That's exactly what I was trying to say as well. In the last 4-5 years, Intel and AMD have made dramatic improvements in CPU throughput and overall system performance, especially in the server space. The current Nehalem and especially the upcoming Sandy Bridge architecture gives you a performance jump of at least 200%-300% in most workloads over the older x86 server chips. Intel has basically been doubling its performance every 2 years, and the performance jump in Nehalem is all the more dramatic because Nehalem was specifically built to improve server performance (new point-to-point interconnect architecture, big improvements in floating and int processing).

Just look at the virtualization performance of a Nehalem 2-Way or 4-Way server - you can basically retire 4 older servers and just install one of these.

Look, I'm not trying to be a fanboy here, just pointing out the fact that IBM may not have sufficiently caught up with the rate of improvement that Intel and AMD have been making in server CPUs. Heck, they're even copying over many of the RAS features to improve failure detection and recovery.

When I think about this some more, I think you are right. The trend towards virtualization is also rapidly increasing the interconnect and memory bandwidth requirements. I'm just guessing - I think that we may end up seeing some drastic architectural shifts in the years to come to solve these issues - perhaps, optical laser interconnects (in silicon).

You took my comment out of context. I was responding to the original post that focused purely on clockspeed as a magic mantra. What you say is only true if you are talking about clock speed increase in the same microarchitecture, ceteris paribus. Making a blanket claim that we have the fastest CPU because we have clocked it at 5GHZ means nothing. I could overclock a P4 to 5GHZ using exotic cooling and my laptop would still probably beat it in terms of performance.

Of course they do. I wasn't talking trash about the chip. The point I was trying to make is that the days of exotic chips and boutique chip manufacturers are getting over, at least in the mainstream server space. IBM is just trying to be performance competitive and retain the mainframe server niche. If you notice the trend in servers, commodity servers are becoming more powerful and stable at a much faster rate than niche servers.

Having said this, performance may not even be the most important consideration in large servers. Other factors like stability, ability to handle failures, platform, etc. are probably much more important. I suspect that sensationalized headlines like this are only a marketing ruse and meant for boasting rights.

This is not to take anything away from IBM, I'm just making a comment on the overall trend and where this will eventually lead.

Sorry, wrong analogy. I was actually being cautious when I said this since I hadn't really seen any benchmarks. Even on pure performance, I am not too sure if the IBM chip will really trounce the upcoming CPUs from Intel and AMD.

OK, firstly the OP should have said that this is the microprocessor with the highest clock speed. Calling it the fastest CPU is extremely misleading. In most modern CPUs, clockspeed is NOT related to throughput. The Intel Sandy Bridge or Nehalem CPU for example may be running its 4 cores at a clockspeed of 3.2GHz but overall, each core in the CPU is easily 4-5 times faster than a 3.2GHz Pentium4 core.

Secondly, many of the bottlenecks that you allude to are no longer major bottlenecks. CPU interconnect bandwidth and memory bandwidth is now large enough that this is no longer an issue - the days of FSB saturation are over. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, but I mean this for most workloads.

Yes, you are correct as far as single threaded workloads are concerned. Nonetheless, you cannot even compare two different CPUs on a clockspeed basis, especially those with completely different architectures, even for single threaded workloads. IBM may have created a very highly clocked CPU and given it tons of transistors, but I seriously doubt if it will compete with a modern day server CPU from Intel or even AMD (pure performance maybe, but definitely not price-performance or performance-per-watt). I strongly suspect that it will probably succeed because of its RAS features, overall system bandwidth, and platform, not because of its raw clockspeed or performance.

A lot of what you said is very true - herbal medicine in general is not as systematic or scientific as modern medicine.

However, to make a blanket statement that all herbal medicine is hit-and-miss, voodoo magic, and unscientific is also distorting the truth, and based on ignorance of our past. Science is not the fiefdom of the Greco-Roman system we have been following in the last couple of hundred years. Systematic and scientific study has indeed been followed by many old cultures, albeit not to the level of sophistication that we currently follow. Nonetheless, you cannot just trash it completely.

Look at what Sushruta used to do in India in 800BC for example.

To quote the wikipedia article:

"The Sushruta Samhita contains 184 chapters and description of 1120 illnesses, 700 medicinal plants, a detailed study on Anatomy, 64 preparations from mineral sources and 57 preparations based on animal sources."

Not just medicine, he has written extensively about surgery, especially plastic surgery, and some of his techniques and instruments are still being used today.

He wasn't alone, you can also read about Charaka.

What I am basically trying to say is that the basic principles of science such as logic and experimental proof did not get magically invented a couple of hundred years ago. Most scientists in the old days were let down by a lack of infrastructure and lack of mature manufacturing processes, among other things. They were not let down because their approach was unscientific or unsystematic. Don't trash herbal medicine just because the active chemical ingredient of a herb has not been isolated (because of lack of chemical or process know-how). No system of medicine (even herbal medicine) can withstand the test of time if it was solely based on hit and trial or voodoo/magic, instead of being based on logic and method.

To put it another way, should your great grandchild trash-talk and call you a scientific neanderthal just because you used to eat fruits, vegetables, and meat instead of ingesting (isolated) protein, carb, vitamin, and fibre tablets? Forget isolating nutrients from our food, we haven't even been able to properly bio-engineer the food that we eat. Imagine how barbaric it will feel to a person 500 years from now when they realize that our generation actually needed to slaughter animals for our nutritional intake. They'll probably look at us the way we look at cannibals.

The intersect is going to start happening later this year when Intel releases Moorestown. Moorestown is a ground-up redesigned architecture that will still run x86, and will idle at 23mW and play video at 1.1W. It will also give about 2X performance increase over current ARM designs, although the 1.1W power consumption will probably mean that it will only end up in tablets, MIDs, and PMPs. For naysayers who keep bashing how wasteful x86 is (which it is) and how it will never compete with ARM, note the power consumption in idle.

The real intersect will happen when Intel releases Medfield, the next generation of Moorestown, probably in Q4 of 2011.

One caveat to this is the fact that by the time Intel releases Moorestown and Medfield, ARM performance would have also increased to an extent that Moorestown's performance edge may only be a small one (although ARM's power consumption also seems to be increasing). On the other hand, x86 (and Linux) support may be a strong reason for companies to migrate to this platform.

I disagree with your views on Intel/Windows. Firstly, your notion is quite outdated - in the mobile space, Intel is actually pushing Linux very strongly in the form of Moblin, and is really not trying to shove Windows down everyone's throat.

Secondly, and more interestingly, MS itself recognizes how unsuitable Windows is in mobile devices. Take a look at the extent to which MS has redesigned Windows Mobile 7 - I strongly suspect that it will be a viable challenger to Android and Apple in the near future.

Yeah, you can count on her.

Nonetheless, for the neighbors, they are the apples of their i.

That, good sir, is because this scale can only be played in dropped D.

Fair enough. I mentioned this in my previous post as well. It goes the other way around too, I've seen too many Asians unable to properly pronounce a common American name. I meant my earlier comment to be constructive - wasn't implying anything.

Just that Khan is probably as easy to spell as John. You hardly ever see anyone misspelling it Jhon (which is actually how it is pronounced!).

On a slightly different note, I find it a little sad that slashdot contributors are able to correctly spell Nordic/Germanic names with umlauts and complex non-English vowels (immediate example: Piratbyrån), but screw up the spelling of a name as simple as Khan.

To be fair, we all (at least us geeks) tend to pay special attention to spelling when we see a non-English symbol in a name. Nonetheless, please do ask yourself if you are unconsciously trying to be Euro-centric. It helps to become more aware of popular names and cultures around the world, especially as we are so well connected in today's world, and because our world is truly become a multi-cultural place.

The correct way to say Khan is something like "Khaaah-n" (not "caan"). Most names and words in the Indian subcontinent (Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka) requires you to speak from the stomach, which is quite different from the way Americans and some Europeans tend to speak. From what little I know, the family name "Khan" is mostly found in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, although it is quite common in India as well. Khans are also considered to be "Pathans" or "Pashtuns" - known to have a strong code of conduct, pride (in a good way), fierce, loyal, living life to the fullest, extremely hospitable, and also physically tall and strong (you will find a lot of them playing sports).

On a different note, hats off to what Salman Khan and what he is doing. He's actually quit a high paying job to devote his energy and attention full-time to follow his passion. The world definitely needs more people like him.

Dude, he's already doing it.

Yet, Aussies and Americans consume a great deal more water than people in other countries, developed or not.
Source: http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=757

Consider that an average Australian consumes 3 times as much water as an average Brit! This is actually quite puzzling considering that many Australian municipalities are actually quite strict about water wastage. From what I hear, the waste water is metered in every house as well.

The only thing I can think of is that Aussies and Americans love their lawns and their swimming pools, and they both seem to be have horrible ecological footprints.

Yeah, I know. You got this thing wrong though. Whether someone will like a gift or not always has a certain amount of randomness associated with it. No point beating yourself up if the gift wasn't received with as much enthusiasm as you would have wanted.

It is also not a function of price, color, etc. Sure, if the gift is situational or has a special meaning, the probability of gleeful acceptance will be higher. Nonetheless, remember, it is still a probability, not certainty. The corollary to your statement is also not to start buying cheap stuff for your girlfriend. Acceptance is the only meager answer I can come up with. and hey, this works both ways too. What if your girlfriend got you an iPad and you hated Apple products? Not too different from rubies vs diamonds, is it?

(For the sake of argument) So what?
By your definition, our universe should collapse every time we bring two mirrors parallel to each other.

One other thing: Why can't VMWare run an OS faster than the OS running natively?
If you assume that VMWare does a better job of optimizing hardware utilization compared to the OS, the OS will definitely run faster in a VMWare host.