Intel: The chipset is the product

Yousuf Khan wrote:
chrisv wrote:

I just haven't seen a need to look elsewhere, recently. It's not like
I'd actually notice the 10% improvement in performance that I'd get by
going with AMD and a brand-X chipset (given equal dollars). Looking
forward, it appears that Intel may be in trouble with the lame
Prescott going against the superb Athlon 64, and I could live with an
Nvidia chipset... I'll cross that bridge when I'm next in the market
for a home machine.


As they say, if you don't try any other products other than the ones you're
comfortable with, then how are you ever going to know the quality of the
competing products?


There is the philosophy that you should let others do the testing for
you, if possible. Unless you have a special personal or professional
interest in different kinds of hardware, what justification would there
be for serving as a volunteer hardware tester?

Who knows whether the spotty reputation AMD acquired was deserved or
not. At this point, one would most likely think not, and that the
chipset manufacturers were the common source of problems. That should
be good news for AMD, but it's not, because I don't sense that anyone
has established a reputation for chipset reliability that is comparable
to Intel's, and you can't plug an AMD processor into an Intel motherboard.

The chipset and the compiler stop me every time I think about an AMD
purchase. I've had enough hardware adventures for a while, thank you.
One gathers that Chris feels the same way, and it's not an opinion
either of us formed in a vacuum. Not an immutable position, but wait
and see doesn't seem wrong. You have to give Intel credit. In pushing
the chipset issue, they are playing to a widely-perceived strength.
Doesn't that seem more attractive than selling megahertz, anyway?


RM

chrisv wrote:
Well, I have eyes and ears, and yes, still some prejudices. 8)

Yes, yes, that we know. ;-)

One example: A friend of mine, who had purchased a PC pre-configured
with Lindows 3. Cheap, brand-X motherboard and chipset, of course.
When he installed Lindows 4 on the same machine, the sound wouldn't
work. We tried some other Linux distributions and had issues with the
on-board video. Yuck. He's now ordering, on my recommendation, an
Intel D865GBFL, and I'd be shocked it if wasn't properly supported
(we're putting on the new Fedora Core 2, again on my recommendation).

I had tried Knoppix on a CD boot, and I was pretty impressed with how well,
it booted up on many desktop systems. It detected pretty much everything on
my system. It boot fine on a friend's system, however it didn't recognize
any of the drives on his Promise SATA card (nor the card itself for that
matter), but that's okay, it didn't lock up either. However, it had a lot of
trouble booting up on my old P3-350Mhz Toshiba Satellite notebook -- it just
plainly locked.

Then a week back, I went to visit a cousin of mine, he was showing me his
P4 laptop. One partition running XP, the other partition running Gentoo. The
Gentoo booted and all fine, but it didn't really seem to have a lot of stuff
to do, almost nothing was automated, he had to start up KDE by hand at the
root prompt, etc. And even with KDE running all he seemed to be able to do
was run a web browser. I said you can probably find all of the stuff for
Gentoo to make it really nice by scowering the Internet, or you could go
with a different distro and have everything built in. I asked my cousin why
he chose Gentoo? He said it was because his friends said that since it is a
compiled-from-source distro, it was likely to be a more optimize kernel than
a generic distro. However, he's not exactly a guru of Windows, let alone
Linux, so I suggested that he go find a different distro and get some better
useability out of it. I suggested Fedora since it's basically Red Hat, but I
don't have personal experience with it.

I guess the point is these days, it would be a distro that would make the
difference between compatibility with Linux or not, rather than the chipset.
Lindows 3 worked on that PC, but why not Lindows 4? Would switching to a new
motherboard, while at the same time switching to a different Linux fix his
problems? If so, then which one fixed it, the motherboard or the distro?

Yousuf Khan

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

In article ble.rogers.com,
Yousuf Khan wrote:
Then a week back, I went to visit a cousin of mine, he was showing me his
P4 laptop. One partition running XP, the other partition running Gentoo. The
Gentoo booted and all fine, but it didn't really seem to have a lot of stuff
to do, almost nothing was automated, he had to start up KDE by hand at the
root prompt, etc. And even with KDE running all he seemed to be able to do
was run a web browser.

"rc-update add xdm default" (combined with making sure DISPLAYMANAGER is set
to "kdm" in /etc/rc.conf) would've fixed the X11-not-loading-at-boot
problem. For someone just getting started with Linux (any Linux), it's not
obvious (though it is in the documentation).

I mostly run without X (and don't bother setting up audio) on my Linux
boxes, but that's mainly because most of them are servers, routers, and
other stuff that doesn't need X. The two Linux desktop machines I'm running
(a dual-boot Win2K/Gentoo box at work and a Gentoo MythTV box at home) went
together without much fuss...and they're both Athlon XPs (1600 at work on an
nForce2 board with a GeForce4MX 440 and on-board audio, and a 2400 at home
on a KT266A board with a GeForceFX 5200, Turtle Beach Riviera, and WinTV
PVR350).

_/_
/ v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail)
(IIGS( http://alfter.us/ Top-posting!
\_^_/ rm -rf /bin/laden What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (Linux)

iD8DBQFAt8OpVgTKos01OwkRAt6SAKCbAfmHzFYbliGu4h5gqo jugRTMfgCffi7k
NAb4mxD5heqmQBsBgoVCPCc=
=XBES
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Scott Alfter wrote:
I mostly run without X (and don't bother setting up audio) on my Linux
boxes, but that's mainly because most of them are servers, routers,
and
other stuff that doesn't need X. The two Linux desktop machines I'm
running (a dual-boot Win2K/Gentoo box at work and a Gentoo MythTV box
at home) went together without much fuss...and they're both Athlon
XPs (1600 at work on an nForce2 board with a GeForce4MX 440 and
on-board audio, and a 2400 at home
on a KT266A board with a GeForceFX 5200, Turtle Beach Riviera, and
WinTV PVR350).

Would suggesting Fedora to a newbie, be a good or bad move?

Yousuf Khan
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGPfreeware 6.5.8 for non-commercial use http://www.pgp.com

iQA/AwUBQLfhzu9XnxyH0dIcEQIvtwCdEg4CXs77xngmh2SQRtspfm l2kWcAn1uO
22X90HngyjVqax5MblhoQeo6
=ndie
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

"Yousuf Khan" writes:

Scott Alfter wrote:
I mostly run without X (and don't bother setting up audio) on my Linux
boxes, but that's mainly because most of them are servers, routers,
and
other stuff that doesn't need X. The two Linux desktop machines I'm
running (a dual-boot Win2K/Gentoo box at work and a Gentoo MythTV box
at home) went together without much fuss...and they're both Athlon
XPs (1600 at work on an nForce2 board with a GeForce4MX 440 and
on-board audio, and a 2400 at home
on a KT266A board with a GeForceFX 5200, Turtle Beach Riviera, and
WinTV PVR350).

Would suggesting Fedora to a newbie, be a good or bad move?

I'm hardly a Linux newbie (10 years and counting , but based on my
recent install of the Fedora Core 2, yes, suggesting Fedora looks like
a good move to me.

The only problem I had was that it didn't detect/understand my
GFX/monitor combo (Matrox G450 and an oldish 17" Hitachi) correctly,
so I had to edit the X config file to get 1280x1204 and 1024x768
resolution running.

Regards,


Kai

On Fri, 28 May 2004 15:34:29 GMT, Robert Myers
wrote:

George Macdonald wrote:
On Thu, 27 May 2004 05:29:14 GMT, Robert Myers
wrote:


George Macdonald wrote:

On Wed, 26 May 2004 00:21:32 GMT, Robert Myers
wrote:


snip


I'm not so sure about "hurry-up" here... the way Intel has been sponsoring
startups in the home oriented multimedia sphere and filling in with
in-house nuts-n-bolts stuff. A big fanfare at rollout with dog 'n' pony
shows all over could have more impact than a ramped info-trickle.


They've definitely been clearing ground for this current agenda for a
while, but I think it's fair to infer that the exact timing and delivery
of much of this stuff is being forced upon them. If Prescott had turned
out the way Intel wanted to, we'd be hearing about Megahertz, not chipsets.

I think their getting too close to actual consumer products for their own
good - quite a dilemma for them as to how far they tread on the toes of
consumer name-brand OEMs in their quest to own the market.

Where do they get this stuff: "Because the chip set incorporates features
like Dolby audio and advanced 3-D video previously found only in add-on
cards..."?

They get it from the press release, one gathers. I haven't yet found
the culpable press release on Intel's site, though.


Wot a loada BULL****! Intel plays catch-up and a buncha
anal...ysts drop their drawers in public!!! How embarrassing.


You worry me sometimes. Can't you just relax and enjoy the show? :-).


I can stand clueless but clueless pretending to be expert advice/opinion
prickles with me - bald-faced lies ****es me off.


Intel is using the relative technological unsophistication of those who
write for the press to get its advertising message across as hard news.
They didn't invent the game, of course. Every technology company
draws from the same pool of PR types, and it would be amazing if the PR
style of Intel differed significantly from industry norms in terms of
what comes natural.

Intel does seem to me to be much more calculating about its message than
most, and they seem to make it work for them. I am probably more
inclined than the average technologist to pay attention to these sorts
of things, but it really does seem to me that you can't understand what
Intel is up to without understanding the messages it is trying to
convey. That's why I take up bandwidth in hardware groups calling
attention on it. :-).

Calculating maybe but I think it has more to do with the susceptibility of
the microprocessor market to BS... due to the presence of a bunch of
(mostly) ignorant "analysts" who are presented as, and perceived by the
even more ignorant news agencies like Reuters, as gurus of the industry.
The news chain is simply primed for BS... for no good reason. The Inquirer
and The Register to the rescue??:-)

As to genuine cluelessness/misinformation, it seems to me like you would
need some kind of logarithmic scale. Consumers aren't very well
informed about the actual properties of the laundry detergents they buy.
The difference, you might fairly object, is that technical-sounding
press releases from Proctor and Gamble don't frequently show up in the
press as hard news. Don't know what to say about that.

People have a direct method of "benchmarking" their detergents though -
they know that, e.g., a store brand detergent gets used up faster or leaves
a horrible scent on their shirts and blouses. Perhaps the auto industry
would be a better comparison as far as consumer technology but the $$ per
finished product is in a different ball-park. There, the outsource
companies take an intentionally low profile - e.g. how many people know
that Magna Steyr builds whole vehicles for M.B and BMW, who gladly put
their "griffe" on them.

In the auto industry there is plenty of expert opinion BS of course but the
consumer is generally in a good position to see it as opinion. The
"experts" cannot, however, get away with the kind of incompetence we see in
many computer industry articles where, either the analyst being quoted is
clueless or the author so unqualified that it all turns out as umm, tripe.
The prognostications on 64-bit x86 are a prime example of this - take a
look at the 64-bit Support section of
http://enterprise-windows-it.newsfac...ory/24055.html where it
looks like the author is just so inadequate to the task that he shouldn't
be writing about the computer industry. Add in the "analyst" bias/misread
and what comes out is gobbledygook.

I give Intel considerable credit for having successfully cultivated a
market by persuading so many people that they needed all that muscle to
begin with. I don't think things like that just happen. I have to be
careful with this line of thinking, though, because it would eventually
lead to my expression very grudging admiration for Microsoft, and we
wouldn't want that.

You need to start worrying about your favorite topic though, now that M$
has declared its intention to enter the HPC market.chuckle

Rgds, George Macdonald

"Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean you're not psychotic" - Who, me??

George Macdonald wrote:
On Fri, 28 May 2004 15:34:29 GMT, Robert Myers

snip


In the auto industry there is plenty of expert opinion BS of course but the
consumer is generally in a good position to see it as opinion. The
"experts" cannot, however, get away with the kind of incompetence we see in
many computer industry articles where, either the analyst being quoted is
clueless or the author so unqualified that it all turns out as umm, tripe.
The prognostications on 64-bit x86 are a prime example of this - take a
look at the 64-bit Support section of
http://enterprise-windows-it.newsfac...ory/24055.html where it
looks like the author is just so inadequate to the task that he shouldn't
be writing about the computer industry. Add in the "analyst" bias/misread
and what comes out is gobbledygook.


Apologies in advance to the author, James Maguire, who is probably a
decent, hardworking person, but my suggested title for the entire
article would be "Bart Simpson Reports on Windows."

What had been two of my favorite _New_Yorker_ columnists both quit
contributing regularly with plenty of mileage left in them, because, as
I remember them both pleading, they liked to write, and they liked to
write for _The_New_Yorker_, but they didn't like to write on a deadline.

Even leaving aside the challenge of churning out copy on demand, just
imagine trying to do a better job of trying to inform readers what might
happen that really matters as a result of 64-bit support in Windows.
Time to talk about the usefulness of more named registers, right? :-).
Just imagine it: a 20-page pullout in industry rags that talks about
memory latency, out of order execution, register renaming, register
starvation and spilling, L1 latency, L2 latency, and pipeline stalls,
complete with slick color graphics and an interactive web page you can
go to for more information. Advertising should sell like half-time
spots for the Super Bowl. I feel faint just thinking about it.

quote

"That's huge," Bittman said, noting that "a large percentage of the
sales will become 64-bit Windows very quickly because of this support."

/quote

Super! Don't know what it is, but everybody will have it. They'll have
the hardware, they'll have the software, and it must be important
because Unix and Linux have had it for a long time, whatever it is.
Maybe you can find the real substance by paying for the relevant Gartner
report. Not that anything that was quoted in the article would
encourage a reader who was paying attention to do that, but, marketing
being the way that it is, it's probably more important to Gartner to be
quoted than to be quoted saying anything that bears examination.



I give Intel considerable credit for having successfully cultivated a
market by persuading so many people that they needed all that muscle to
begin with. I don't think things like that just happen. I have to be
careful with this line of thinking, though, because it would eventually
lead to my expression very grudging admiration for Microsoft, and we
wouldn't want that.


You need to start worrying about your favorite topic though, now that M$
has declared its intention to enter the HPC market.chuckle


You barely know me. I already made a post to the Beowulf mailing list
suggesting that the HPC community should seize this opportunity to get
as much Microsoft money as possible. HPC is, like racing cars, a
money-losing proposition. How much would Microsoft sink into a grand
challenge problem to say that a grand challenge problem was solved using
Windows? The cost of the actual scientific enterprise to Microsoft? A
day's earnings if it went hog wild. Cost to hype it to the press?
Several times that. Value to Microsoft in getting people to stop
thinking of them as a predatory monopolist? Priceless. Time for
science to get on the gravy train.

RM

On Sun, 30 May 2004 15:48:28 GMT, Robert Myers
wrote:

George Macdonald wrote:
On Fri, 28 May 2004 15:34:29 GMT, Robert Myers

snip


In the auto industry there is plenty of expert opinion BS of course but the
consumer is generally in a good position to see it as opinion. The
"experts" cannot, however, get away with the kind of incompetence we see in
many computer industry articles where, either the analyst being quoted is
clueless or the author so unqualified that it all turns out as umm, tripe.
The prognostications on 64-bit x86 are a prime example of this - take a
look at the 64-bit Support section of
http://enterprise-windows-it.newsfac...ory/24055.html where it
looks like the author is just so inadequate to the task that he shouldn't
be writing about the computer industry. Add in the "analyst" bias/misread
and what comes out is gobbledygook.


Apologies in advance to the author, James Maguire, who is probably a
decent, hardworking person, but my suggested title for the entire
article would be "Bart Simpson Reports on Windows."

What had been two of my favorite _New_Yorker_ columnists both quit
contributing regularly with plenty of mileage left in them, because, as
I remember them both pleading, they liked to write, and they liked to
write for _The_New_Yorker_, but they didn't like to write on a deadline.

Even leaving aside the challenge of churning out copy on demand, just
imagine trying to do a better job of trying to inform readers what might
happen that really matters as a result of 64-bit support in Windows.
Time to talk about the usefulness of more named registers, right? :-).
Just imagine it: a 20-page pullout in industry rags that talks about
memory latency, out of order execution, register renaming, register
starvation and spilling, L1 latency, L2 latency, and pipeline stalls,
complete with slick color graphics and an interactive web page you can
go to for more information. Advertising should sell like half-time
spots for the Super Bowl. I feel faint just thinking about it.

Well yeah the "more named registers" is a big part of it but for the usual
shallow press coverage, there are other ways to get the message across.
like: finally we have a desktop PC which is worthy of the term computer;
internally it's just like a *real* computer; we can finally leave behind
the legacy of a hand calculator ISA; software can be made more efficient;
compilers can produce better code... etc. etc.

Super! Don't know what it is, but everybody will have it. They'll have
the hardware, they'll have the software, and it must be important
because Unix and Linux have had it for a long time, whatever it is.
Maybe you can find the real substance by paying for the relevant Gartner
report. Not that anything that was quoted in the article would
encourage a reader who was paying attention to do that, but, marketing
being the way that it is, it's probably more important to Gartner to be
quoted than to be quoted saying anything that bears examination.

Hmm, probably better for Gartner to be quoted than some other analyst
"house"?:-) Have you been quoted by such writers? Apparently there are
journos who read Usenet - one of them contacted me recently by e-mail for
my "opinion". What I said/wrote got lifted out of context, mangled and
didn't really say what I wanted at all.shrug

I give Intel considerable credit for having successfully cultivated a
market by persuading so many people that they needed all that muscle to
begin with. I don't think things like that just happen. I have to be
careful with this line of thinking, though, because it would eventually
lead to my expression very grudging admiration for Microsoft, and we
wouldn't want that.


You need to start worrying about your favorite topic though, now that M$
has declared its intention to enter the HPC market.chuckle


You barely know me. I already made a post to the Beowulf mailing list
suggesting that the HPC community should seize this opportunity to get
as much Microsoft money as possible. HPC is, like racing cars, a
money-losing proposition. How much would Microsoft sink into a grand
challenge problem to say that a grand challenge problem was solved using
Windows? The cost of the actual scientific enterprise to Microsoft? A
day's earnings if it went hog wild. Cost to hype it to the press?
Several times that. Value to Microsoft in getting people to stop
thinking of them as a predatory monopolist? Priceless. Time for
science to get on the gravy train.

If you can find yourself a niche there, good luck to you. I assume you are
aware of the dangers of dealing with them - sewing up your pockets won't do
it.;-)

Rgds, George Macdonald

"Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean you're not psychotic" - Who, me??

On Mon, 31 May 2004 03:42:57 -0400, George Macdonald
wrote:

On Sun, 30 May 2004 15:48:28 GMT, Robert Myers
wrote:
Super! Don't know what it is, but everybody will have it. They'll have
the hardware, they'll have the software, and it must be important
because Unix and Linux have had it for a long time, whatever it is.
Maybe you can find the real substance by paying for the relevant Gartner
report. Not that anything that was quoted in the article would
encourage a reader who was paying attention to do that, but, marketing
being the way that it is, it's probably more important to Gartner to be
quoted than to be quoted saying anything that bears examination.

Hmm, probably better for Gartner to be quoted than some other analyst
"house"?:-) Have you been quoted by such writers? Apparently there are
journos who read Usenet - one of them contacted me recently by e-mail for
my "opinion". What I said/wrote got lifted out of context, mangled and
didn't really say what I wanted at all.shrug

[snipped]

The premise that there's anyone taking seriously anything the Gartner Group
has to say is hilarious...

/daytripper ("Gartner: searching for the bottom in the clueless hack biz")

George Macdonald wrote:
On Sun, 30 May 2004 15:48:28 GMT, Robert Myers
wrote:


George Macdonald wrote:


snip


Even leaving aside the challenge of churning out copy on demand, just
imagine trying to do a better job of trying to inform readers what might
happen that really matters as a result of 64-bit support in Windows.
Time to talk about the usefulness of more named registers, right? :-).
Just imagine it: a 20-page pullout in industry rags that talks about
memory latency, out of order execution, register renaming, register
starvation and spilling, L1 latency, L2 latency, and pipeline stalls,
complete with slick color graphics and an interactive web page you can
go to for more information. Advertising should sell like half-time
spots for the Super Bowl. I feel faint just thinking about it.


Well yeah the "more named registers" is a big part of it but for the usual
shallow press coverage, there are other ways to get the message across.
like: finally we have a desktop PC which is worthy of the term computer;
internally it's just like a *real* computer; we can finally leave behind
the legacy of a hand calculator ISA; software can be made more efficient;
compilers can produce better code... etc. etc.


You are, as always, so much more sensible than I am. I suspect, though,
that there are people in the business with a mainframe heritage who
twitch at the thought that anything built on an x86 could ever be
regarded as a "real" computer.

To pick but one issue of many, the fact that x86 doesn't virtualize has
started to bother me. I'm afraid of getting myself into the mess of the
parallel thread about the NX bit, but I'm beginning to wonder if
anything short of a complete hardware sandbox should ever be regarded as
a plausibly secure solution to any enterprise application that faces a
network.

In the sense of being something that is worthy to displace boxes with
the reassuring IBM logo on them, x86-64 is only slightly less screwy
than x86, and not any more safe, as far as I can tell. For producing
efficient code, it is probably a significant win. For enterprise
applications, though, I wonder if the reduced likelihood of bugs by
virtue of having a flat address space isn't the biggest win of all.


Super! Don't know what it is, but everybody will have it. They'll have
the hardware, they'll have the software, and it must be important
because Unix and Linux have had it for a long time, whatever it is.
Maybe you can find the real substance by paying for the relevant Gartner
report. Not that anything that was quoted in the article would
encourage a reader who was paying attention to do that, but, marketing
being the way that it is, it's probably more important to Gartner to be
quoted than to be quoted saying anything that bears examination.


Hmm, probably better for Gartner to be quoted than some other analyst
"house"?:-) Have you been quoted by such writers? Apparently there are
journos who read Usenet - one of them contacted me recently by e-mail for
my "opinion". What I said/wrote got lifted out of context, mangled and
didn't really say what I wanted at all.shrug


I get e-mail from lurkers with a serious agenda, although I'll sidestep
saying just who. Have I been quoted? Don't know.

I wouldn't want to leave the impression that I have a low opinion of
Gartner; Gartner is one of the few places I would consider paying for
research.

The quality of talent that's out there is so hopelessly nonuniform, and
trying to discover and to convey accurate, journalist-quality
information to an audience that lacks the preparation sounds like a
nearly impossible problem.

While we're on the subject, you might want to google up and read the
_New_York_Times_ article "There's a Sucker Born in Every Medial
Prefrontal Cortex," which can be found online in any number of
locations. I consider myself reasonably advanced just to recognize that
there is a technology of persuasion that has gone well beyond
_The_Hidden_Persuaders_ and that it matters, even to technologists.
Even as I discuss these things, though, I have to keep in mind that I,
too, have a medial prefrontal cortex.


You need to start worrying about your favorite topic though, now that M$
has declared its intention to enter the HPC market.chuckle

You barely know me. I already made a post to the Beowulf mailing list
suggesting that the HPC community should seize this opportunity to get
as much Microsoft money as possible. HPC is, like racing cars, a
money-losing proposition. How much would Microsoft sink into a grand
challenge problem to say that a grand challenge problem was solved using
Windows? The cost of the actual scientific enterprise to Microsoft? A
day's earnings if it went hog wild. Cost to hype it to the press?
Several times that. Value to Microsoft in getting people to stop
thinking of them as a predatory monopolist? Priceless. Time for
science to get on the gravy train.


If you can find yourself a niche there, good luck to you. I assume you are
aware of the dangers of dealing with them - sewing up your pockets won't do
it.;-)


Oh, heaven forfend. Just another example of my being what I regard as
realistic: what is Microsoft _really_ up to, and what's the best way to
prosper given the ongoing reality of Microsoft dominance. I wouldn't go
at it with anything less than the resources of the Cornell Theory
Center, which has already gotten on the gravy train.

I wandered past the William H. Gates building (and the Stata Center) at
MIT yesterday. MIT is finally putting up buildings that are worthy of
its prestigious architecture department. Too bad about the name above
the door. Richard Stallman is so displeased that he's said he's moving
out, although he's blaming it on the security system they've chosen.
The Microsoft legacy is going to be everywhere. We might as well try to
get used to it.

RM