That was true in an age where single threaded performance also saw similiar improvements. But those days a gone. The power wall and transister scaling also ate factors here.
Today, increases in compute capabilities enabling new technology requires new architectures that match the problems. Similarly to how GPUs enabled deep learning.
These processors have a lot of advanced features for big-time computing users (warehouse scale, super computers, etc). You can't just look at frequency or cachesize or number of cores for this chip. There are reliability features, quality of service features, and overall capabilities that consumer grade processors don't have.
Also I don't recommend you try to outfit your startups server farm. I dont know your needs, but you should find someone who can figure out what you really need.
Initially all I "need" is a relatively
high end of a consumer grade
mid-tower case, e.g., an AMD
8 core processor, 32 GB of ECC
main memory, several hard disks,
on a current motherboard
for less than $150 or so running
Windows Server or maybe,
initially, just Windows 7 Pro.
Keep that on average half busy
24 x 7 for a month, and I will
be able to afford more.
If I get, say, two wire rack shelf units
18 x 48 x 72", fill them with
a good router and mid tower
cases, and keep all that
on average half busy 24 x 7,
then I will consider
a colocation facility or the
cloud.
A few miles from me is
a nicely big, fully serious
colocation facility
that offers dual 10 GbE
Internet connections, etc.
No joke: One of those shelf
units has room for about 12
mid tower cases. Keep two
such shelf units busy, and that
will max out what I'm willing
to pursue without a lot more
server farm expertise than
I have (or want to get)
and also make cash not
a problem.
So, one hope is that I will be
able to pay some experts, two
or three days at a time, to
hold my hand into more --
reliable electrical power,
HVAC, floor space, cabling, racks,
servers for the racks,
internals of the servers for
the racks, e.g., maybe Xeon,
automation for software
installation, system management,
system monitoring,
farm performance analysis,
fail-over, virtual machine
exploitation, security,
test systems, development
systems, organized
code repository and testing,
all relevant documentation,
training, recruiting,
HR, legal, real estate leasing,
janitorial, physical security,
etc. Or, right, just use
a cloud!
But for the high end Xeon
processors, I'm looking
ahead. E.g., a motherboard
with two Xeons with 18 cores each,
all in just one full tower case,
or two for failover, or
three considering testing,
might provide enough
computing for my startup
all the way to exit so that
I could avoid taking seriously
what I'd have to do
with 100 people
and 50,000 square feet of
server farm, dual optical
fiber connections to an
Internet backbone point of
presence, etc. So, that's
why looking into high end
Xeons now is not totally
wasted time.
I am a bit concerned with the direction of in-game purchases. Games are being designed to push users to spend money. Whats the difference between this and gambling in casinos? Are users aware that algorithms are being gamed to maximize profits? Is this ethical? I think we really need some oversight here. I think an entire generation is being exposed to gambling and exploitation -- and I am not sure if its healthy.
> Games are being designed to push users to spend money.
Every business is designed to push their clients to spend money. Some are better at it than others.
> Whats the difference between this and gambling in casinos?
There's no possibility of winning, so no way to delude yourself that the money you spend is an "investment", or to try to make back your losses. And we haven't (yet) seen anything like the scale of social problems caused by casino gambling.
> Are users aware that algorithms are being gamed to maximize profits?
Maybe. But honestly what's the difference between an algorithm and a human salesman? (e.g. I've heard it alleged that Dumas and Dickens deliberately stretched and optimized their serialized stories, to maximize their profits) Does it matter?
An algorithm can make the game harder after it confirms you are willing to buy items. It's getting to the point where games are short circuiting your ability to reason.
I never thought about it that way. Interesting insight. One aspect is that users don't receive a cash payout. They pay money in, but never receive money in return, like you would expect from true gambling. This falls apart when you allow trading within a game though, as you can exchange real money for a virtual trade. Then it does involve a payout.
Interesting point - I would originally agree with the other posters that said Gaming is different because there is no chance of making back your money, but you are correct, in a lot of games with markets and currencies, there is a way to make money from your time spent gaming.
I guess this would only be an issue if the purchase-element manifested directly in a way to make money? For example with Team Fortress 2; you can buy keys to unlock the item crates (which deliver a player a single new random item) - but you can't buy the item crates themselves - and you can't buy an item to make the crate's randomness any more favorable.
This sounds like the same thing credit card companies who target young teenagers and college kids to get them hooked into impulse spending and rack up large sums of debt.
I think you have your causation all messed up. We're immersed in a culture of "keeping up with the Jones'" impulse spending. Credit cards are a just tool to fulfill that desire.
Really, what do credit card companies do besides set up a booth on campus, saying, "Want a card?", and kids line up around the block?
In my eyes the type of "games" Zynga create are no different from sites like madbid.com. Except the hook is needing to have a better looking/more successful farm than your friends, rather than an iPhone for £1.50
Uuuh... and what about CPGs? Chocolate bars are designed to push consumers to spend more money. Whats the difference between this and shooting cocaine in your veins?
Yeah, let's get the government involved, because they don't have better things to do than make sure people aren't spending too much on their fake farms.
>and I am not sure if its healthy.
I'll bet you have a few habits or activities that people aren't sure "are healthy".
Where did I say government? If I am not mistaken, the organizations that oversee the casinos are private sector. If they are needed here then I see no reason why it cant be setup the same.
As for your other comment... jeez. Why so passive-aggressive? You are certainly right -- we all have habits that someone would consider unhealthy. But is my taste for sweets as destructive as this? I dont know, seems like they are both serious. It might even be that the addictiveness and lack of end-game of these games make them more dangerous.
Anyways, my main concern is that these games are being played by kids. I think everyone agrees that kids are still developing. What is the impact of these kinds of games on them? Do you know for sure that its harmless?
Not meaning to insult you or anyone, but dismissing these questions without a good reason is just plain ignorance and probably irresponsible. I am not equipped to answer these questions. Which is why this post and my original one are filled with questions.
> If I am not mistaken, the organizations that oversee the casinos are private sector.
You are mistaken, at least in America. Except for those Native American run, casinos in America are regulated by some form of a gaming control board.
To my knowledge, this is true of pretty much anywhere that has gambling as an industry, though I wouldn't be shocked to find out that Monte Carlo or somewhere were wholly unregulated.
Well, as a parent I'd do the responsible thing and ensure that the games I purchase for my children to play (because, you know, they don't have iTunes or Facebook accounts, or credit cards) don't employ those methods.
It comes down to how you define correctness. Weaker consistency requirements accept executions that do not serialize processor orderings allowing for algorithms like bakery to work without strong atomic operations.
This is why programmability is important. This is why being able to achieve performance of relaxed memory models with a more intuitive SC memory model should be a top objective for Intel and architecture researchers..
Hi. I won't be able to read this for a while. I am not familiar with federated byzantine. Can you quickly comment on the difference between this and purely distributed consensus? How is fault tolerance maintained? Do we presume that top tiers are free of byzantine nodes?
Rubinstein was also behind the work on using pixel intensity variations to visualize... stuff. They used it to extract heart rates. I am guessing sillier methods used, but now to recover induced vibrations due to sound. Interesting work.
Yes. Functional languages are amenable to composition. Because of their "purity". This allows trivial extraction of parallelism/concurrency. No need to reason about interleaving and shared data and such.
But, I don't know if "use FP if you want parallelism" is an acceptable solution currently. My intuition is that latency sensitive application can't use these languages because they don't expose the low-level primitives (read pointers) that make the difference in such applications. But I haven't written and profiled enough FP code to know if this is absolutely the case.
No, Functional languages reduce the problems surface area but they don't eliminate it. You can still get data races and deadlocks in Haskell. They aren't the same as a memory race in say C where the contents of a variable might change out from under you in truly bizarre ways but you still get algorithmic races where the wrong answer comes our the other end because two parallel operations happened in the wrong order.
Today, increases in compute capabilities enabling new technology requires new architectures that match the problems. Similarly to how GPUs enabled deep learning.