AMD Readies "Lottery-Core" CPUs 80
Barence writes "AMD has announced a radical shake-up of its CPU strategy, in an exclusive interview with PC Pro. The company has revealed that the next generation (codenamed Tyche) will be offered as a single 'lottery-core' SKU, with the number of functional cores in each part left for the customer to discover. 'We know gaming is very important to our customers,' explained regional marketing manager Ffwl Ebrill, 'and we're innovating to bring that win-or-lose experience out of the virtual world and into the marketplace.' Anyone discovering more than ten functional cores could consider themselves 'a lottery winner,' while unfortunates discovering their new CPU had no working cores at all would be encouraged to 'roll again.'"
Chaos theory (Score:4, Insightful)
Take a machine designed to give out specific units of force, and balls designed to weigh the same weight they are prescribed, and you've got a very predictable physical system.
Even if it is predictable, it isn't necessarily tractable. The air inside one of those table tennis ball blenders, for instance, is a chaotic system [wikipedia.org]. The "specific units of force" aren't always constant given fluctuations in power supply.
your state lottery is just as random as the PRNG at headquarters.
More likely, the PRNG that dictates exactly how long the machine runs isn't entirely pseudo but instead tied to an entropy-gathering process such as hashing room noise received through the microphone.
Re:How to rig a lottery (Score:5, Insightful)
Except they don't, because the vast majority of the systems are based on the concept of turbulent flow of a fluid (in this case air generally), which is for all practical purposes due to the number of variable points of deflection impossible to model for any time period signifigant enough to allow for predictions of these machines as they are designed to long pass this point before the balls would lock in position.
Heck trying to model turbulent flow on a fixed path is hard enough, trying to model turbulent flow through a mass of shifting floating deflectors is downright masochistic.
Re:How to rig a lottery (Score:3, Insightful)
Save money on QA (Score:3, Insightful)
A boon for Overclockers really..
No longer are things priced by binning, now every one has an equal chance.
I would seriously buy one if the price was right. I mean I already own a C2D 1.8 I bought on the assumption that I could overclock the thing to 3.2 or whatever, and then was sorely dissapointed when it couldn't take an OC at all. I mean the ONLY reason I bought it was to OC it.
This would fill that niche. You don't have to sort or test them, heck, you don't even need to market them... what are you gonna say... erm we don't know how fast it will run, nor do we really know how many cores it contains... buy one and find out! Sure I will, just price 'em cheap and I would be all over that! (so long as your secretly not binning all the good ones and just selling rejects!)
I dunno, sounds find to me if the price is right. Overclockers everywhere would have a field day posting their finds! Not sure how you would do the package with a possible variable number of cores. I guess your MB would have to be uber compatible with everything...
Yes yes I know it is an April Fools joke. I still want one for fun though! :)