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DrDork posted:There's also the issue of enormously expensive vendor lock-in on a lot of the platforms. Book publishers and vendors of "productivity software" (homework kits, etc) are laughing all the way to the bank in a lot of cases. Well it certainly doesn't help that some ebook textbooks require awful software or have terrible layouts that almost seemed intended to be unusable.
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Aug 27, 2015 04:25
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Nintendo Kid posted:Well it certainly doesn't help that some ebook textbooks require awful software or have terrible layouts that almost seemed intended to be unusable. The secret is to be awful, but at a slightly lower price than the printed books, so the district buys them because it "saves money". Everyone who actually uses them then bitches and complains because they're terrible. Then next year you release a new version that's more expensive but slightly less awful and everyone demands the district pony up for the better product. Congratulations! You've now made 1.8x the revenue you would have from selling the single perfectly usable printed book you would otherwise have sold them. Include one-time-use "companion codes" to access online quizzes, and you can continue making 40-50% of the original book's price for no further effort every god damned year!
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Aug 27, 2015 04:41
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DrDork posted:Include one-time-use "companion codes" to access online quizzes, and you can continue making 40-50% of the original book's price for no further effort every god damned year! Don't forget that the "companion codes" also make the instructor's job pretty low-effort as well. Exploited with great success in undergrad courses, instead of making the grad student slaves grade all the assignments the way our founding fathers intended. 
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Aug 27, 2015 06:27
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Durinia posted:This is true, but that's also assuming that the software momentum of current PCs will outweigh the software momentum of Android/iOS. ARM is already starting to eat into the laptop market (slowly), but PCs are kind of the last bastion where it's x86 or GTFO. ARM designs are making an end-run around it and going straight for server market where that momentum is less of an issue (and the market is actually not shrinking like PCs). Except that every arm server thing to date has been vaporware.
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Aug 27, 2015 17:21
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kwinkles posted:Except that every arm server thing to date has been vaporware. That's not entirely true, isn't HP shipping Moonshot servers with ARM modules available for a while? Something like this: http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/proliant-servers/product-detail.html?oid=7398907#!tab=specs Compute AppliedMicro™ X-Gene™ 2.4GHz (1), ARMv8 64-bit cores (8), SOC Memory 64GB of DDR3 PC3L-12800 (1600 MHz) SODIMM Low Voltage Memory
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Aug 27, 2015 17:24
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kwinkles posted:Except that every arm server thing to date has been vaporware. There isn't a demand for them yet. Intel has the high end, AMD and others the rest. But if AMD were to go bye bye, and Intel started jacking up prices, there is much more incentive to develop an alternative, and ARM is closest (assuming someone doesn't pick up AMD designs from their corpse and start reusing them)
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Aug 27, 2015 17:25
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Twerk from Home posted:That's not entirely true, isn't HP shipping Moonshot servers with ARM modules available for a while? Something like this: http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/proliant-servers/product-detail.html?oid=7398907#!tab=specs And these sold so well that hp server revenue fell by 12% or something and then they released a xeon version.
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Aug 27, 2015 17:30
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Twerk from Home posted:That's not entirely true, isn't HP shipping Moonshot servers with ARM modules available for a while? Something like this: http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/proliant-servers/product-detail.html?oid=7398907#!tab=specs They exist, but Intel shits on them in both absolute perf and performance per watt bigtime, and the second generation that was supposed to close the gap is somewhere floating in the ether  Meanwhile Broadwell(-D) Xeons are another nice march forward in perf/watt. Skandranon posted:Intel started jacking up prices, there is much more incentive to develop an alternative, and ARM is closest (assuming someone doesn't pick up AMD designs from their corpse and start reusing them) This sort of price sensitivity just doesn't apply to the server world. CPU hardware costs are a quite small percentage of your overall expenses. Most of your money will tend to end up poured in to the bottomless pit of storage and software licensing/support contracts. Even on a non "BIG DATA/CLOUD/etc" scale, a VM infra deployment can easily work out to be ~50k in server costs, 500k in storage costs. Then software/support more on top. The ratio generally holds true as you scale down, too, a more modest business might be looking at 10k worth of servers, 50 (maybe 100k if you want some nice DR or replication) in storage. No one buying this gives a gently caress if the CPUs in your servers are $3000 vs $3500.
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Aug 27, 2015 18:24
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ARM was effective competition in that Intel saw it coming and started working to counter it. It's unlikely they would have gone on the power-savings kick as early as they did without the threat of ARM. Since there's a large market for ARM chips outside of computers it will stay as a potential threat if Intel fails to deliver, while perhaps not actually moving into intel markets in any real force. Sort of a chip-in-being strategy.
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Aug 27, 2015 18:34
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evilweasel posted:ARM was effective competition in that Intel saw it coming and started working to counter it. It's unlikely they would have gone on the power-savings kick as early as they did without the threat of ARM. Since there's a large market for ARM chips outside of computers it will stay as a potential threat if Intel fails to deliver, while perhaps not actually moving into intel markets in any real force. Sort of a chip-in-being strategy. There is no question that arm is the competition for intel now in a way that amd is not anymore. Just look at surface 3.
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Aug 27, 2015 22:07
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kwinkles posted:Except that every arm server thing to date has been vaporware. There's only one company that's actually released anything to shipment (APM) and it follows ARM licensees' traditional model of "the first implementation of a new ISA (in this case, ARMv8) is a piece of poo poo". The promise of ARM as competition with Intel doesn't have anything to do with low power microserver garbage (which the entire processor vendor set - including a full bet by AMD - bought hook/line/sinker and is now failing spectacularly), but that any number of very good SoC companies now have the tools and ecosystem to make Xeon equivalents if they want to. There are still companies that have figured this out - companies with almost Intel-level resources - that will start showing up with designs. It's just taking a while since the hype train got started super early on ARM thanks to some companies that tried to jump the gun with 32-bit stuff.
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Aug 27, 2015 22:24
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kwinkles posted:And these sold so well that hp server revenue fell by 12% or something and then they released a xeon version. Yeah, yet another feather in HP's visionary cap. But "THE MACHINE" will be totally awesome guys! Trust us!
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Aug 27, 2015 22:25
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kwinkles posted:There is no question that arm is the competition for intel now in a way that amd is not anymore. Just look at surface 3. ARM vs Intel competition is quite different from what AMD vs Intel was like. AMD actually had product lines which competed directly with Intel and could be treated as fungible (particularly in the olden days before Intel locked AMD out of using a common socket). ARM does not. Not even with these attempts at server chips. Basically ARM and Intel each have a safe, well protected tasty lunch in their respective market segments. They're competing in the sense that each side is eyeing the other's lunch and trying to figure out how to take a bite, but it's an uphill battle both ways. There's too much shipped binary software and that puts the brakes on the other side trying to enter the market. Even with Android, where binary compatibility is theoretically a non issue (because Java), Intel has faced enormous problems making their x86 cellphone chips attractive to OEMs because it turns out they still end up running a substantial amount of code through an ARM emulator. The other issue is that the market segments ARM is in, and the nature of how ARM does business with both fabs and the fabless companies that put their cores into complete chips, makes it very tough for ARM to justify even trying to design a truly high performance core that could go head to head against Intel on the desktop or in servers. If they tried they'd have to commit to losing money on a few generations, and it might be a lot of money. ARM doesn't have the luxury of an Intel size revenue stream, so they probably can't do this. This is why, to date, all these ARM server chips have been "toss a shitload of underpowered slow low power cores borrowed from mobile in a single chip and hope it looks attractive to somebody". But it turns out it's really not, because even in cases where the business workload is a zillion threads latency is usually still important, and slow cores have much worse latency than fast.
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Aug 27, 2015 22:34
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Skandranon posted:pick up AMD designs from their corpse and start reusing them Durinia posted:There are still companies that have figured this out - companies with almost Intel-level resources - that will start showing up with designs. It's just taking a while since the hype train got started super early on ARM thanks to some companies that tried to jump the gun with 32-bit stuff. Qualcomm, Samsung, and... and....
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Aug 27, 2015 22:42
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BobHoward posted:The other issue is that the market segments ARM is in, and the nature of how ARM does business with both fabs and the fabless companies that put their cores into complete chips, makes it very tough for ARM to justify even trying to design a truly high performance core that could go head to head against Intel on the desktop or in servers. If they tried they'd have to commit to losing money on a few generations, and it might be a lot of money. ARM doesn't have the luxury of an Intel size revenue stream, so they probably can't do this. This is why, to date, all these ARM server chips have been "toss a shitload of underpowered slow low power cores borrowed from mobile in a single chip and hope it looks attractive to somebody". But it turns out it's really not, because even in cases where the business workload is a zillion threads latency is usually still important, and slow cores have much worse latency than fast. So, this is all true. A true "server core" like Intel's is not a good investment for ARM themselves. The wild card comes in when someone with a lot of revenue, experience, and an ARM Architectural license (so they can design their own core based on the ISA) decides they want to take a shot at it.
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Aug 27, 2015 22:49
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JawnV6 posted:That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. Yeah, the list is fairly short. There are a couple of others that have announced publicly (Broadcom, AMD, Cavium) besides the ones you mention. The market (if it takes off) probably couldn't sustain more than a couple of them. But I think I can safely say that most server OEMs would be thrilled with a count of 1 or greater.
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Aug 27, 2015 22:56
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Durinia posted:But I think I can safely say that most server OEMs would be thrilled with a count of 1 or greater. In the same way that it's safe to say most server OEM's would be thrilled with unencumbered perfectly efficient fanless cooling, but that says nothing about the actual feasibility of doing the science and engineering to make it possible.
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Aug 28, 2015 00:01
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JawnV6 posted:That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. Whats this supposed to mean? Samsung could buy AMD and decide to go into the CPU market. Who knows what will happen to AMDs IP if/when they go under.
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Aug 28, 2015 00:50
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Skandranon posted:Whats this supposed to mean? Samsung could buy AMD and decide to go into the CPU market. Who knows what will happen to AMDs IP if/when they go under. The thing about AMDs x86 license? It's non-transferable.
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Aug 28, 2015 01:03
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Look at AMD's market value. If AMD had an available x86 license that would be inherited by a buyer, AMD would have been bought in 2012.
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Aug 28, 2015 01:04
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A cash rich company could buy a huge stake in AMD and try to run it in the background--I think this wouldn't violate the x86 license. I'm just not sure who would want to buy into the x86 market. The only area worth competing for is server; I'm sure some monied company must be sick of Intel's pricing by now, but infusing cash into the ongoing tire fire that is AMD strikes me as a poor investment. Aside from "high end" chips, x86 doesn't seem that worthwhile.
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Aug 28, 2015 09:27
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That exact scenario would actually break their contract with Intel.
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Aug 28, 2015 10:10
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Well they're doomed then thanks for ruining my dreams. Intel will never be pushed. I don't think x86 is great investment anyways. Here is to OpenPOWER on the desktop! Edit: they better sell ATI to someone who isn't poo poo.
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Aug 28, 2015 10:23
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Yudo posted:Well they're doomed then thanks for ruining my dreams. Intel will never be pushed. Stop wishing for POWER to come back to the consumer market. It's never going to happen.
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Aug 28, 2015 13:46
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evilweasel posted:ARM was effective competition in that Intel saw it coming and started working to counter it. It's unlikely they would have gone on the power-savings kick as early as they did without the threat of ARM. Since there's a large market for ARM chips outside of computers it will stay as a potential threat if Intel fails to deliver, while perhaps not actually moving into intel markets in any real force. Sort of a chip-in-being strategy. The key mistake Intel made was they underestimated how fast the ARM players could ramp up clocks and IPC while still maintaining their tiny power envelope. There's a pretty big time window between the original iPhone SoC to the Cortex A8 where they could have really beat ARM in their own game, but they chose not to probably because of intolerance for slimmer margins. By the time the Qualcomm S4 Pro came out in late 2011, Intel has effectively lost the mobile war to ARM's "good enough" level of performance.
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Aug 28, 2015 14:28
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Palladium posted:The key mistake Intel made was they underestimated how fast the ARM players could ramp up clocks and IPC while still maintaining their tiny power envelope. There's a pretty big time window between the original iPhone SoC to the Cortex A8 where they could have really beat ARM in their own game, but they chose not to probably because of intolerance for slimmer margins. By the time the Qualcomm S4 Pro came out in late 2011, Intel has effectively lost the mobile war to ARM's "good enough" level of performance. This type of thing (supported by all the bitching about how little Intel's cores are improving per generation earlier in this thread), is what the ARM side is hoping happens in server. The big difference is whose home turf it's playing out on.
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Aug 28, 2015 14:36
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Should be noted that it's not impossible to negotiate your own license for x86 and x86-64, it's just going to require an upfront payment of $texas and probably ongoing royalty payments. Which is why no one's bothered to buy the licenses and then buy out AMD for the people who have some idea of actually implementing it.
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Aug 28, 2015 14:49
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Durinia posted:This type of thing (supported by all the bitching about how little Intel's cores are improving per generation earlier in this thread), is what the ARM side is hoping happens in server. Nah, the big difference is that there's no such thing as "Eh, good enough" performance in the server space like there is on the desktop or mobile, and that server CPUs have continued to make much more significant leaps every generation in both power and performance. (Of course helped by server applications pretty much always scaling well with thread counts which have risen dramatically). Gwaihir fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Aug 28, 2015 |
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Aug 28, 2015 14:54
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A Bad King posted:Stop wishing for POWER to come back to the consumer market. It's never going to happen. Of all the far fetched scenarios, POWER's triumphant (and assuredly expensive) return to the desktop is still within the realm of possibility. The once mighty and glorious Alpha, on the other hand, was summarily executed to clear the market space for the Itanium. Never forgive, and never forget. I had some experience with Sparc's of various shapes and sizes, but I recall distinctly how Alpha powered workstations utterly trounced the equivalent era Intel machines. Of course they were more expensive (though if I recall, more reasonable than SGI boxes) but you got what you paid for including great FPU performance before the era of of powerful and programmable GPUs. The P6 closed the gap quite a but, and today's Intel architectures are basically RISC inside and otherwise full featured, but I do wish they kept the Alpha team together after DEC was sold to Compaq (and eventually HP). Perhaps I will buy one off EBay, to look at and to weep, from time to time.
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Aug 29, 2015 21:26
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Would be interesting to know if competition law would apply in the case of AMD going under. With the high level of dependence on X86 - I'm not sure an X86 monopoly would be allowed...
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Aug 30, 2015 05:49
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I'd go on a limb and say that AMD going under would be bad for Intel's business. Government purchasing often requires second sourcing, particularly military stuff. Intel would become an official monopoly rather than just being one de facto. Legally, I doubt the US would do anything about it but the EU would perhaps. Intel might even be wise to keep AMD on life support as there are no real competition in the areas that seem to matter now: server and mobile. Intel's problem is not AMD, rather its dependence on process scaling and struggles with with multiple patterning and wiring these 14nm chips. 10nm is going to be even worse.
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Aug 30, 2015 08:00
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If the government does airport bailouts...
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Aug 30, 2015 10:21
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Deathreaper posted:Would be interesting to know if competition law would apply in the case of AMD going under. With the high level of dependence on X86 - I'm not sure an X86 monopoly would be allowed... How does this work? Would the government be required to bail out competitors? The monopolist be ordered to break up his company?
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Aug 30, 2015 10:42
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It would depend on if Intel became a monopoly cause they are the best or because they hosed over amd.
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Aug 30, 2015 14:05
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Does anybody know when CPU's with GT4e will start to be released? I'm thinking of buying an intel NUC if the performance is good enough.
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Aug 30, 2015 14:18
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Xeom posted:Does anybody know when CPU's with GT4e will start to be released? Some Skylake CPUs will have it.
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Aug 30, 2015 14:29
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Yudo posted:I'd go on a limb and say that AMD going under would be bad for Intel's business. Government purchasing often requires second sourcing, particularly military stuff. Intel would become an official monopoly rather than just being one de facto. Does the fed buy raw cpus? For example, at the moment there is a de-facto Dell monoculture in the federal government for user desktops and servers(most stringently in DoD and Army), but that adds a layer of abstraction above the cpu vendor. I'm not finding any procurement policies that care whether the HP and Dell servers they have available on CHESS contracts all have only one parts vendor for cpu.
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Aug 30, 2015 16:46
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midnightclimax posted:How does this work? Would the government be required to bail out competitors? The monopolist be ordered to break up his company? They might require that Intel's licensing terms on x86 change.
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Aug 30, 2015 16:50
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Subjunctive posted:They might require that Intel's licensing terms on x86 change.
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Aug 30, 2015 17:22
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Anime Schoolgirl posted:Better hope the EU isn't distracted enough for them to actually do that Even just making AMD's license survive change of control would be a big help.
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Aug 30, 2015 17:53
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