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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.'"
Incremental! (Score:5, Funny)
Wait a sec...holding off on this one...
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Agreed. Best first post I've seen in a while.
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Turn that spreadsheet into a random jumble of bits! It will even DECREASE the amount of entropy in the Universe!
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Didn't Intel already do that with Pentium 4?
But Intel didn't get the joke, or do they?
Re:Hmm....... (Score:5, Funny)
No no. Seems completely legit to me.
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It would have been more entertaining if it wasn't just listing the Slashdot April Fools stories.
Uh.... (Score:2)
Okay, I know it's a joke, but isn't it kinda true? Grab one of AMD's chips with disabled cores, and it truly is random how many cores (if any) you might be able to unlock using ACC. :P
Re:Uh.... (Score:5, Funny)
Let's not forget NewEgg's recent version of this promotion with their "Zero chips--- you're a loser!" packages.
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I know it's April fools, but this is exactly the kind of marketing one would expect from a company which merged with ATI. So, I can't tell if this story is real or not. ;)
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Damn man, lighten up!
Or did you just get a "Zero chips - you're a loser!" package for yourself?
How to rig a lottery (Score:2)
The thing about lotteries is that they defy physics. 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.
So, how do they avoid drawing the same numbers every time? They let a computer mess up the given statuses... do they use Set 1, Set 2, or Set 3 of balls? Do they put the balls in numerical order? When does the machine start moving?
The thing is... you can't let humans decide these va
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The thing about lotteries is that they defy physics. 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.
Predictable for how long?
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.
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Already attempted by Intel. (Score:5, Funny)
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Give me an f-ing break (Score:4, Informative)
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Stop with the April fools posts already!
This one isn't even funny
Re:Give me an f-ing break (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Give me an f-ing break (Score:5, Funny)
Every web page on the internet is basically useless for a day.
Most pages on the internet are basically useless for every day of the year.
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I like MySpace you insensitive clod!
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Just 'cause it's April 1st doesn't automatically mean that everything posted on this day is funny. Guess what? It's not funny! Insightful! Informative! But not funny!
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The worst part is that they're all showing up as posted on the 2nd for me. Guess it's cause I'm in GMT+10 (Aus).
Re core lottery (Score:1)
I once bought a lottery DIMM (Score:2)
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http://search.reviews.ebay.com/fake-USB-flash-drive [ebay.com]
How long before we see 8-core AMD Opterons on eBay that turn out to have only 4?
Just stop it ! (those April 1st Jokes) (Score:1)
Those jokes aren't even funny nor interesting.
They are just bad.
Except the youtube 1/4 that thing was good !
Pentium FPU (Score:2)
got to love (Score:1)
The luckiest one gets what (Score:2)
It is all fun and 1 of April games until someone gets a 0-core processor.
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I'm thinking of installing a small generator on my abacus powered by the motion of the beads and calling it a minus-1-core processor. I put processing in to it, and I get energy out.
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It's probably 16 mebicores.
Why don't you just RTFA? It's maybecores...
And here I thought (Score:2)
that was already how they determined processor speed: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/cpu/char/mfg_Rating.htm [pcguide.com]
I REALLY hate April Fool's Day. (Score:2)
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This is in no way unique.
You can essentially 'overclock' everything in existence to some extent.
It generally doesn't happen outside of PCs because most people realize that you're trading off something else.
In the case of overclocking you're giving up reliability and data integrity in exchange for a marginal speed boost because you were too cheap to buy the better chip or you're just going nuts trying to see just how far you can push it.
Overall though, unless you're 15 and still inschool with no job, Overclo
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But the triple cores truly are a lottery.
If you're going to fabricate a bunch of quad-core chips, you expect a certain number of them to end up with 1 bad core, a certain number to have 2 bad cores, and some will have 3 bad cores, and some will just be garbage. That's the nature of the beast. AMD is just smart enough to test them until they hit their desired yield of quad cores, then test until they have their desired yield of triples, and test the remaining ones and those either become double-core or get
April Fools (Score:2)
Enough already. It's done to death and not funny.
At least the OMGPONIES joke was fun, since it didn't rely on an endless avalanche of stupid fake news stories.
Dontruinitwithtags ... it was already ruined. (Score:4, Interesting)
To whomever decided to add the 'dontruinitwithtags' tag ...
IT WAS RUINED ALREADY WITH THE OTHER 9 GOD DAMN APRIL FOOLS POSTS. ENOUGH ALREADY.
I get excited at a glimmer of hope of something to read while I sit here and wait for this batch to run ... only to find out another moronic April Fools post was made ... because 10 in one day just isn't enough.
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Who would be stupid enough to believe this anyway even in the absence of tags and of a billion other jokes?
It's not a joke, quite. (Score:2)
Isn't there a tech site that sells a daily "Bag of Crap"? People buy it, every day. Sometimes it's full of nice stuff. Often it's crap. People buy it. Because the price is right.
So, same here. I'd go for it. I'd pay $10 for a "Box of Crap" from AMD. It can have anywhere from 0 to 12 operational cores. As long as neither I nor AMD know ahead of time which it is, I'd buy it. I'm willing to gamble my $10 on the yield of AMD's production line.
'course, given their yield, the price would probably have t
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! :)
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Dangerous Precedence (Score:2)
First, I am a fan of AMD and I'm glad they are being creative with how they might approach the market in the future.
But, this "lottery core" concept, if legal, is a very dangerous precedent pawned off to the consumer. Like atm transaction fees, or any financial transaction fees whatsoever, the only reason they persist is because no one has decided to sue for the practice; all those who might afford the lawsuit in some way benefit from the practice or the short changing effect has negligible effect on them
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Seriously. We need a "-1 WHOOSH!" mod option....
-Mike
Better odds that the real thing (Score:1)
Intel beat them to this (Score:2)
Intel was already getting ready to roll out their own lottery-core [slashdot.org] However there was a bit of public backlash because units leaked out early.