Larrabee can play Crysis better than the GTX 285

Charlie Demerjian wrote May 20, 2010 that, "They only *publicly* showed a raytracing demo, but they put out lots of other videos of things running. I may have seen lots more. It ran Crysis at playable frames when the software was still immature."

Fast forward to today, a smart idiot says, "Knight's Ferry can't play Crysis or any game really for that matter but this is most likely a driver-limitation than a hardware one since we've seen Larrabee being able to play Crysis(or was it Far Cry 2?) where it was better than GTX285 which back then was the best GPU around. But it seems that Intel has completely abandoned the idea of using Larrabee for gaming and that the architecture will be used only for HPC and servers."

Nvidia's GTX 285 is a bit stale, released in January 2009, so it's almost 2 years old now. The revelation that Larrabee isn't totally a dud (except that it's a 300w monster) is earth shattering, except it seems, Larrabee was playing Far Cry 2 back at IDF 2008 in public! It's a shame such technology is being steered toward HPC, like I earlier surmised.

Canning Larrabee sort of makes sense though. Since graphics are becoming increasingly irrelevant, Intel might as well milk this x86 pseudoGPU. "Performance on my LIBOR Monte Carlo
application is similar to Fermi, and 10× better than quad-core Nehalem."

software trumps steel

Paul Otellini had a chat with Ken Auletta recently at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Intel of course, plowed through with a $7 billion investment in early 2009, even as stock markets were cratering.

Mr. Otellini used the opportunity of a speech before the Economic Club in Washington to vow that Intel would spend more money than ever to expand chip factories in the United States.

Soon after, the markets surged over 50%.

Today, he insists, "As grim as the economy may still appear, we are generating the cutting-edge innovation today that can drive tomorrow's vitality...And as much as business leaders must cope with the fallout of creative destruction, no one wins more from disruptive innovation than the average consumer. The consumer has more choice than ever before, prices go down as new technology (ramps the volume ?), and people have new ways to communicate and enrich their lives."

I am not a fan of inflation, so it's good to see Mr. Prescient continue to forecast further deflation in technology.

On the stockpiles of cash corporations have amassed, he says, "People are not adding jobs or adding capacity because of their view of demand, or their view of the environment -- the uncertainties I mentioned before. Having cash on hand, when -- particularly when you can borrow ultra cheaply, is just good, prudent treasury management for that point in time when things do reverse and you want to make those investments."

See, jobs will come back 1 day.

There is a funny bit, where Paul dabbles into certain conspiracies about CFR...

OTELLINI: Richard and I were talking about this before the lunch today. You guys have a fleet of black helicopters, right, with CFR? (Laughter.) You ought to be able to answer that better than I can. (Laughs.)

QUESTIONER: That one will come back to haunt you.

A quantitative look at gold

I don't understand the gold fever. I never care to invest what I don't comprehend. Business Insider has a good "model" up today that explains some idiosyncrasies. Basically, <2% short term rates means gold goes higher, >2% short term rates means gold goes lower.

According to my backtest, tor every one percentage point real rates differ from 2%, gold moves by eight times that amount per year. So if the real rates are at 1%, gold will move up at an 8% annualized rate. If real rates are at 0%, then gold will move up at a 16% rate (that’s been about the story for the past decade). Conversely, if the real rate jumps to 3%, then gold will drop at an 8% rate.

I will be watching so I can finally pull the trigger on DZZ.

Razing Georgia

I just came across this story about the city of Smyrna razing the 94-building, 48 acres of the Hickory Lakes apartments. I know little of the area, including the apparent crime problems. It will cost them $9.5 million for the rights to the area, and $4 million to raze it. It seems pretty expensive for 0.075 square miles, but I'm not a developer, so I wouldn't know. Their budget seems solid, so why not!

In fact, I wonder why the wealthy in Atlanta don't all huddle up to blow up some of these ugly old, abandoned buildings (like in The Bluff) and plant trees instead. Think about the carbon they could save! The area around the Georgia State University Commons is looking a lot better though.

Pimco's McCulley flips and flops on QE2

September 3, 2010: "no compelling pressure to move to QE2"

October 4, 2010: “A new round of quantitative easing is likely,” McCulley, who is based in Newport Beach, California, said in his report. “The bottom line for the U.S. is a growth trajectory so slow you’d nearly call it stalled.”

Come on now... All it will take is another good jobs report for Paul McCulley to flip again on quantitative easing 2. These guys are supposed to be visionaries, not reactionaries.

Myth of Japanese poverty and Chinese wealth

Cool article in Foreign Policy.It reminded me of James Fallows's article, "Japan Surrenders".

the next reinvented Japan would be easier-living, nonhierarchical, less export-driven, open to the world in all ways (sound like us during the NAFTA debate?!). Having shown the world how to get rich, Japan could illustrate how to be rich.

If you know China mainly through stories of its economic successes, you’re surprised on a visit that it’s still so poor. If you know Japan mainly through stories of its failures, which are real, you’re surprised that it’s become so rich. The houses looked the same, but with bigger, nicer cars in the driveways.

We saw Land Rovers, BMWs, even a Cadillac on the narrow streets that once were full of bikes and little Nissan Sunnys.

In the 1980s, the Tokyu store had run an “American Food Festival,” featuring Big Red soda and bins full of Butterfinger candy bars. Now there are latte shops everywhere, bistros, tapas bars.

only half as many Japanese students are now enrolled at U.S. colleges as 10 years ago—the opposite of the trend in almost every other nation. The tight job market has discouraged students from doing anything as “risky” as spending time outside the Japanese school system.

Japan got rich before it grew old, and China will grow old before it gets rich

Sure, old people steal there, but it sounds like they are doing better than Las Vegas at the moment. I'll take a BMW and a job nearby...

As to the Foreign Policy article that suggests, "a meltdown in Beijing would make Japan's economic malaise look like child's play,", I am in complete agreement, albeit I have only taken a few economics courses so far. My thesis is that though Japan was an imbalanced economy that imploded, they at least had an educated base, still churning out flat screens today. In contrast, China makes cheap and poisoned crap. India can at least speak English and their population is growing, while China slows down, thanks to their short-sighed depopulation policy.

Intel Knights Ferry performance is "quite impressive"

I decided to take a gander at AMDZone to see how those folks were reacting to Sandy Bridge, considering the heaps of praise lavished by Real World Technologies and Ars.

A post by Smartidiot89 dated October 2, 2010 reads, "I happen to know someone who has "Knights Ferry" in possession, while he won't tell me me much due to NDA the performance is quite impressive but it requires alot of work to actually... work on any x86 software so it doesn't simply work as most people believe."

It reminds me of a post by Charlie Demerjian where he notes, "the strengths of the chip are in the 'other' category" and a recent one where he says,

"From what I understand, the consoles were decided as Sony = Intel Larrabee, MS = ? + ATI, and Nintendo = ? + ATI. Then the economic sh*tstorm hit, and people pulled back, and the consoles slipped from 2012 -> 2014.

Sony and MS have started over, Sony because of Intel's screwup, and MS because they could. Both are still taking bids right now.

Nintendo is the only one with a console being actively worked on, and that will be out LONG before the others. It will likely be the same team that did the N64, GC and Wii again, because they did a great job."

I was looking forward to ray tracing and such, but at least Larrabee/Knights is good at something (presumably HPC, since the crew is supposedly being repurposed that way). We'll be curing Malaria in no time.