Yousuf Khan said:
chrisv said:A stupid article. He seems to think that "buying computers" is
something that is done all at once, with an eye toward OS upgrades X
months later. In fact, computers, 10's of thousands of computers, are
sold every freaking day of the year. It's not an off/on switch where
suddenly buying an Opteron makes sense. It's a grey scale, where
every single day it makes sense to more and more buyers.
chrisv said:http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/AMD_enhances_pitch_for_ Opteron.html?tag=tu.arch.link
A stupid article. He seems to think that "buying computers" is
something that is done all at once, with an eye toward OS upgrades X
months later. In fact, computers, 10's of thousands of computers, are
sold every freaking day of the year. It's not an off/on switch where
suddenly buying an Opteron makes sense. It's a grey scale, where
every single day it makes sense to more and more buyers.
Rob Stow said:http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/AMD_enhances_pitch_for _Opteron.html?tag=tu.arch.link
A stupid article. He seems to think that "buying computers" is
something that is done all at once, with an eye toward OS upgrades X
months later. In fact, computers, 10's of thousands of computers, are
sold every freaking day of the year. It's not an off/on switch where
suddenly buying an Opteron makes sense. It's a grey scale, where
every single day it makes sense to more and more buyers.
I was particularly amused by the paragraph:
In my book, the whole AMD investment protection
story is a bit over-rated. Chances are, you’re going
to buy a new system anyway. I asked Knox about my theory,
and surprisingly he agreed, but his disclaimer was a time
threshold. “If you aren’t migrating for another two or
three years, you’re right,” Knox said. “Anything after that,
you should buy the best 32-bit system [now] and not worry
about backwards compatibility [later]. But, for people that
are migrating in 18 months or less, this makes sense.”
Why the heck didn't either Knox or that idiotic writer point out
that for most purposes AMD64 *is* the best 32-bit system available ?
Tony Hill said:In the end, I'm not really sure what his big complaint about the
Opteron is, except that some people might not benefit much from it's
64-bit capabilities. It seems to me sorta like if someone were to
complain about a great 4-door sedan because right now the owner is
single and might not start a family for quite a number of years so
he/she won't really benefit from having a sedan instead of a coupe.
While it might be true, it misses the point that the car is great to
begin with, regardless of how many doors it has.
Oh and BTW, yeah AMD has seemed to convince a lot of OEMs, software ISVs,
and customers about the value of their solution, yada-yada-yada, let's just
get that out of the way so we can continue attacking AMD.
Yousuf Khan
Ed said:YES! finally an Opteron bashing article, just what Intel ordered!
Who cares what this guy thinks anyway, he just some bozo!
Alexander Grigoriev said:Device drivers has been written without assembly language for quite a long
time. Only very small parts of kernel need assembly. I'm not sure if you'll
be able to find much assembly in Linux driver's sources. Windows NT/2K/XP
etc and Win9x WDM drivers are all written in C and some C++. Assembly has
been widely used for writing Windows 3.0/3.1 VMM and VxD, but then there was
no 32-bit C compiler at Microsoft. Now, for quite a few years even VxDs (God
forbid!) could be (and are) written entirely in C.
I know, but you gotta admit, even the C/C++ code that is written for device
drivers is a lot more architecture specific than code written for
applications, right?
AFAIK without using inline assembly there's no way to do many low-level things on hardware.
I never programmed WDM drivers but I know some DSP programming and if want to do that right you must
learn assembler because C interfaces/libraries are always pretty limited.
Only if you want to hand-optimize MMX/SSE code. In Windows kernel, the
hardware is accessible through WRITE_PORT_xxx and WRITE_REGISTER_xxx
function families and you don't need to (and should NOT) code IN and OUT
assembler instructions.
Keith R. Williams said:things on hardware.
You're wrong. One can bit-bang in C, or a myriad of other
languages, just like one can in ASM.
Keith R. Williams said:Assuming your universe is limited to writing application code on
proteted OSs, sure. However, if you're doing kernel, or other
low-level priv stuff (how do you suppose WRITE_PORT is
implemented?), or in an embedded environment, no.
key word : multiplatform
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