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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (112025)	5/23/2000 6:14:00 AM
From: Joe NYC	Respond to of 1570913

I finally read Anand's attempt to earn back the credibility lost, or as he calls it Part 2 of the Rambus article: anandtech.com What I got out of it is that he doesn't understand the meaning of bandwidth and latency. I am not saying that I do. I have a vague concept of the terms, but enough to know that he is not on solid ground writing the article, and that his concept of the terms and the relation between the 2 is even more vague than mine. I think the main point to realize is that it is impossible to construct a test machine (using off the shelf components) to test these concepts. There are more variables than bandwidth and latency, and any benchmark that you perform, any machine you will configure will have some of these other variables involved to some degree. One variable that comes to mind is the clock speed of FSB. If you clock the celeron at 66 MHz and later at 100 MHz, you are not only increasing bandwidth, you are increasing FSB, which itself influences latency. If you had a capability to control bandwidth by controlling the width of the data bus (let's say increasing it from 64 bits to 128 bits), you would increase the bandwidth, but at the same time, you would decrease the time it takes to fill a cache line, which itself is a component of latency. Even though, my understanding is that the key measurement of latency is the time it takes to deliver a critical piece of data a stalled CPU needs to resume operation. Anyway, I am not any smarter after reading the article than I was before. Joe

To: Joe NYC who wrote (112025)	5/23/2000 9:20:00 AM
From: Amy J	Respond to of 1570913

OT RE: "There always is the other side" The other side to the picture are cost and gains. You weren't implying that I did not know that? Cost (money out) and lobby money (money in). The insurance industry is somewhat closer to the government than the other group I had mentioned, so let's focus on tangible costs rather than intangible lobby money. Let's look at the cost on a current heath reform Bill that went into law on May 1st. On May 1st, a federal law went into affect which makes it illegal for insurance carriers not to cover diabetes and several other illnesses. I'm told, the total cost that the insurance industry estimated for this (for both the insur carrier and the company) is on the order of .04% (or was it .004%?) of the health premium. Some insur companies may pass this .04% cost directly to the company, some may absorb the cost. Employee/community/public gains are very significant for only .0004 * payroll. Companies no longer have to worry if a newly hired employee is rejected health care because they have diabetes, because this law (which went into affect on May 1st and applies to all insurance plans, even those created before May 1st) forces all health care companies to legally provide for this coverage after the legal pre-existing condition duration. If a company had an employee with diabetes, one might assume this employee would be more productive at work if they had their illness covered, and for .0004*payroll, business are willing to pay that cost. Amy J