What about performance related pay? For example, pay directly tied to profits?
228 karma · joined July 2, 2008
edit : I wud advice to look for "Centrino" branded stuff. That usually works out of the box. But YMMV.
For CPUs, the numbers using FFTW, one of the fastest FFT libraries that does take advantage of SIMD, the numbers usually do not exceed 5-6 gflops particularly for larger lengths.
OTOH, the above 55 gflops figure is also somewhat misleading since it does not include transfer time of data b/w RAM and GPU. Actual throughput is somewhere around 20gflops. On one particular project using FFT, I got around 15 gflops using GPU including transfer time while testing several FFT libraries, I never got above 3 gflops on a 2.4ghz quad-core using all four cores. The lenghts were big enough not to fit into cache thus reducing CPU performance considerably.
1. Apple's main bread-earner right now is the Macbook, MBP and iMac. All of them are premium models and significantly, all of them use mobile processors. Only the Mac Pro uses desktop processors. AMD's mobile line cannot compete with Core 2 Duo currently and is only found in cheaper laptops. I cannot see what apple gain by acquiring AMD. And what exactly will they do after acquiring AMD? Not buy Intel processors anymore and instead compete with Penryn and (future) Nehalem? And once again lose out to generic Windows boxes in the performance game?
2. Apple has no chip expertise in the desktop/laptop area. They have a small inhouse chip divison but its dedicated to mobiles and handhelds. Their recent acquisition was also in this space and was fairly small (less than $50mn if i remember).
3. Apple does not have the resources to compete with Intel. OTOH they have a very good working relationship with Intel and I dont see why they would want to disrupt that and instead focus on non-core areas.
Sun also bought a x86 startup a few months back but Sun has its own problems. Samsung was considered as another contender but Samsung wont actually get the x86 license (the license can only be transferred to US based companies I believe).
Or maybe AMD will survive. They need to find a new management and probably need to deeply collaborate with IBM on fabs and tech.
Despite Nvidia's sabre rattling, it cannot compete with Intel on the CPU front though Intel certainly has the resources to give Nvidia a fight.
But what is not gonna go away are content producers. I still prefer watching movies made by Hollywood than home-made videos of cats. Where and how I watch movies may change but the fact that I will still watch professional made movies is not very likely to change.
Similarly newspapers may go away as a content distribution mechanism. But professional reporters and news agencies may not necessarily go away even with bloggers and social news sites and so on.
edit : genuinely curious. not trying to put down gedit.