Or, put it the other way : for the last ten years, every PC manufacturer moved to just a normal gaming console, albeit capable of running any generic operating system, and being capable of running generic software quite well. Actually, most modern PCs got all those "custom circuits" (GPUs, sound processing DSPs, vector instructions, etc.) which previously only existed inside those custom chips inside the consoles.

What I thought was not just something of 'generic'ness, but that Sony (and IBM) took a far too ambitious goal, which failed miserably. Their initial though on Cell was that it should become a generic processor which can be used for various home appliances, supercomputing, and possibly other embedded applications. Their intention was to have PS3 to be the initial Cell customer, and find many other customers later to cover the development cost.

However, the problem of the Cell Broadband Processor was that it was too generic to be used for games (since it must also be capable of running HPC or home entertainment applications), while being too difficult to use properly. Thus, they failed to find a customer other than the PS3, and as a result, the sales of PS3 had to cover the development cost of the whole Cell project. The final nail in the coffin was that IBM killed all future Cell projects, probably because they couldn't find any future customers.

In short, Sony and IBM's goal was to create a new "general-purpose" CPU, which failed miserably. The issue wasn't about "generic PC" vs. "custom circuits for gaming" : it was about "generic PC" vs. "a different generic PC".

Sony didn't say that they are going to produce a less powerful design, but a design which costs less, in terms of investment.
Although the outcome may be a not-so-powerful console, the other possibility is something with less "custom" solutions.

Such as:
  - Off-the-shelf CPUs/GPUs, or custom ASICs using 3rd-party licensed CPU/GPU designs (instead of designing one from scratch)
  - Off-the-shelf DDR(1/2/3/4/5/whatever) SDRAM (instead of using something from Rambus)
  - Blu-ray, instead of a new kind of optical disk design (or, even eliminate the physical medium altogether in favor of online purchases)

...and therefore, most of the people in the world won't need anything beyond an Intel Atom because their tasks aren't compute-bound.

Seriously, I don't know what kind of code you write for a living, but the code I write is almost always has some portion of compute-bound submodules, even if what I do has nothing to do with video codecs or 3d or whatever field that there are convenient libraries.

Additionally, an average server has 2x cpus, 8x memory, while having 0x graphics compared to an average desktop. Another problem is that we are running out of tricks for reducing dram power, which means that the portion of dram power may increase steadily in the near future.

Even graphic cards have a sizable, high-bandwidth ram on-board.

Trust me, DRAM power consumption is becoming a serious probpem.

A common misconception is that people think that the Android market from Google is essential and irreplacable. However, I find that there are plenty of ways to replace Android market with something that may work.

The Android market may be fine and essential for people who live in U.S, or at least, many English-speaking regions. However, my experience is that they are a somewhat half-baked solution to non-English speakers. Don't speak English? all you have is a bunch of apps written in some indecipherable language, or some wierd application with machine-translated, cryptic text.

For example, in Korea, there are zero games avaiable on the Android market, and zero paid apps published by the Koreans. Until recently, paid apps weren't even available to the Korean market. Although half of it isn't Google's fault (e.g., in Korea, games are required to have a rating to be sold.), but that doesn't matter. On the other hand, the T-store from SK Telecom (the largest telco in Korea) does have a functioning Android app store which actually provides localized games, localized contents, and applications that are written by real Korean-speaking developers. Since the Korean developers cannot register paid apps in the Android market, they upload the free version on both the T-store and the Android market, and leave a note on the Android market version as something like 'if you want the paid version, search on T-store'.

Now, this is the situation in Korea. Imagine what can happen in China, which may require even more localized content, a potentially huge installment base, and many people who doesn't speak English. If Google fails to provide a localized market, and Baidu does, suddenly Android without Google starts to make sense.

Okay, I think I understand what's going on (at least, what Microsoft is claiming).

1) The sunspider cordic benchmark is actually a huge dead code : runs something, throws the result away, and just measure how long it takes.
2) IE9's javascript engine has a dead code elimination engine. However, since analyzing large amount of code for searching dead code is expensive, they have a parameter specifying how far they will search for dead code.
3) The engineer who was looking for the optimal parameter number simply looked for whatever benchmark he/she could find, and tuned the parameter which yields the highest score,
4) ...which happened to be precisely the size of the cordic benchmark.

The claims on the blog has a point : sunspider is a bad benchmark. Not just because it is stupid to write some code that computes sin() in javascript when you can get super-fast native implementations, but because THE WHOLE BENCHMARK IS A FRIGGING PIECE OF DEAD CODE.

Choose my build order. Rock, paper, or scissor?

However, books with good stories also have a 20-40 hour experience, and somehow still can be compressed into an hour thirty..??

Even if the patents that Google need to defend against are really crappy, it may worth having some ammo because bogus patents still can be used for suing, while zero patents can be used for nothing.

Moreover, invalidating bogus patents is quite expensive, risky, and time-consuming.

OTOH, how many patents does Palm have, and how many of them are valid ones?

Wikipedia to the rescue:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micron_Technology

They split their PC manufacturing business into a spearate company, which declared bankruptcy in 2008. Now, they focus on manufacturing memory.

To most of the people, Micron is known as their consumer brand Crucial Tehnology and Lexar Media.

Well, I think this would be the article Zed needs to read:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000332.html

Basically, many programmers feel that everybody else around him(or her) is a stupid asshole. However, if you want succeed, (e.g. have everybody around you learn statistics) you should never, ever, ever make enemies.

Be productive, work hard, listen to others, and try to do the work in the *right way*. Gain respect from yor collegues, and then they will get interested.

Yes, maybe you are shocked, but me and my wife agreed to remove TVs from our home. We found that TVs started to waste our time too much, and all we were watching were junky TV shows which had near-to-zero value on us anyway.

Instead, now we listen to FM radio. At least, we can do something more productive while listening to the radio.

And somehow, I am wasting my 'productive' time writing comments on Slashdot. Great.

If money and sheer 'raw performance' could solve the problem, I'd bet that they would have already done that. The (salary of the engineers + server downtime + crashses (resulting in bad reputation) + etc.) are much more expensive than the hardware cost.

The problem in this situation is that they are trying to put too many people inside a small region.

For example, if you develop some kind of chat server, which can have 10 people inside a single room, and assuming that each person types one message per second, you have 10 messages per second on the room for 10 people, resulting in 100 messages transmitted per second. Make that 1000, and you have 1,000,000 messages to broadcast per second.

The problem is that, all that data has to get out of your server farm. Even worse, is that the required bandwidth grows square-proportional of the number of users on the battlefield. Now, add the 'computing load distribution' when the computation (and the interaction between the users) also grows square-proportional of the number of users. Things will get ugly quickly. That's why most MMOs put queues and user caps on individual 'servers' or 'instances' or whatever, because potentially everything inside the region need to interact with each other.

Actually, I heard that EVE online had done a tremendous job scaling the size of battlefields up to remarkable sizes. Well, at least they are trying.

Yeah, that's why Intel started to sell those cheap processors called 'Atom'. Performance worse than a Prescott, while having less than 1/10 of the power consumption.

The reason behind the problem of 'why can't I have the same level of experience compared to 10 years ago using the same hardware?' isn't just about forcing upgrades. It's tightly related to software developer productivity. such as:

- using interpreted or JIT-compiled languages like .NET CLR, javascript, Adobe Flash, Java, python, etc. instead of the good'ol 'native' executives
- using generic, reusable libraries instead of application-specific, fine-tuned implementations,
- writing more readible code rather than dirty-but-blazingly-fast code
- and, having mediocore developers write non-performance-critical code (lower labor cost)

If you don't want upgrades, so be it. Unfortunately, there won't be enough people to write 'new' softwsare for you, because it will be more expensive to develop.

However, I find that I upgrade every three or four years, not because of insufficient performance, but because of (my laptop's) typical wear-and-tear. After four years of routine usage, I find that buying a new one is generlly cheaper than repairing it.

To be fair, the $300 inspection fee is for getting *any* device certified by the FCC-equivalent authority of Korea *for personal use*. To make sure that the device does't interfere with the government-authorized spectrum. You should blame (insert company name) for not doing the job for you, not the South Korean government. Hell, what kind of government authorize using non-certified devices in their soverign?

Additionally, I use IE8 and firefox, and I had zero hiccups using IE8, and nearly zero problem using Firefox except on-line gaming sites (which merely is a Windows game installer) and banks (which require so many addons). Everything else is fine.