Is Centrino brand all that strong?

[George Macdonald]

Like Chrysler? They're enough to put DB through a weak spell!
...forever. I still don't understand *what*they*were*thinking*. Sorta
like HP buying the 'Q' and then dumping Alpha. ...another of the
great corporate *what*they*were*thinking* moments. At least the latter
has been admitted now.

From what I hear, DB is learning how to produce even worse junk than
they've had a habit of. They couldn't believe that people would buy the
stuff so they've adopted the "strategy".

As for HP, now that Carleton has gone I wonder what Plan B is?

;-) Then there's Ford buying Jag. Huh? Volvo was almost as bad.

Don't forget Aston Martin - with a back-order log of ~2 years, they're the
only Ford division which has been turning a profit recently. I hear they
have a guy with a sander/polisher scrubbing off the blue ovals on the
gear-knobs, door latch handles etc.

I looked briefly today, but didn't even have time to figure out how to
navigate the site.

Just scroll down to "Tim Blair" and "UNHonesty" - it's a hoot!

 

[Robert Myers]

Yeah, yeah I know what's being said. The fact that nanotubes are going to
solve a multitude of other problems and bring us micro-motors and the like
arouses suspicion, from my POV... one solution fits all?


Memory just looks easy I guess. What about organic cell memory which was
supposed to be commercialized 5 years ago? I've been hearing about optical
memory as a replacement for main memory for 30 years - the closest thing we
have is the DVD.

Memory is always first, I gather. Whatever happened to GaAs, for that
matter? Sorry to keep using the oil analogy, but the biggest
obstacles to replacements for oil is that oil is so attractive. If
we're really reaching the end of the line on silicon, then maybe other
players will be permitted to emerge.

So the 1st Opteron is 12th - BFD! The rules are about to change as
evidenced by the 64-bit boost with REHL 4.0. Hell even Dell is *saying*
it's tempted. Note we still do *not* have a 64-bit comparison between
EM64T and AMD64 - gotta wonder why!

P4 has the wrong architecture. Intel is scrambling to unwind itself
from NetBurst.

P4 has the wrong architecture or Intel's circuit designers messed up
with Prescott? I'm guessing what I said to so little applause when P4
first came out: P4 has the wrong architecture.

More err, marketing? What are they going to invent as a name here?
Eventually that wears thin and especially in the server space.

Intel has to deliver price/performance. Their issue, really, is gross
margin. To the extent that AMD puts pressure on gross margin, it's a
problem.

AMD just doesn't have the credibility (yet) to be purveyor of
microprocessors to enterprise. Will they ever get that credibility?
You could easily guess that I am skeptical.

Opteron is really impressive? Yes, yes, and yes again. Linux is also
a better operating system than Windows. Linux _has_ invaded the
enterprise space, but it has, for the most part, replaced Unix, not
Windows.

It reminds me how, in the 80s, the "pundits" of the U.S. specialist
computer press were wringing their hands over the Japanese promise to
organize software factories with <gawp> reusable code... and the U.S.
software industry was doomed.

My tiny acquaintance with Japanese computer science via Ruby, which I
admire, and comparing it with Java, which I don't exactly admire,
leaves me wondering why they haven't done better for themselves.
Language barrier, probably. India should thank the British East India
Company for their long-term prospects.

What gets written in the computer specialist press, of course, is
there to get people to buy and to read, not necessarily to inform.
The remarkable thing about the Apollo program is that a national
government announced an ambitious technology goal well ahead of time
and actually did it. For the most part, the press can't foresee the
future, and governments can't buy it.

Infiniband will rise from the ashes? I dunno.

I don't think infiniband is in the ashes. To the extent that people
think they need a relatively low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnect,
infiniband is the interconnect of choice--unless IBM is selling a
proprietary platform, in which case, nothing is standard.

The future is the interconnect. Infiniband will be a player, but not
_the_ player. Rambus is a player. The intellectual property lawyers
are players. What will Intel do? I have a hard time figuring out
what they've already done, and I expect they intend to keep it that
way.

That's the trouble - just noise. Hydrogen as a fuel is a red herring.

Yes, it is.

Look at the scale - bio-fuels are all wrong. I don't have what I'd call an
accurate number but I read somewhere that it takes 70% more energy to
produce bio-ethanol than you get back from it - sounds reasonable to me.
The cheapest ethanol is still produced by the petro-chemical industry from
ethylene and it's a much higher cost than gasoline. The bio-ethanol being
offered for FFT vehicles is/was Mr Daschle's pork barrel.

The claims about the energy budget of bioethanol have been rebutted.
The largest sources of feedstock are things like agricultural,
industrial, and municipal waste, not crops grown to purpose. Making
ethanol from such feedstock (which can much more easily be used to
manufacture methanol) requires newly-engineered organisms and enzymes.
That industry has just gotten off the ground, and it is moving much
faster than nuclear power ever did.

As for hydrogen, I dunno where hot-fusion came into it, but I see no viable
solution to the production, distribution, transport, portability problems
as a fuel. Hell we hear people talking about "liquid hydrogen" as though
you can actually do it. Some himbo/bimbo on CNN trots it out and it
becomes folklore! It's at that point that the "expert" being "interviewed"
clams up, does a shit-eating grin... instead of telling the truth.

Hot-fusion as the hidden player is my read. Why else would someone
propose something so silly as hydrogen? A government that won't
participate in Kyoto is pushing hydrogen because it is benign with
respect to global warming?

Nah. The problem with oil is its use for transportation. Can't use
nuclear power for transportation without some kind of energy storage
device. Batteries, they thought for a long time. Now it's hydrogen.
It's all about keeping the national labs funded.

And we've all paid, subsidized that "much, much less expensive" by buying
x86 systems for the last 10 years or so. Do you really think Itanium can
be self-financed? We'll see.

If Carly Fiorina can't figure it out, do you suppose I think I can?
;-).

So Hypertransport was too bitter a pill for Intel to swallow.<shrug>

I don't think bitterness has anything to do with it. Ownership is
what it's all about.

RM

 

[Robert Myers]

Or like most of the world, you *cannot* schedule. If scheduling were easy
Itanic would still be floating. The existence theorem says that it's not.
Thus latency is the lynchpin to performance. Maybe *you* have some
"embarasingly linear" data flow, but the real world doesn't. Were this
the general case we'd have a P-V with a hundred-stage pipe. We don't;
there's that ugly existence theorem at work again.

We have different attitudes. There is no theory, as far as I know,
and when you don't know that something can't be done, my instinct is
to assume that it can.

Really? You don't care about conditions? ...don't need precise
exceptions? You're by *far* in the minority, Robert. If your data is so
homogenous, what's the interest in computing the answer. It'll always be
the same.

A great deal has been written about this. Large swaths of application
software show an astonishing level of predictability.

Exceptions? That's a whole separate, ugly business for someone. Not
for me.

Thank you. The processors doing this kind of work outnumber your
"workload" by 1E10:1, at least.

Well, no. See comment above. Exploiting the known predictability is
another matter entirely.

Ah, but that pisses you off enevn more, because their market has no need
for a DP FPU. ...and you can't afford to have them make one for you that
does. There's that money thing again, and the dreaded "existence theorem".

Apparently not. People are now doing even 128-bit floating point.
Cell is probably stuck in 32-bit land.

Nah, it'll be latency. The pipe's will still be starved. The bandwith
will match the *number* of pipes. The pipes themselves still will be
latency limited.

There are some deep, deep, deep problems here. No doubt about it.
Why didn't dataflow machines take over the world?

Your proposed solution: wait for the information to become available
and then act really, really fast is the only possible answer for
transaction processing. That's why you think it's the only possible
answer. We could go around on this forever. ;-).

RM

 

[Robert Redelmeier]

Nah, it'll be latency. The pipe's will still be starved.
The bandwith will match the *number* of pipes. The pipes
themselves still will be latency limited.

True for most apps (barring vector processing like imagery).

Over the past 7 years, CPU speed (clock*IPC) has increased
by at least 4x. Memory bandwidth (burst) has increased ~8x.
Latency has only improved ~1.5x and overall the machines seem
(subjectively) about that much faster.

-- Robert

 

[Robert Myers]

True for most apps (barring vector processing like imagery).

Over the past 7 years, CPU speed (clock*IPC) has increased
by at least 4x. Memory bandwidth (burst) has increased ~8x.
Latency has only improved ~1.5x and overall the machines seem
(subjectively) about that much faster.

There is a bizarre circular logic afoot. Part of what has killed off
vector processors is their requirement for bandwidth. Bandwidth is a
serious issue for stream processors, which we _are_ seeing in more
general use, thanks to the ambitions of GPU manufacturers.

How the bandwidth issue is going to be addressed is something of a
mystery to me, but the argument you present is an argument about past
design decisions, not about actual requirements. Millibytes per flop?
Of what possible use all those flops would be with so little bandwidth
is a mystery to me.

Would lower latency be nice? Sure. It's stupefyingly expensive, and,
your programmer-with-screwdriver-in-hand perspective notwithstanding,
it isn't necessary or even all that useful for applications where
stream processors are attractive. Bandwidth, on the other hand, is an
absolute requirement. Just how deeply stream processors will
penetrate general purpose computing remains to be seen. My stake is
in the ground: packet processors are going to all but push
conventional microprocessors off the stage.

To address your argument more substantively, your argument suggests
that processors are now routinely stalled a _much_ higher fraction of
the time than they were seven years ago (4x increase in speed, 1.5x
increase in throughput). 'Taint so.

RM

RM

 

[George Macdonald]

Memory is always first, I gather. Whatever happened to GaAs, for that
matter? Sorry to keep using the oil analogy, but the biggest
obstacles to replacements for oil is that oil is so attractive. If
we're really reaching the end of the line on silicon, then maybe other
players will be permitted to emerge.

Like I said memory's easy... relatively anyway, compared with the rest. I
believe GaAs has found a niche in ultra-RF stuff, maybe even hybrid
bi-polar. Obviously Si wasn't chosen by accident... after it was found
that Ge didn't do some of the things required. The thing about nanotubes
is that it's a VCs wet dream, including govt. purses - the intellectual
panhandlers have not missed this fact. Hey they're getting real good at
marketing.

P4 has the wrong architecture. Intel is scrambling to unwind itself
from NetBurst.

P4 has the wrong architecture or Intel's circuit designers messed up
with Prescott? I'm guessing what I said to so little applause when P4
first came out: P4 has the wrong architecture.

They were led astray by the marketroids?... remember the Intel culture and
the tenets of its doctrine: "disagree and commit" and "constructive
confrontation". I've posted it before but here's an interesting and
revealing article on the subject:
http://www.reed-electronics.com/electronicnews/index.asp?layout=article&articleId=CA50587

Intel has to deliver price/performance. Their issue, really, is gross
margin. To the extent that AMD puts pressure on gross margin, it's a
problem.

AMD just doesn't have the credibility (yet) to be purveyor of
microprocessors to enterprise. Will they ever get that credibility?
You could easily guess that I am skeptical.

Opteron is really impressive? Yes, yes, and yes again. Linux is also
a better operating system than Windows. Linux _has_ invaded the
enterprise space, but it has, for the most part, replaced Unix, not
Windows.

Dell's skepticism is wobbling. There are exceptions, some of them huge, to
your stated beliefs, e.g. the German local govts.' abdication from Windows
to Linux and similar effects in the U.K. Some of the enterprise tech
computing has moved to both AMD and Linux and people are getting pissed
with the M$ annual "rental fees" on the umpteenth go around. At least when
IBM had their hand in your corporate pocket, they actually looked after
you.

I don't think infiniband is in the ashes. To the extent that people
think they need a relatively low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnect,
infiniband is the interconnect of choice--unless IBM is selling a
proprietary platform, in which case, nothing is standard.

The future is the interconnect. Infiniband will be a player, but not
_the_ player. Rambus is a player. The intellectual property lawyers
are players. What will Intel do? I have a hard time figuring out
what they've already done, and I expect they intend to keep it that
way.

Compared with where they wanted to be and thought they'd be, Inifiniband
*is* in the toilet. Personally I'm not surprised - the hype was
aggravating in the vagueness of the technical target... another one
solution fits all; I still don't know where they want to focus their
attention.

The claims about the energy budget of bioethanol have been rebutted.
The largest sources of feedstock are things like agricultural,
industrial, and municipal waste, not crops grown to purpose. Making
ethanol from such feedstock (which can much more easily be used to
manufacture methanol) requires newly-engineered organisms and enzymes.
That industry has just gotten off the ground, and it is moving much
faster than nuclear power ever did.

The scale is still wrong - you can't come even close to oil and fuel grade
(99.9%) ethanol is expensive to make, store and distribute. I'm sure
that's been rebutted by people with interest in their new "industry" but I
don't believe it and I'm fairly knowledgeable on the chemistry. Perhaps if
they apply some template which distorts the current fuel supply
infrastructure, they can bend the results to make it look like it
fits.<shrug>

Of course, apart from the above, a steaming, stinking fermentation of
industrial waste plant is just what everybody wants in their "back yard".

Hot-fusion as the hidden player is my read. Why else would someone
propose something so silly as hydrogen? A government that won't
participate in Kyoto is pushing hydrogen because it is benign with
respect to global warming?

Nobody really "participates" in Kyoto - it was a fraud which we rightly
refrained from. It's now graduated to the status of govt. extortion.

If Carly Fiorina can't figure it out, do you suppose I think I can?
;-).

Well, agreed it's difficult to figure, but do you think Carly had it down?
She's one of those people whose career path is just baffling: wrong
studies, wrong job, wrong companies and yet straight to the top of the
ladder. Every company she's worked for has turned into shit and has
dragged their, previously successful, acquisitions down along with them.
How'd that happen?

I don't think bitterness has anything to do with it. Ownership is
what it's all about.

Oh, you mean "invented here".... not "there".

 

[Robert Myers]

They were led astray by the marketroids?... remember the Intel culture and
the tenets of its doctrine: "disagree and commit" and "constructive
confrontation". I've posted it before but here's an interesting and
revealing article on the subject:
http://www.reed-electronics.com/electronicnews/index.asp?layout=article&articleId=CA50587

In Bob Colwell's telling, NetBurst was a marketing ploy. Also in his
telling, he kept a fig leaf over his self-respect by believing that he
would eventually backfill with real performance to match the hype.
Never happened, of course.

I have, in effect, contradicted myself, since NetBurst moves in the
direction of a stream processor. It got all the downside without any
of the power advantages you should get from a true stream processor.

Dell's skepticism is wobbling. There are exceptions, some of them huge, to
your stated beliefs, e.g. the German local govts.' abdication from Windows
to Linux and similar effects in the U.K. Some of the enterprise tech
computing has moved to both AMD and Linux and people are getting pissed
with the M$ annual "rental fees" on the umpteenth go around. At least when
IBM had their hand in your corporate pocket, they actually looked after
you.

If you want to help Tinkerbell get well, you have to believe. ;-).

Compared with where they wanted to be and thought they'd be, Inifiniband
*is* in the toilet. Personally I'm not surprised - the hype was
aggravating in the vagueness of the technical target... another one
solution fits all; I still don't know where they want to focus their
attention.

Intel trashed infiniband because they lost control of it. If it
wasn't going to be their silicon, they didn't want to play. I got
walloped for saying that, too, but players who are much better
positioned than I am have discreetly nodded assent. You guys think
I'm a shill for Intel. Ha!

The scale is still wrong - you can't come even close to oil and fuel grade
(99.9%) ethanol is expensive to make, store and distribute. I'm sure
that's been rebutted by people with interest in their new "industry" but I
don't believe it and I'm fairly knowledgeable on the chemistry. Perhaps if
they apply some template which distorts the current fuel supply
infrastructure, they can bend the results to make it look like it
fits.<shrug>

Of course, apart from the above, a steaming, stinking fermentation of
industrial waste plant is just what everybody wants in their "back yard".

You believe in the future of AMD. I'll believe in the viability of
biofuels. ;-).

ORNL has scenarios in which biofuels contribute noticeably to
transportation fuels by 2020. Given the volatility of the sources of
oil, I do believe that developing a viable biofuels industry is
sensible. They will for sure beat hydrogen to market as a significant
player. The odor is a problem? We're talking about cooking
_cellulose_ here, George. Yes, the odor is a problem, as some
operators have already discovered.

I mean, what other possibility is there? Canada has lots of
unconventional oil. You want us to invade Canada? ;-).

Nobody really "participates" in Kyoto - it was a fraud which we rightly
refrained from. It's now graduated to the status of govt. extortion.

I'm happy to say I don't have clue.

Well, agreed it's difficult to figure, but do you think Carly had it down?
She's one of those people whose career path is just baffling: wrong
studies, wrong job, wrong companies and yet straight to the top of the
ladder. Every company she's worked for has turned into shit and has
dragged their, previously successful, acquisitions down along with them.
How'd that happen?

Carly was gonna be President, or something. I don't understand the HP
story. Not at all. They were going to continue on as a printing
company wedged in between Dell and the true enterprise players the way
they are with servers? It's not a hand I'd want to play either way.

As to Carly, hell, I don't know. When the enterprise server division
lost all that money because they screwed up their order system, who
imagined that the captain of the ship shouldn't be thrown to the
sharks? I mean, they couldn't make the product they were offering to
customers work for themselves. If Itanium was a factor, it was just
icing.

The better (more disturbing?) question is: how can you take the talent
that used to be DEC and so totally annihilate it?

RM

 

[keith]

We have different attitudes. There is no theory, as far as I know,
and when you don't know that something can't be done, my instinct is
to assume that it can.

Perhaps not, but there is insumountable evidence that shows that when
there i smuch money to be made such vacuums suddenly vanish. This fact
tells me your windmills aren't ppullign their weight.

A great deal has been written about this. Large swaths of application
software show an astonishing level of predictability.

"Large"? Why isn't Itanic cleaning house in these "swaths"? It seems to
be a natural for those who want to compute the known.

Exceptions? That's a whole separate, ugly business for someone. Not
for me.

Ah, the ugly face of reality shows. Without exceptions processors would
be simple, life would be great, and we'd have sunny days, even here in New
England. Except...

Well, no. See comment above. Exploiting the known predictability is
another matter entirely.

It seems Intel and HP believed as you still do. Wanna job? There's one
open.

Apparently not. People are now doing even 128-bit floating point. Cell
is probably stuck in 32-bit land.

Like I said, where's your checkbook? I'm sure for between six and ten
zeros you can give you what you want. It's a simple matter of hardware.

There are some deep, deep, deep problems here. No doubt about it. Why
didn't dataflow machines take over the world?

Because the problems that pay the bills don't match the costs of producing
the hardware. If that trend reverses the hardware *will* be there.
"Existence theorem", once again. Ok, perhaps the opposite; the
"non-existance theorem".

Your proposed solution: wait for the information to become available and
then act really, really fast is the only possible answer for transaction
processing. That's why you think it's the only possible answer. We
could go around on this forever. ;-).

I didn't say it was the only answer at all. I said that's the answer to
the problem that people really have, and thus will pay for.

BTW, the same answer goes for your other example; the oil industry. When
oil gets expensive we may switch to corn, but why pay the bastards to
produce corn for fuel when it's more expensive even *after* subsidies?

 

[keith]

True for most apps (barring vector processing like imagery).

Point given. Imagery has been done rather well in GPUs with far less that
128bit precision FPUs.

Over the past 7 years, CPU speed (clock*IPC) has increased
by at least 4x. Memory bandwidth (burst) has increased ~8x.
Latency has only improved ~1.5x and overall the machines seem
(subjectively) about that much faster.

Exactly my point. Latency is the bitch that won't let go. Sure, caches
and prefecthing have helped over the last couple of decades, but the
elephant hasn't left the livingroom.

 

[keith]

For the record, in light of the reply I just posted, let us stress that you
and I are not collaborating here.

At least not by any back-channel. If we agree, is that collaboration?

 

[Robert Redelmeier]

There is a bizarre circular logic afoot. Part of what
has killed off vector processors is their requirement

No. What kills off anything in the market is lack of
demand--usually due to poor performance/price.

Would lower latency be nice? Sure. It's stupefyingly
expensive,

Really? DRAMs are obscenely inexpensive. Why not use 4x
the transistors and make SRAMs? Especially if they could
be interfaced into Northbridges as "standard" DDR DIMMs.
I know I'd rather 256 MByte of 10 ns latency SRAM rather than
1 GByte of 100 ns latency DRAM. YYMV.

your programmer-with-screwdriver-in-hand perspective

Why, thank you for the compliment!

To address your argument more substantively, your argument
suggests that processors are now routinely stalled a _much_
higher fraction of the time than they were seven years ago
(4x increase in speed, 1.5x increase in throughput). 'Taint so.

Surely you've noticed that benchmark scores are only very
rarely linear with CPU speed. Now even bus doesn't help
hugely. But no sense arguing. At least Intel CPUs have
performance counters on stalls.

-- Robert

 

[keith]

Yeah, yeah I know what's being said. The fact that nanotubes are going to
solve a multitude of other problems and bring us micro-motors and the like
arouses suspicion, from my POV... one solution fits all?


Memory just looks easy I guess. What about organic cell memory which was
supposed to be commercialized 5 years ago? I've been hearing about optical
memory as a replacement for main memory for 30 years - the closest thing we
have is the DVD.

Memory is always first because its regular structure is easy to
manufacture and diagnose faults. If it doesn't make it past memory
(bubbles anyone?) it hasn't a chance at logic. Since it hasn't done the
simple part...

<snip the rest - too many subjects for one post>

 

[keith]

From what I hear, DB is learning how to produce even worse junk than
they've had a habit of. They couldn't believe that people would buy the
stuff so they've adopted the "strategy".

Being one who "willingly" bought an AMC Gremlin and four Chrysler
products, I'm sorta an expert in crap. Not only is Chrysler crap, but
their support infrastructure since being bought by DB is crap. I wouldn't
touch them with BillyG's money after he won the PowerBall!

As for HP, now that Carleton has gone I wonder what Plan B is?

Make something customers want to buy? Nah! Too hard!


What was the plan before CF? Strip a *fine* company?

Don't forget Aston Martin - with a back-order log of ~2 years, they're
the only Ford division which has been turning a profit recently. I hear
they have a guy with a sander/polisher scrubbing off the blue ovals on
the gear-knobs, door latch handles etc.

Are you telling that Ford Motor Credit isn't making money? Gee the
company is still paying a hefty dividend, and I didn't think it was on
AMs. They must be much expensive!

Just scroll down to "Tim Blair" and "UNHonesty" - it's a hoot!

Will do. Too busy again today. "Work" is a nasty four-letter word. The
FCC ought to do something about that too.

 

[daytripper]

No. What kills off anything in the market is lack of
demand--usually due to poor performance/price.


Really? DRAMs are obscenely inexpensive. Why not use 4x
the transistors and make SRAMs? Especially if they could
be interfaced into Northbridges as "standard" DDR DIMMs.
I know I'd rather 256 MByte of 10 ns latency SRAM rather than
1 GByte of 100 ns latency DRAM. YYMV.

It may vary indeed, especially if your theoretical small-but-fast memory is
too small to avoid paging. It doesn't take too many page-ins to wipe out any
"speed" advantage that memory might have offered...

/daytripper

 

[Robert Myers]

Perhaps not, but there is insumountable evidence that shows that when
there i smuch money to be made such vacuums suddenly vanish. This fact
tells me your windmills aren't ppullign their weight.

Your theory just doesn't wash. There's lots of money to be made in
all kinds of problems that are long understood and long to solve. The
dataflow problem is like an open problem in math: either it is solved
or it is demonstrated that it can't be done.

AI isn't done. There hasn't been all that much progress, really, but
even what AI is understood to be has changed dramatically since
researchers imagined that logical deduction is the way that people
think. Most people think we'll eventually get something more like
what was originally expected. You don't? There's lots of money to be
made.

"Large"? Why isn't Itanic cleaning house in these "swaths"? It seems to
be a natural for those who want to compute the known.


Ah, the ugly face of reality shows. Without exceptions processors would
be simple, life would be great, and we'd have sunny days, even here in New
England. Except...

Exceptions may explain a big part of the problem with Itanium. Could
be just poor design, or it could be inherent in a processor that has
to do so much speculation and recovery. I suspect poor design.

Because the problems that pay the bills don't match the costs of producing
the hardware. If that trend reverses the hardware *will* be there.
"Existence theorem", once again. Ok, perhaps the opposite; the
"non-existance theorem".

Just as with the AI problem, there's lots of fundamental stuff we
don't know about dataflow.

I didn't say it was the only answer at all. I said that's the answer to
the problem that people really have, and thus will pay for.

BTW, the same answer goes for your other example; the oil industry. When
oil gets expensive we may switch to corn, but why pay the bastards to
produce corn for fuel when it's more expensive even *after* subsidies?

The biofuel question is easier to answer than the microprocessor
question. In both cases, there is a reliable, affordable product that
satisfies obvious needs.

The price of oil to U.S. (and actually to world) consumers is
subsidized by the cost of security arrangements to ensure the flow of
that oil. You don't seem to have a problem with that kind of subsidy.
Developing a biofuels industry as an alternative to that kind of
arrangement seems pretty attractive to me, and it makes sense to me to
get started before oil supplies have been disrupted.

What could you do with much faster microprocessors if they were
available? And how would you use processors that are much better at
streaming data than fetching it? I think we're going to find out, no
matter how little you think of the enterprise.

RM

 

[George Macdonald]

Being one who "willingly" bought an AMC Gremlin and four Chrysler
products, I'm sorta an expert in crap. Not only is Chrysler crap, but
their support infrastructure since being bought by DB is crap. I wouldn't
touch them with BillyG's money after he won the PowerBall!

We all get taken or make mistakes - I used to buy VWs until... the "German
Revenge".

Make something customers want to buy? Nah! Too hard!


What was the plan before CF? Strip a *fine* company?

I still think the printer crowd are going to do a Lexmark and it'll be
called a "spin-off".

Are you telling that Ford Motor Credit isn't making money? Gee the
company is still paying a hefty dividend, and I didn't think it was on
AMs. They must be much expensive!

Making money? I thought the banks were even talking of movng in on the
place.

Will do. Too busy again today. "Work" is a nasty four-letter word. The
FCC ought to do something about that too.

"Glow-Ball Vorming"

 

[George Macdonald]

On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 19:42:22 -0500, George Macdonald


If you want to help Tinkerbell get well, you have to believe. ;-).

Read the news.;-)

Intel trashed infiniband because they lost control of it. If it
wasn't going to be their silicon, they didn't want to play. I got
walloped for saying that, too, but players who are much better
positioned than I am have discreetly nodded assent. You guys think
I'm a shill for Intel. Ha!

Silicon? PCI Express is only "their silicon" in their chipsets... and
they've ceded at least part of that to nVidia. Control is their thing of
course - everybody wants to feel they're in control of their destiny.

You believe in the future of AMD. I'll believe in the viability of
biofuels. ;-).

ORNL has scenarios in which biofuels contribute noticeably to
transportation fuels by 2020. Given the volatility of the sources of
oil, I do believe that developing a viable biofuels industry is
sensible. They will for sure beat hydrogen to market as a significant
player. The odor is a problem? We're talking about cooking
_cellulose_ here, George. Yes, the odor is a problem, as some
operators have already discovered.

I mean, what other possibility is there? Canada has lots of
unconventional oil. You want us to invade Canada? ;-).

Believe what you want - even with quite ideal fermentation input, e.g.
corn, the energy balance is way off... it's the distillation that gets
you... energy in. Oh and the petroleum guys actually have quite a bit of
experience here: it is a bitch to maintain in storage and it does not mix
well with petroleum in transportation, storage or even the customer fuel
tank. Do you think the pipeline companies are going to say "ethanol?...
sure shove it in, where do you want it to go?" There's no damned
infrastructure.

Carly was gonna be President, or something. I don't understand the HP
story. Not at all. They were going to continue on as a printing
company wedged in between Dell and the true enterprise players the way
they are with servers? It's not a hand I'd want to play either way.

As to Carly, hell, I don't know. When the enterprise server division
lost all that money because they screwed up their order system, who
imagined that the captain of the ship shouldn't be thrown to the
sharks? I mean, they couldn't make the product they were offering to
customers work for themselves. If Itanium was a factor, it was just
icing.

The better (more disturbing?) question is: how can you take the talent
that used to be DEC and so totally annihilate it?

Oh-oh... didn't Intel have a hand in that too?

 

[Robert Myers]

Silicon? PCI Express is only "their silicon" in their chipsets... and
they've ceded at least part of that to nVidia. Control is their thing of
course - everybody wants to feel they're in control of their destiny.

M$ mysteriously withdrew native support for infiniband at about the
same time Intel dropped its own host channel adapter. That's one I
don't blame on Bill.

Believe what you want - even with quite ideal fermentation input, e.g.
corn, the energy balance is way off... it's the distillation that gets
you... energy in. Oh and the petroleum guys actually have quite a bit of
experience here: it is a bitch to maintain in storage and it does not mix
well with petroleum in transportation, storage or even the customer fuel
tank. Do you think the pipeline companies are going to say "ethanol?...
sure shove it in, where do you want it to go?" There's no damned
infrastructure.

There's plenty of oil. Maybe even plenty of oil with depending on the
Middle East, with some adjustments to usage patterns, but you have to
count on unproven, unconventional sources. Wind power is the only
underexploited renewable that works for sure, but, short of taking
over North and South Dakota, wind is not a big enough player, and it
is not, in any case, a transportation fuel. A case can be made for
nuclear power, but it isn't a transportation fuel, either. There is
always coal, but it isn't a transportation fuel, either.

If hydrogen works as a way to turn stationary energy into a
transportation fuel, so do biofuels. Both have serious infrastructure
problems. I think I'd rather figure out how to protect piping from
corrosion than how to protect piping from hydrogen migration and
embrittlement.

The lessons of this whole sorry saga--finding a replacement for
oil--should give any prospective true believer reason to pause. We've
been at it for thirty years and generated mostly polemic. One thing
that has changed is that the earliest econometric models were
inadequate because the cost of computer time was so high. That's not
a problem anymore, but the models aren't demonstrably any more useful.

I brought the whole business up as an example of how hard it is to
anticipate anything in technology. A tremendous amount of money and
brain power went into the energy problem, and we are still pretty
clueless. It will happen when it happens, whatever "it" is.

Oh-oh... didn't Intel have a hand in that too?

You don't mean to start the alpha debate again, I'm sure. If you
leave out the compaq intermediate episode, you had a technically
competent company (DEC) that didn't know how to market being fed into
a company whose focus was marketing (HP). One glaring example, I
suspect, of just how badly bean-counters and marketers manage
technical talent.

RM

 

[Robert Redelmeier]

It may vary indeed, especially if your theoretical
small-but-fast memory is too small to avoid paging. It
doesn't take too many page-ins to wipe out any "speed"
advantage that memory might have offered...

Of course thrashing must be avoided. But _none_ of my
problems have working sets approaching 256 MByte, and I
suspect that very few people have such large problems.

My point is that DRAM pricing has fallen and size risen
past the point of usability. Something more useful than
size needs to be done with those transistors.

-- Robert

 

[George Macdonald]

There's plenty of oil. Maybe even plenty of oil with depending on the
Middle East, with some adjustments to usage patterns, but you have to
count on unproven, unconventional sources. Wind power is the only
underexploited renewable that works for sure, but, short of taking
over North and South Dakota, wind is not a big enough player, and it
is not, in any case, a transportation fuel. A case can be made for
nuclear power, but it isn't a transportation fuel, either. There is
always coal, but it isn't a transportation fuel, either.

The funny thing about windpower, to me, is that it has divided the greens.
It's more developed in Europe in general and especially in a few "pockets"
like Denmark and Netherlands; there are several *BIG* projects in the
discussion stages - the usual NIMBY and "nature-greens" are raising a
stink.

There are scientific studies which say that it's just not viable and one
does wonder about the economics of power generation in general - it *could*
be that the fill-in and peak coverage required, usually from gas turbines,
is actually more polluting/wasteful than just running a running as we are.
I know that it wouldn't work here in NJ and surrounding states - we get
maybe 10 days a year with enough wind to do anything useful. The only wind
farm I've actually seen had all its turbines sitting stationary for several
days - so wasteful... and fugly.

If hydrogen works as a way to turn stationary energy into a
transportation fuel, so do biofuels. Both have serious infrastructure
problems. I think I'd rather figure out how to protect piping from
corrosion than how to protect piping from hydrogen migration and
embrittlement.

The corrosion is a minor part of the difficulties of ethanol - the stuff is
very hygroscopic and the mixing problems with petroleum are a nightmare.
As for hydrogen, I just don't see that it works at all as a transportation
fuel, without some major rule-breaking technology.