse to believe in real security holes that actually happened and that are actually documented.

If you have that level of paranoia, then you ought to just stop using any instruction of any kind on any big-bad Intel CPU (and ARM/ARM/etc. for that matter).

Basically, you are saying that even though it is easy to verify that the output of RdRand is random (and it is) that RdRand is "unauditable". Well guess what? If one instruction on a big-bad Intel CPU is "unaditable" then they ALL ARE. Add instructions? Can't be trusted. Mul instructions? NSA backdoors. Comparison ops? Obviously doctored to let NSA code sneak through?

You know what an "audited" software PRNG from a bunch of NSA-hating hackers is? A bunch of instructions that are executed on a CPU, that's what it is. But... we've just shown that all instructions on the CPU are really NSA backdoors, so even your magic "open source" PRNG is just another NSA backdoor! Have fun!

Ooh look.. an AC... do you work for the NSA? Are you here intentionally trying to plant a false flag about RdRand to push people into using crappy RNGs that are easier for you guys at Club Meade to break?

If I were the NSA, I'd be doing everything in my power to get the paranoid types to *NOT* trust good security solutions because of phantom magical "backdoors" that don't exist, while I would simultaneously exploit *REAL* security holes to spy on those exact same people. Just sayin...

You know.. I've seen plenty of real security research that says that the RdRand RNG is actually very good and produces very high quality output.

Here's just one set of results showing that the output is truly random, so-called NSA "backdoors" or not:
http://smackerelofopinion.blogspot.com/2012/10/intel-rdrand-instruction-revisited.html

You know what *ISN'T* truly random? When guys just like you who are all paranoid about the NSA went and broke OpenSSL in Debian for over 2 years in the name of "fixing" code: http://research.swtch.com/openssl

Oh, and are you and the petitioners going to be intellectually honest and demand the complete removal of Via Padlock support from Linux, or is this only an anti-Intel fanboy rant thinly disguised as "sticking it to the man?"

Guess what the NSA loves: When lemmings throw away real security solutions because they think the NSA engineers every transistor in every piece of hardware. Go ahead and try to put together your own crypto solutions, the NSA *wants* you to do that, because they are a hell of a lot smarter than you are.

Uh... deliberately weakened from what exactly? The magical multi-gigabit random number generator that doesn't exist in earlier chips?

It's pretty easy to go look at randomness and test it you know.... and Intel's RNG has stood up to testing and scrutiny by a whole bunch of real security researchers, not just paranoid basement dwellers who see the NSA around every corner.

If this petition is actually about people who think that an RNG is some evil NSA plot then I have news for you: THE NSA IS PROBABLY #1 IN LINE SUPPORTING THIS PETITION BECAUSE THE RDRAND GENERATOR PROBABLY MAKES THEIR LIVES A WHOLE LOT HARDER COMPARED TO CRAPPY DIY RNGS THAT THE PARANOID BASEMENT DWELLERS "INVENT" TO AVOID BIG-BAD INTEL!!!

Shouldn't we be welcoming RdRand with open arms? It's a mathematically proven high-quality random number generator that lets chips like Ivy Bridge & Haswell produce large amounts of true random data (not a simple PRNG data) at multi-gigabit speeds.

There are some excellent slides describing RdRand here: http://software.intel.com/en-us/tags/20757

I would strongly recommend using it wherever feasible as it is a great boon to security in Linux.

So is some AMD/ARM fanboy saying that it's not fair that AMD/ARM haven't bothered to implement RdRand yet so therefore nobody should be allowed to use it? How about we extend that logic to other pieces of hardware? Say, when AMD comes out with an improved GPU, let's say that Linux shouldn't support it because Intel doesn't have the same hardware.. fair is fair right?

Now that Dear Leader Obama is the president and has decided that we all need to give war a chance, NPR has taken to calling anyone who doesn't want his war to be an "isolationist."

  You'll note that this term was never used against people who disagreed with wars in Afghanistan or Iraq... instead those people were "anti-war" or "pro-peace". We basically need another Republican as president so that the press can go back to attacking the president instead of being his trained lapdog.

Yes you are right... it is unrealistically favorable to AMD that is since if you had bothered to look at the charts you'd note that the benchmark was a CPU-only test that gave AMD the advantage of being able to run the GPU at very low power since it isn't being stressed and redirect the power consumption to the CPU...

Oh and they also tested with discrete GPUs that completely relieve the APU of having to expend any energy on the IGP at all.

These chips are slightly faster (given equal core counts) than their predecessors but not in any interesting way.

  However, you have to remember that these are really server chips that are repurposed for high-end desktop use. The one vital metric where these chips shine is in their power consumption (or lack thereof): Techreport did a test where the 6-core 4960X running full-bore is using about the same amount of power as a desktop A10-6800K part ( http://techreport.com/review/25293/intel-core-i7-4960x-processor-reviewed/9 )

That level of power efficiency will do wonders in the server world and these chips (and their 12-core bigger brothers) should do quite well in servers.

I've used tesseract + ghoscript as a front end to do OCRs of PDF documents. From my experience, tesseract is OK if you have original images that are pretty high quality (300 DPI minimum) printed using standard fonts with pretty standard layouts (the newest versions mostly works OK with a basic 2 column format). You'll still only get results in the high 90% range (which sounds good but is actually pretty atrocious compared to high-end OCR systems that are well up into the 9's for reliability). Oh, and even though you specify a language, tesseract has very little contextual knowledge of what it is scanning so you'll regularly see it run together two letters in properly spelled words to come up with mispelled words.

Oh, and you have to have a blacklist of characters since tesseract is absolutely in love with the idea of the letter A with the circle coming out of the top even though you tell tesseract that you are specifically scanning English documents where you just have the plain ordinary letter "A". A few other characters are like that too.

If, however you leave the reservation of high-quality scans of standard black & white printed text with normal layouts, tesseract quickly turns into a lovely random noise generator.

Looking at the mods that are done to my post is very interesting... when regular people who read the article and comments see my post, it goes up to +5 Insightful quite quickly.

Then DailyKos brigade and other paid schills show up with their accounts and promptly downmod the post in the name of their religious leaders. It's an interesting phenomenon and frankly it doesn't speak well to Slashdot's moderation system.

1. Article is behind a registration paywall, not that any of the editors bothered to proofread or click the link.
2. The "editors" probably chose this submission for the sole reason that it says "MoFo" ... I have heard that Beavis & Butthead is back on the air so I guess the Slashdot editors are trying to get back to that level of discourse.

All I heard was Al Gore use the typical cop-out line of "some people say X" so he can put forth a position and blame it on those mythical "some people" later if it turns out that his tentative position turns out to be a bunch of B.S. (which it did).

Trust me, Al has no problems taking credit for something later if the magical "some people" turn out to be right about whatever point he is putting forward.