On The Quality Of Things I've Said

Another blogger has started making a list of incorrect, unclear or just plain goofy things I've said. The only problem I can see is that I doubt he has allowed enough space.

I suppose it is a compliment to think that anyone would care enough about things I've said to bother compiling a list of mistakes. I recall when Dr. Asimov said that he had made so many logical errors in his Foundation series that he had to stop adding to it. These were more than just spelling or grammatical errors but errors in timeline, characters, plot, and events. Apparently, he hadn't been able to keep track of everything and these errors accumulated as he added each book. He was informed of the errors by his readers who apparently came up with several hundred.

I started posting online about computers in 2002 and I'm sure there were times that I posted when I was falling asleep at 3am, busy, distracted, or just in a bad mood. However, one particular distraction that I had came in September 2001 when my wife was diagnosed with Congestive Heart Failure. I can't really forget that date because she was in the hospital when the attack came on the World Trade Center. They gave her two years to live so I have no doubt that this had some effect on the quality of my posts over the next few years. There were also times when I was on vacation trying to get in some good times with her or when I was busy working on my house. In hindsight I'd say the house was perhaps overcompensation because I more than doubled the floor area. I watched her get noticeably worse toward the end of Summer in 2004 so I'm sure I was distracted then. Finally, in the middle of that Winter she was hospitalized. When she did come home after a few weeks I had to have hospice care set up for her with a hospital bed and oxygen generator. I took care of her 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the next eight months. I can remember sitting next to her bed with my laptop while she slept. She often slept 16-22 hours a day. So, when I wasn't checking her blood pressure, counting out medication, changing the bedding, bathing her, getting her something to eat or drink, or just holding her hand, I did make posts. However, because of the stress I would imagine my error rate went up a bit. She died in October 2005 and I'm sure my error rate remained high for quite awhile afterwards.

I don't know exactly how many posts I've made on AMDZone since I began because the count has been reset twice. Let's say it is at least 10,000 posts. I figure if I'm lucky then maybe 5% of my posts contained mistakes. That would be about 500. Hopefully, my error rate wasn't any higher than 20% which would be a whopping 2,000 posts with errors. I'm sure that there have also been things that have changed over that time or I got more information about later. I'm sure there were a number of things I said years ago that will seem goofy now and I'll wonder what I was thinking. But getting back to my industrious mistake counters. If the real number is somewhere in the middle or about 1,000 then I doubt a single link will do. They may end up having to create a larger list of links to my mistakes. Maybe they can divide them up by topic or 6 month interval to keep each list to a more reasonable size. I think they currently have fewer than 50 in their list so I'm certain they have a lot more work to do. I wish them luck in their endeavour.

This month was interesting in that visits from www.intel.com topped all others. More visits originated from Intel Corporation than originated from from any of the major internet ports such as Verizon, Bellsouth, Road Runner, or Comcast. To give an idea of how many this is, I got more than twice as many visits from Intel as from Sony, Microsoft, Boeing, Cisco, IBM, Sun, Motorola, Hewlett Packard, Pratt & Whitney, AMD, Lockheed, and Texaco combined. These are actually in reverse order so the fewest visits were from Sony while Texaco had the most. Also, we can see that AMD's interest was in between Pratt & Whitney's and Lockheed's so not at all unusual. I have no idea where the interest at Intel comes from. I don't know if anyone there actually finds it interesting or whether it is simply an amusing distraction. The last time I looked at the site distribution the visits seemed to come from a lot of different places in the far flung Intel corporation so I doubt they are able to chuckle over my articles at the water cooler. Perhaps they send emails.

Of course, I imagine that Intel is probably a more pleasant place to work these days. It is possible that AMD's recent performance has reduced the pressure considerably. AMD is currently down in almost every measurement we can make. They've had two half Billion dollar losing quarters in a row with a probable third coming up Q2 07. AMD is down in volume share. Intel is way ahead in quad core and with initial Barcelona clocks at 2.0Ghz it looks like Intel will maintain the clock lead into 2008. They are only matched in dual core clock speed but with C2D's higher IPC and much greater FP performance it isn't that much of a contest. True, dual core K10 should have a higher clock than K10 quad core but by the time they are out in any number Intel can surely bump the clock with 45nm. In fact, if they keep pulling the TDP down they may be able to bump the clock to 3.2Ghz on 65nm by Q1 08 which may be the earliest AMD gets a K10 near 3.0Ghz. Intel still has the bulk of mobile and has no real competition from AMD until 2008 (assuming the new mobile cpu and chipsets stay on schedule).

There is also no doubt that Intel has gained tremendously in servers. In fact, in HPC, while AMD had modest gains, Intel's gains could only be described as ballistic. This is the sharpest gain by Intel in HPC on the Top 500 list since November 2003 when a flood of 32 bit Xeon systems began replacing the RISC systems like Alpha, Pa-RISC, MIPS, and Sparc. In just one year, Xeon HPC system power had doubled and became the dominant source of computing power in June 2004. Today, Intel has duplicated that feat by surpassing IBM's Power with 64 bit Xeon. As we speak, there is more HPC computing power coming from 64 bit Xeon (primarily Woodcrest) systems than any other. Of all the Top 500 HPC systems, 64 bit Xeon systems provide about 20% more computing power than IBM's Power and about double that of Opteron. AMD does have some large HPC systems lined up for later this year but even 30,000 processors for these systems won't put much of a dent in Intel's lead. AMD would need about 70,000 Barcelona's in HPC today to catch Intel.

There is no doubt that AMD is digging in on the low end with DTX and the BE chips. It appears that K10 will inherit this legacy next year with the GE series. Although Intel currently has nothing really competitive in this region I'm not sure that it needs to be. Trying to compete with mini-DTX for example would require not only new motherboards in mini-ITX size but large cuts in dual core processor prices. The current Celerons won't quite compete because they are single core. Intel could compete with DTX with its pico-BTX motherboard in terms of size but maybe not in cost. It is doubtful that there will be any wholesale shift to smaller form factors in 2007 but perhaps enough to give AMD some much needed breathing room. And, Intel can probably just wait until earlier in 2008 to respond. This is very much reminiscent of 2002 when AMD moved its K7 line down to compete against Celeron. It worked then (although AMD took quite a beating) so perhaps it will work in 2007.