text:
Calxeda's ARM server testedby Johan De Gelas on 3/12/2013 7:14 PM EST
- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Xeon
- Boston
- Calxeda
- server
- enterprise CPUs
102 Comments
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tuxRoller - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkWhy WOULD you expect DVFS to boost performance?
You seem to think it slightly revelational that the scores are slightly lower (but perhaps statistically meaningless). Reply
dig23 - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkOn-demand seems fair choice to me, its what best you can do on this OSes. But I will be very interested to see energy efficiency numbers when DVFS working on swarm of ARM nodes...:) Reply
tuxRoller - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkIt's not cpu governor I'm talking about but DVFS in particular.
There's bound to be some small amount of latency involved with the process.
It's point isn't for best performance but energy efficiency thus why I made the comment in the first place. Reply
JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkThere's the potential for DVFS to optimize for better performance on a few cores while putting some of the other cores into a lower P-state, but I think that would be more for stuff like Turbo Boost/Turbo Core. It's also possible Johan is referring to the potential for the optimizations to simply improve performance in general. Reply
CodyHall - Friday, March 15, 2013 - linkLove my job, since I've been bringing in $5600… I sit at home, music playing while I work in front of my new iMac that I got now that I'm making it online.(Click Home information)
http://goo.gl/9u8us Reply
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkCan you tell me where I got you confused? Because I write "This allowed us to make use of Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS, P-states) using the CPUfreq tool. First let's see if all these power saving tweaks have reduced the total throughput."
So it should been clear that we are looking for a better performance/watt ratio. The interesting thing to note is that ARM benefits from p-states, and that Intel's excellent implementation of C-states makes p-states almost useless. Reply
Twonky - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkFor information about a year ago the following post on the Linkedin ARM Based Group gave a link to a M.Sc. thesis publishing figures on the performance/watt ratio for Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 based boards:
www.linkedin.com/groups/Single-CortexA8-CortexA9-in-comparison-85447.S.84348310 Reply
AncientWisdom - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkVery interesting read, thanks! Reply
staiaoman - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkDamn, Johan. As always- an incredible writeup. Interesting thought experiment to figure that an upper bound on damage to INTC server share might be found by simply looking at how much of the market is running applications like your web server here (where single-threaded performance isn't as important).
Intel powering phones and ARM chips in servers...the end is nigh. Reply
JohanAnandtech - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - linkThanks Staiaoman :-). I'll leave the though experiment to you :-) Reply
Gigaplex - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkI wouldn't call that a spectacular performance per watt ratio. It's a bit faster than the Xeon under a cherry picked benchmark (much slower under others), and is only marginally lower power. Best case it's an 80% improvement over Sandy Bridge with regards to performance per watt, and Atom wasn't represented. Considering all the hype, I was expecting something a little more... exciting. Ignoring Ivy Bridge improvements, Haswell isn't far off. Reply
spronkey - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkYeah... I agree. It also only seems to really come into its own in high concurrency. The Xeons idle quite similarly in terms of power - what happens if you compare it to more Xeon cores? It seems like on a per core basis, Intel still has the advantage on both fronts? Reply
spronkey - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkI would also point out that the A15 has already been compared against Sandy and Ivy cores and come up short in performance per watt; so I'm very interested to see what the next step for these ARM node servers is. Reply
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkI warned against the hype in the first sentences. :-) ARM CPUs are still rather weak and not a good match for most applications. However, the fact that we could actually find a case where they do a lot better than the current Xeon systems was surprising to me. Reply
wsw1982 - Wednesday, April 03, 2013 - linkNo, it should not surprise any people regarding how picky the use case is. I mean, I do think you can find a use case the ARM 11 output perform Xeon. E.g. Serving 1 web request per hour :) Reply
LogOver - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - link24 servers ran inside 24 VM's on Xeon server, while for ARM server you used the 24 physical server nodes... Hmm... Does not seems to me like apple to apple comparison. Why not to compare, for example, 16 physical nodes on both, xeon and arm servers? Reply
haplo602 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkAnd how do you slice the Xeon server into 16 physical nodes ? It does not support any kind of HW partitioning that I am aware of. On the other hand the Calxeda machine is a cluster by design. If you try 16 Xeon nodes you'll go through the roof with power. Reply
Colin1497 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkI think the question is this:
Was 24 VM's optimal for the Xeon? Since we're visualizing the Xeon, why 24? Just because you had 24 ARM nodes? Would the Xeon done better with 4VM's? Or 16? Or 1000? 24 seems arbitrary. Reply
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkWe tested with 16 as I briefly mentioned in the conclusion. The 2650L did 170 responses/s per VM, or about 40% better. Total Throughput = 2.7k/s, while with 24, 2.9 K/s. THe flexibility that the Xeon has to reduce the number of VMs if higher throughput is necessary is definitely an advantage, but the performance numbers are not that different with different VM configs. Reply
Kurge - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkHow about with 0 VM's? Just run it on the metal. Reply
Kurge - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkYeah, should have had two teams - each with goal to optimize on each platform. The Xeon team would not (lol) load up 24 VM's to serve the same web app. It's silly. Go bare metal in that use case.
There will be different needs for different cases. The "lets load up a bunch of VMs" is useful to cloud providers and in other cases, but not for "I want to feed this app to as many users as possible". Reply
dig23 - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkInteresting article and great first effort but felt bit outdated on both ATOM as well as ARM front, I am not blaming you, just saying. Reply
JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkOutdated in what sense? No one else has really made a serious attempt to review thee Calxedas stuff, and while there are better Atom option out there, as Johan notes we were unable to get any in-house in time for testing. Or do you mean Calxedas' use of Cortex-A9 is outdated? If so, that's more of a case of laying the groundwork I think. Assuming they have their A15 option be backwards compatible with the current system (e.g. just get a new set of cards with the updated SoCs), that would be very cool. Reply
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkI can only agree with Jarred. There are no A15 server chips AFAIK, and unless I have missed a launch, I think the Atom N2800 is not outdated at all (Dec 2011). Reply
aryonoco - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkThis was a fabulous and most informative write up. You answered so many of my questions with this article. Excellent job covering an area that no one else is, and also kudos for running such great benchmarks.
This really is tech journalism at its best. Thank you Johan, and thank you Anand for employing such high-quality writers.
We all know how memory constrained the ARM A9 is. Even something like Krait would solve a lot of A9's traditional weak areas. And yet, it looks like the Calxeda makes sense in enough niches to be sustain their R&D and development efforts. Low-to-medium traffic web hosting, media streaming and storage. Each one of those areas is a sizeable market and the Calxeda solution offers enough to be seriously considered in these makets.
And when one thinks about how many years of x86 optimisation has gone into the toolchain in things like the gcc, one realises the potential that lies ahead for ARM in this market. ARM's future roadmap is well known, next is Cortex A15 and then Cortex A57. Meanwhile there will be more software optimisation, and the management/deployment side will also improve. With all these in mind, I think it's more than conceivable that ARM will grab up to 20% marketshare in the server market by 2015. Reply
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkThanks! Good summary... and indeed 20% marketshare is not impossible. The real questions is whether Intel give the Atom it is long overdue architecture update, or will Haswell put some pressure from above? Exciting times. Reply
beginner99 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkIsn't it much easier to administer 24 virtual servers than 24 physical ones (cost of personnel)? When all servers have the same workload it look sgood for ARM but the virtualized intel environment easily wins if some servers get a lot more requests than others, meaning too much for one ARM SOC to handle. The tested scenario is basically the best one could ever hope for the ARM server and pretty unrealistic (same load for all servers). That's fine but then also post worst-case scenarios...Intel server is a lot more flexible. Reply
hardwaremister - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkI completely agree with the other readers that this writing is just absolutely superb. Fantastic novel job Johan.
However, I also agree with the above commenter: a big part coup on virtualizing a "fat" core system is to be able to properly utilize the resources of the machine across VMs. By equally loading "tiny tiles", the obvious advantage of the inherent load balancing of a virtualized infrastructure completely disappears.
Under current the current "fat" VM infrastructure you can accomodate individual VMs with heterogeneous loading levels, with extra provisioning in the resource pool.
That is just not simply the case for these tests based on an army of individual machines against a many VMs virtualized under a few "fat" cpus.
I don't mean to be overcritical, but this is a proper apples vs oranges comparison. Reply
bobbozzo - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkA lot of shared hosting ISP's use lightweight virtualization with Linux or BSD "Containers". I would like to see you re-benchmark with those on both servers instead of using VMs.
You should see higher performance vs full virtualization. I'm not sure how it would affect the ARM performance, but it shouldn't hurt much, and there is more potential for better load sharing if some sites are busier than others. Reply
Jambe - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkSurprising, indeed! Thoroughgoing as usual, and excellently written. Reply
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkThanks! Reply
SunLord - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkHmm if these didn't cost $20,000 they would make a nice front end for larger websites and forums using less rack space and power. What setup using these would you use for anandtech? Would you guys keep the intel DB server? Reply
Gunbuster - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkI just got a Dell R720xd decked out with 384GB and 4.3TB of storage for a hair over that price. Reply
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkIntel Xeons are still by far a better choice for relational databases that are very hard to split up (sharding is only a last resort) Reply
zachj - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkI'm not sure I agree with the absolutism that seems imlicit in your comment that Xeons are better for relational databases...I think there are cases where that won't be true.
Database scale-out doesn't always require sharding...using any of a number of different off-the-shelf capabilities built right into most SQL engines, you can create multiple active replicas of your database. This is generally better-suited to workloads that aren't write-intensive, but both clustering and replication allow for writes. While this may seem like a quick-and-dirty solution that is architecturally "less good" than sharding, hardware is a lot cheaper than paying people to design a sharding solution and the dollars very often drive the conversation. As long as the database size isn't terribly large this can be a very cost-effective way to scale out a database.
I would wager that the Anandtech website database (not the forum database) would probably be well-suited to this type of scale-out. You do waste some money on redundant storage but you more than make up for that cost by not having to pay a development team to implement sharding. If the comments section of the Anandtech website gets stored in the same underlying database, the size constraints and the write activity may appear to be incompatible with this approach, but I would in fact argue that comments don't require relational capabilities of SQL and would be more rightly stored as blobs in Hadoop or Azure Storage Tables. Then the Anandtech database is strictly articles and is both much more compact and almost entirely read-only (except for a few new articles per day). Reply
rwei - Friday, March 15, 2013 - linkTo the best of my understanding, replication does well for scaling reads but doesn't do much for writes. I'd still imagine that this would work decently well with AnandTech, where I can't see the volume of writes being that large relative to the volume of reads. Reply
Kurge - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkThey would make a horrible front end for such websites. Just buy a single Xeon server and don't artificially limit it by using 24 VMs. Just run the app straight on the metal and it will perform massively better. Reply
Oldboy1948 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkVery interesting Johan as your tests often are!
Interesting that the memory bw is so much lower than anything from Intel. In fact Iphone 5 looks much better...why? Only Intel has about the same rsults in compress and decompress. Reply
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkWhere did you see the stream results on the A6? I might have missed it somewhere. The only ones I could find reported only 1 GB/s in Triad. http://www.anandtech.com/show/6298/analyzing-iphon... The Quad ECX-1000 got 1.8 GB/s Reply
PCTC2 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkDo you know what would be an interesting concept for a future version of these cluster-in-a-box systems? A solution like ScaleMP. ScaleMP is basically a reverse VM. A hypervisor on each server clusters together to run a single OS with an aggregation of all resources (cores, RAM, network, and disk). ScaleMP running on 4x Dual-socket 8-core Xeon systems w/ 32GB RAM results in a usable system with 64-cores and 128GB RAM as if it was running natively on the hardware. This would be an interesting concept to transfer to the ARM space (if a form of hardware virtualization ever is designed). In a box like this, there would be 192 cores and 192GB of RAM available to a single Fedora instance. Cluster 2 of these together and suddenly there's a system with 384 cores and 384GB of RAM in 4U. Just some food for thought. Reply
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkHmmm ... There is almost no info on how that hypervisor works. It is hard to imagine that kind of system would scale very well. How does it keep Cache coherent? Do you have info on that? Reply
timbuktu - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkI can't speak directly to ScaleMP, but it looks similar to NUMALink.
Reading through this article about Calxedas, great job BTW, I couldn't help but think about the old SGI hardware that seemed pretty similar with MIPs (and later Itanium) processors connected through a switch with NUMALink. I haven't played with NUMALink directly in almost a decade, but back then cheaper Altix slabs were ring topology while higher end hardware was switched. In the end though, you could put together a bunch of 1U racks together and have a single system image. Like you mentioned though, cache coherency was exceptionally important. Since we have a uv here, I can point you to the documentation for that box.
Everything old is new again, I suppose. Well, except NUMAlink never went away. =D Reply
Tunrip - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkI'd be interested in knowing how the Xeon compared if you did the same test without the virtual machines. Reply
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkThe website won't scale to 32 logical cores I am afraid... but we can try to see how far we can get Reply
Colin1497 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkA better question might be "is 24 VM's a logical number to use?" Would more or fewer VM's work better? The appearance is that you have 24VM's because you have 24 ARM nodes? Reply
duploxxx - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkvery interesting, loved reading it. But although early in the ball game I do think there are other way better solutions in the pipe-line from the big OEM:
HP Moonshot
http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/iss/110111.aspx Reply
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkIsn't remarkable how PR people manage to fill so many pages with "extreme" and "the future" without telling anything. Frustation became even higher when I clicked "get the facts" page. That is more like "You are not getting any facts at all". Reply
DuckieHo - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkSince these are set up as webservers, what's the power consumption at say 20-40% load? Usually there is some load instead of completely idle. Reply
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkGood suggestion... you'll like to see a step by step power measurement like SpecPower right? Let me try that. Reply
DanNeely - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkI'd be interested in seeing where, and what happens when you start pushing single chips to and slightly beyond their limits. Calxeda's hardware's proved competitive on a very friendly workload (which I didn't really expect would happen until their A15 product); but in the real world a set of small websites are unlikely to all have equal load levels. Virtual servers on larger CPUs should give more headroom for load spikes; so knowing what the limits on Calxeda's hardware are strikes me as fairly important. Reply
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkOk, good question. I'll look into it, as I am definitely considering a follow-up Reply
skyroski - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkI make performance oriented web apps for a living and I was looking forward to this performance test very much. However, I was quite disappointed at how you have done the "real world" test.
If you're serving a single site you would never put a Xeon through the performance penalties of virtualisation, so I deem your real world results flawed/unusable.
Basically, if I was to consider buying a Calxeda server tomorrow, I want to know if I can serve a site faster/better by using the "cluster in a box" solution which ARM's partners are going for or if a single Xeon server with standardised dedicated hardware will serve me and my businesses better.
The other thing that I would have also tested is SSL request performance because Intel has AES-NI built in and I believe ARM has something similar? I would say the majority of request today for a serious web app/site will be traffic using the SSL protocol, so that would also be one of those deciding factors I would look at.
If I was a cloud host provider your comparison may contain some truth as their business model would be to presumably let each ARM node out as a VPS alternative, but that isn't what you were testing were you? Reply
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link1. The single site: it is not meant to be an environment of one single site. The reason why we use the same site over and over again, is that it makes it easier to interpret the results and more repeatable. Consider a hosting provider who host many similar - but not the same - LAMP sites.
The repeatable part is the part that most people don't understand very well: we don't just hit the same URL over and over again. We perform real user interactions and randomize them in realworld patterns (like logging in first and then several real actions) and then getting a repeatable benchmark gets very complex.
2. The SSL comment is definitely good feedback. We are currently writing the connection code for such SSL websites but also need to find one or more good examples. If your site is a good example, maybe we can use yours (even under NDA if necessary) ?
3. Lastly, the virtualization overhead of ESXi 5 is very small. Reply
Kurge - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkYou know, you can host multiple different LAMP sites on bare metal ;) Reply
klmccaughey - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkIt won't be LAMP sites any more though - take a trawl through something like the Linode forums to get an idea of what people are building. You are talking higher concurrency and more likely nginx.
Someone made a valid comment about database sharding - for web apps this is much more likely as people try to make sure they have failover.
Whilst initially very disappointed, if you imaging the refresh on the ARM cores over the next 2 years (and considering the rate of change due to the phone market) you might actualy be looking at a beast of a machine in two or three iterations. Imagine if you could buy these off the shelf for under $10k: That feels to me like mission critical failover systems in a box. I can see this taking off in a couple of years. Reply
klmccaughey - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkAnd kudos for the review - I look forward to the follow-up. This is a space that needs watching! Reply
Silma - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - linkTrue but do you think Intel will stop product development for the next 3 years? In addition who will have the best fabs then? My guess is Intel. Reply
Krysto - Monday, March 18, 2013 - linkI don't know how fast it actually is, but relative to the ARMv7 architecture, AES should be up to 10x faster on ARMv8. Reply
kfreund - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkNice job, Johan. Can't wait to see your next one; we will be sure to get you an A15 based system as soon as we get it out! Let the debates begin! Reply
kfreund - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkRegarding Stream performance, this is a known limitation of A9; it just can't handle a lot of concurrent memory requests. A15 will nearly triple the memory bandwidth at same DDR rate. Reply
Madpacket - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkAnd all of a sudden AMD's acquisition of SeaMicro is starting to make sense. Thanks Johan, great article! Reply
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkI really really hope they downscale the current SeaMicro's soon. Because with a starting price at $139000, they are not catering to the typical SME :-). Reply
joshv - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkIt seems this has a very narrow application in VM hosting, but I am not sure it's applicable when you have the choice of just scaling up memory or process usage of the single instance Xeon server. For example, I could load 24 instances of my production middle tier on the ARM server - or I could run one instance on a Xeon server and give it all the memory and make sure it spawns enough threads to keep all the internal cores busy. Perhaps my middle tier software has issues with handling all that RAM, so maybe I run 4 instances of it as a process, not a biggy.
I am going to bet that the Xeon server will win as it won't have the VM overhead. Reply
Kurge - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkI would be interested in a bare metal comparison. Since you're serving up the same app why would you split it between 24 VMs on the Xeon server? It's a bit contrived.
Just load up Server 2012 and IIS or Linux + Apache straight up on the Xeon and see how it performs. Reply
MrSpadge - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkVery interesting!
I'd prefer a fat machine with virtualized servers to get automatic load balancing, but it's not like one couldn't shuffle tasks around in the ARM farm. And there's room for improvement: be it the next Atom or the memory controller in the current ECX-1000 CPUs. And take a look at how badly they scale from 2 to 4 threads - surely, there's lot's of rooms left! Reply
rubyl - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkWhat is the average CPU utilization for the Viridis nodes and for the Xeon system under the 5 different concurrency loads (for the 24 webserver workload)? Reply
gercho - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkWhen you said " The next generation ARM servers are already on the way and will probably hit the market in the third quarter of this year. The "Midway" SoC is based on a 28nm (TSMC) Cortex-A15 chip. A 28nm A15 offers 50% higher single-threaded integer performance at slightly higher power levels and can address up to 16GB of RAM." As far as I know the A15 cores have 50% more performance but consume 3X more power, that's not "slightly"......... Reply
nofumble62 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link50% more performance at 3X more power... reminding me of the Netburst architect. Reply
thenewguy617 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkCan you please point me to sources of your number?
Thanks Reply
Wilco1 - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - linkWhere on earth you do get that 3x from? So far no 28nm Cortex-A15 chips have been released. The A15 in the Exynos Octo uses about 1.25W per core at 1.8GHz according to Samsung. That's slightly more power than a Calxeda A9 uses per core, but the A15 gives twice the performance per core. Reply
tech4real - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - linkCalxeda quotes 6W for the whole SOC. We don't know how much is used for all these uncore stuff. It's possible A9 core only burns around 800mW. Still quite a gap to 1.25W. Reply
Wilco1 - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - linkAssuming the 800mW figure is accurate and the uncore power stays the same, then a node would go from 6W to 7.8W - ie. 30% more power for 100% more performance. Or they could voltage scale down to 1.5GHz and get 65% more performance for 5% more power. While a 28nm A15 uses more power in both scenarios, it is also much faster, so perf/Watt is significantly better. Reply
tech4real - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link1. I guess we have to wait to see if it's really 2X perf from a9 to a15 in real tests. I personally wouldn't bet on that just yet.
2. mostly likely the uncore power will increase too. i don't think the larger memory bandwidth will come free. Reply
Wilco1 - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link1. We already know A15 is 50-60% faster than A9 per clock (and often more, particularly floating point), so that gives ~2x gain from 1.4GHz to 1.8GHz.
2. The uncore power will be scaling down with process while the higher bandwidth demand from A15 will increase DRAM power. Without detailed figures it's reasonable to assume these balance each other out. Reply
tech4real - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - linkthen let's wait to see anand benchmarks the future a15 system.
also since the real microserver battle is between the future a15 system and 22nm atom system, I am eager to see how it plays out. Reply
Th-z - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkVery interesting article, thanks! This really piques another curiosity: how does latest IBM Power based server fair these days. Reply
Flunk - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkIt really doesn't sound like the price\performance is there. Also, lack of Windows support makes it useless for those of us who run ASP.NET websites (like the company I work for).
It's still nice to see companies trying something different from the standard strategy. Maybe this is be better in a few generations and take the web server market by storm. If we see a Windows Server arm I could see considering it as an option. Reply
skyroski - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkI agree your testing suite's method is good and ok, so you were testing in consideration with hosting providers, fair enough.
However on the topic of if you were serving a single site would a standard Xeon be better or ARM based ones? Which - is the case of consideration to FB/Twitter/Google/Baidu etc..., whom are as I have been led to believe by the media this past year, companies that ARM partners are trying to sell this piece of kit to. This test unfortunately cannot tell us.
A quick search on Google on performance impact of VMs yielded a thread in the VMware community forum by a vExpert/Moderator that mentioned expectation of 90% performance, and frankly, no matter how small you think the performance impact of a VM maybe, it is still using up CPU cycles to emulate hardware, that point will remain true no matter how efficient the hypervisor gets.
Secondly, coupled with the overhead of running 24 physical copies of the OS + Apache + DB on a box that would otherwise be running a single copy of the OS + Apache + DB is total overkill (on that topic)
It would be great if you can also test Xeon's req/sec if it ran a single instance so we can see it from a different perspective, as of now as I said, your test is skewered towards hosting providers whom might invest in Calxeda to provide VPS alternatives. But to them (and their client base), the benefit of a VPS is it's portability, which, 24 physical ARM nodes isn't going to provide, so I don't see them considering it as an alternative solution anyway. Reply
skyroski - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkI also want to ask if your Xeon test server's network adapter is capable of and was using Intel VT-c? Reply
JohanAnandtech - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - linkIt was using VMDq/Netqueue (via VMXnet) but not SR-IOV/VT-c Reply
thenewguy617 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkI would like to see the results with the website running on bare metal. I would like to, but I don't believe you when you say the virtualization overhead is minimal.
Also, did you include the power used by the switch? as we scale the xeon cluster we will add a lot of cost and power in the network, however Calxeda fabric should scale for free. Reply
thebeastie - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - linkI think a lot of you are missing the main point or future potential of this server technology. And that is that intel like to make an absolute minimum of $50 per CPU they make, in server CPUs it's more like $300.
These Arm CPUs are being sold at around $10 a CPU.
Sure Caldexa have gone the hard yards making such a server and want a lot of money for it. BUT once these ARM servers are priced in relative context of their actual CPu costs its going to be the biggest bomb drop on Intels sever profits in history. Reply
Silma - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - linkAssuming you are right and ARM is becoming so important that it can't be ignored, what's to prevent Intel to produce and sell ARM itself? In fact what's to prevent Intel to produce the best ARM socs as it has arguably the best fabs?
There are rumors that Apple is asking Intel to produce procs for them, this would certainly be very interesting if it proves to be true. Reply
thebeastie - Friday, March 15, 2013 - linkThe fact that Intel would practically look at other businesses then produce SoC/CPUs for $10 each, x86 or ARM based doesn't matter in the face of such high portability of code. Reply
Metaluna - Friday, March 15, 2013 - linkThe problem is that ARM cores are pretty much a commodity, so ARM SoC pricing is inevitably going to end up as a race to the bottom. This could make it difficult for Intel to sustain the kind of margins it needs to keep it's superior process R&D efforts going. Or at least, it would need to use its high-margin parts to subsidize R&D for the commodity stuff which could get tricky given the overall slowing of the market for the higher end processors. I think this is what's happening with the supposed Apple deal. There have been reports that they have excess capacity at 22nm right now so it makes sense to use it. And, since Apple only sells its processors as part of its phones and tablets, it doesn't directly compete with x86 on the open market.
Of course, all the other fabs are operating under the same cost constraints, so there would be an overall slower pace of process improvements (which is happening anyway as we get closer to the absolute limits at <10nm). Reply
wsw1982 - Wednesday, April 03, 2013 - linkAnd so does those companies, run into bottom. What can they do to even their R&D, by put the server chip into mobile phone? Reply
Krysto - Monday, March 18, 2013 - linkYup. This is actually Intel's biggest threat by far. It's not the technical competition (even though Intel's Atom servers don't seem nearly as competitive as these upcoming ARM servers), but the biggest problem by far for them will be that they will have to compete with the dozen or so ARM server companies on price, while having more or less the same performance.
THAT is what will kill Intel in the long term. Intel is not a company built to last on Atom-like profits (which will get even lower once the ARM servers flood the market). And they can forget about their juicy Core profits in a couple of years. Reply
wsw1982 - Wednesday, April 03, 2013 - linkSo your argument is because the ARM solution is more expensive than Intel solution now, therefore it must be cheaper than Intel solution in the feature? The mobile ARM is cheap, so does the Intel mobile chips. Reply
Silma - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link1300$ difference / server, that's a lot electricity you have to spare to justify the cost, especially as it is better that Xeon servers only in a few chosen benchmarks.
Can't see how this is interesting in production environment.
It's more for testing / experimenting I guess; Reply
Wilco1 - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - linkThe savings are more than just electricity cost, you also save on cooling costs and can pack your server room more densely. If you do a TCO calculation over several years it might well turn out to be cheaper overall.
This is the first ARM server solution, so it's partly to get the software working and test the market. However I was surprised how competitive it is already, especially when you realize they use a relatively slow 40nm Cortex-A9. The 2nd generation using 28nm A15 will be out in about 6 months, if they manage to double performance per core at similar cost and power then it will look even better. Reply
kfreund - Friday, March 15, 2013 - linkKeep in mind that this is VERY early in the life cycle, and therefore costs are artificially high due to low volumes. Ramp up the volumes, and the prices will come WAY down. Reply
wsw1982 - Wednesday, April 03, 2013 - linkJa, IF they have high volume. But even if there is high volume, it's shared between different ARM suppliers and needless to say, the ATOM. How much can it be for one company?
But the question is where the ARM get the volume? less performance, comparable power consumption, less performance/watt rational (not this kind extreme bias case ), less flexibility, less software support (stability), vendor specific (you can build a normal server, but can you build up a massive parallel cluster?), oh, don't forgot, more (much more) expensive. Which company will sacrifice themselves to beef up the market volume of the ARM server? Reply
Sputnik_b - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - linkHi Johan,
Nice job benchmarking and analyzing the results. Our group at EPFL has recently done some work aimed at understanding the demands that scale-out workloads, such as web serving, place on processor architectures. Our findings very much agree with your benchmark conclusions for the Xeon/Calxeda pair. However, a key result of our work was that many-core processors (with dozens of simple cores per chip) are the sweet spot with regard to performance per TCO dollar. I encourage you to take a look at our work -- http://parsa.epfl.ch/~grot/pubs/SOP-TCO_IEEEMicro....
Please consider benchmarking a Tilera system to round-out your evaluation.
Best regards! Reply
Sputnik_b - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - linkSorry, bad URL in the post above. This should work: http://parsa.epfl.ch/~grot/pubs/SOP-TCO_IEEEMicro.... Reply
aryonoco - Friday, March 15, 2013 - linkLWN.net has a very interesting write-up on a talk given by Facebook's Director of Capacity Engineering & Analysis on the future of ARM servers and how they see ARM servers fit in with their operation. I think it gives valuable insight on this topic.
http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/542518/bb5d5d3498359... (free link) Reply
phoenix_rizzen - Friday, March 15, 2013 - linkARM already has hardware virtualisation extensions. Linux-KVM has already been ported over to support it. Reply
Andys - Saturday, March 16, 2013 - linkGreat article, finally good to see some realistic benchmarks run on the new ARM platform.
But I feel that you screwed up in one regard: You should have tested the top Xoen CPU also - the E5-2690.
As you know from your own previous articles, Intel's top CPUs are also the most power efficient under full load, and the price would still be cheaper than the full loaded Calxeda box anyway. Reply
an3000 - Monday, March 25, 2013 - linkIt is a test using wrong software stack. Yes, I am not afraid to say that! Apache will never be used on such ARM servers. They are exact match for Memcached or Nginx or another set-get type services, like static data serving. Using Apache or LAMP stack is too much favorable for Xeon.
What I would like to see is: Xeon server with max RAM non-virtualized running 4-8 (similar to core count) instances of Memcached/Nginx/lighttpd vs cluster of ARM cores doing the same light task. Measure performance and power usage. Reply
wsw1982 - Wednesday, April 03, 2013 - linkMy suggestion will be let them run one hard-disk to one hard-disk copy and measure the power usage:) Reply
thomas94k - Monday, August 01, 2016 - linkAfter study a couple of the blog posts on your website now, and I truly like your manner of blogging. I bookmarked it to my bookmark site list and will be checking back shortly. Pls check out my site too and I would like to know what you think. http://www.marvelcontestofchampionshackonline.com/ Reply
thomas94k - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - linkRather! This was a truly excellent post. Thank you for your supplied advice Reply
thomas94k - Thursday, September 22, 2016 - link$AboutMe$ http://studenti.isissismondipacinotti.it/members/j... Reply


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text:
The Original Dream Game — U of L -UK 1983
Posted by frankpos on July 2, 2008
"There have been some great games over the years, but none so big. So much was at stake, and the winner went to the Final Four. The weight of the State was on the shoulders of the players and coaches."
"There was only one–the original–Dream Game."
Charles Jones, U of L center in The Game
It was — and still is– the most important, most exciting, most meaningful
single sporting event
in my life.
I have never since been so thrilled for a game–and so tense about it's outcome.
Yes, this was the ultimate "show me" game — against the sport's dynastic power and for recognition in our own state as an equal.
And, yes, the feelings of tension and anger still well up as I write even these simple words….
Younger Card fans….
you just don't know.
24 years of Big Blue condescension, ridicule, and refusal to even consider scheduling us
rising to a peak of hatred and revulsion with the smarmy, snarling UK AD Cliff Hagan
and a Joe B. Hall at his clumsy, arrogant worst.
Hell, they wouldn't have played us in 1958-59 if they hadn't been forced to!
And that year, Peck Hickman's unranked Cardinals whipped Adolph Rupp's second-ranked Wildcats 76-61 in the Mideast Regional semifinals on the way to U of L's first Final Four.
Before that, the teams hadn't met since 1922!
UK was the dynasty, the traditionally dominant player on the national scene for decades. They had only recently been humbled by John Wooden and UCLA. The Cats had claimed five NCAA championships and had produced dozens of All-America players.
Louisville was the upstart, a successful program in its own right starting in the 40's with coach Peck Hickman, and then regularly crashing the NCAA party in the 1970s under Denny Crum. Only three years earlier –in 1980–the Cardinals had finally won their first NCAA championship.
"I don't think UK wanted to recognize that our program was on a competitive scale with theirs," Denny Crum says. "They certainly didn't want the media to recognize that."
In those long 24 years, the teams had just missed meeting on a couple of occasions.
In 1975, both teams marched into San Diego for the Final Four.
Even then the fever for a match-up was hot. I was a senior at U of L at the time, and somehow managed to get a ticket in the student lottery– and went on my first airplane trip!
The game was in a small gym (around 15,000) in San Diego — basically a "home" game for UCLA. It was Denny's second Final Four in his first four years, and he faced his mentor and perhaps the greatest college BBall coach of all-time. John Wooden. In what at the time was considered one of the finest games ever played (and deserves a story in its own right), U of L lost in overtime to top-ranked UCLA 75-74 in the semifinals; Joe B's first Final Four team at Kentucky fell to the Bruins 92-85 two nights later.
(Wooden has been quoted as saying he feared Denny's team the most. It has also long been rumored that Wooden announced to his players before the U of L game that he would retire, to fire up the Bruins.)
After Denny won his first championship in 1980, basketball aficionados throughout the nation began to clamor for a match-up. The NCAA committee seemed to want such a pairing too, and they started putting the Cards and the Cats in the the same Regional.
In 1982, Big Blue needed only to beat 11th-seeded Middle Tennessee State University in the tournament's first round to earn a matchup with third-seeded Louisville. The Mildcats fell in a huge upset, 50-44. U of L then pummeled Middle 81-56 on the way to its second Final Four in four years.
"I really thought (that year) we were ready to play," says Charles Jones, a 6-8 center for the Cards. "We were disappointed when they lost to Middle Tennessee State."
The next year it happened. In 1983, UK beat a tough Bobby Knight-led Indiana squad, and U of L –with Razorback US Reed's 50′ dagger a few years earlier still etched in their minds–edged a very difficult Eddie Sutton-coached Arkansas on a last second tip-in.
Finally…the Game was on!
And it was for the Regional championship, pitting two of the nation's top programs against each other for a spot in the NCAA Final Four–and with both teams coming off recent NCAA championships- U of L in 1980, UK in 1978!
But there was of course a lot more was at stake when the teams took the floor at the tiny (12,000) and somewhat dingy old Stokely Athletic Center in Knoxville, Tenn.
"I can't tell you how much more the game meant to U of L than to UK," says Billy Reed. Then sports editor of The Courier-Journal, Reed incurred the wrath of UK's coaches and fans for advocating a series between the two schools. "Had UK won that game they probably would never have played (the series)."
CBS and a national audience were focused on the game.
So that you have a true understanding of the intensity of the Game, take a moment and listen to the CBS pre-game show -particularly the classic John Tesch interviews with Denny at his cocky, sarcastic best and Joe B. at his clumsy worst –"Is that (camera) off?" ( You can also watch the entire game at Jerb's site.)
My brother-in-law — a huge Card fan like me–managed to get tickets. We took our wives–both dyed deep Blue.
I was 29 at the time.
For six years, I had been working and living in Eastern Ky and I was definitely one of only a handful of U of L fans in that region — and EVERYONE let me know it.
I had been raised a UK fan –as most Louisvillians and Kentuckians were in that era. People younger than 50 do not understand this: Rupp was God in Kentucky, even in Louisville in the 50's and 60's. When Blue deigned to play at Freedom Hall, it was packed, and people were turned away.
The Cards did not fill Freedom Hall like that until the 80's.
But after seeing Unseld play, and attending U of L, and being blinded by the brilliance of this new smart-ass coach from the West Coast who wore those so-trendy leisure suits– I had become a die hard Card fan.
You had to be a rebel in your own family and city back then to "come out" as a Card fan!
Now… I ached for –and dreaded –the Game.
If we won… supreme vindication…within our families, our city, maybe even our State. For our style of play…and our ideals (no need to go into race issues here- suffice to say UK did not integrate its BBall until the 70's- well after U of L).
If we lost… oh God! It felt like we would never get over the hump then. More "little brother" nonsense, more feeling like a second class citizen in your own city, more daily abuse from family, neighbors, friends!
But I and most Card fans felt confident going into this game. Yes, Joe B and Denny each had one NCAA ring at that point. But Denny had taken the Cards to 4 Final Fours while Joe B had only the one. And the Cards were generally considered by impartial experts to have the stronger team in 1983. It had been clear for awhile–even in most UK fans' minds–that U of L was at least equal to and probably better than UK from 1971-1972 to this point.
Yes, U of L "wanted" the Game more than UK–but let me tell you: UK feared the Game much, MUCH more.
I don't remember much about the ride down, but I remember being somewhat surprised at how small the arena was. It was old and a bit musty. But every seat had a great view.
As you can imagine, the feeling in the crowd before the game was electric –I've seldom felt anything like that raw mix of emotions. Violence had been feared….
But then, just before the game started, in what is one of the most celebrated moments of the entire event, the cheerleaders from both schools locked arms and led the crowd in singing My Old Kentucky Home. The scene sent chills through me and thousands of others. Tears flowed openly in the emotion of the moment…
And then it was on!
From the opening tip it was war. Louisville fell behind quickly. The shooting of guard Jim Master and forward Derrick Hord bolted UK to a 15-6 lead, then 23-10. "I knew they would be tough," Crum says of that Wildcats team. "Their players were as good as any in the country."
I remember thinking that the Cards looked tight, and UK played a very steady, controlled game, never allowing our feared defensive pressure to find a crack.
Still, the Cards never panicked. Brothers Scooter and Rodney McCray began to take over inside, scoring six of Louisville's next eight baskets. Charles Jones' lay-up cut UK's halftime lead to seven, 37-30.
Crum felt U of L had begun to take control. At halftime, "He told us not to worry about it," Jones says. "He said 'Let's go out there and play ball.' "
"There were no Knute Rockne speeches," Crum says. "The incentive was there."
UK once again jumped on the Cardinals at the start of the second half. Center Melvin Turpin's hook shot gave UK a 43-32 lead with 16:38 left in the game.
Then the Cardinals took over.
In less than two minutes U of L outscored the Cats 12-2, cutting the lead to one point. The teams then traded baskets until a similar flurry put U of L up five, 58-53. I remember finally feeling some relief, thinking the Cards had finally rattled the Cats, and that we were ready to hammer the final nail in.
But UK fought back, tying the game at 60 each with just over three minutes left.
We missed our shot, and UK had the ball with about 2:00 to go. This was bad. Very bad. There was no shot clock then. The Cats could just run the clock down for the game's last shot.
And that's what they tried to do. The moved the ball around for what seemed a lifetime until finally, with 20 seconds left, UK guard Dirk Minniefield faked Lancaster Gordon right and drove wide open to his left for a certain layup.
Out of nowhere, Charles Jones soared across the lane and tipped the shot away from the goal toward Scooter McCray. He fired a pass to his brother, who then fed Gordon, who redeemed himself with a short jump shot and a 62-60 Cardinals lead. Only eight seconds remained.
Wild CARDS cheers echoed off the old arena walls. High- fiving, raucous Cards fans –after having waited those many long years–were ready, oh so ready, for that final sweet vindication. Imagine the energy of caged animals not fed for a lonnnngg time. I (we) could taste it!
But Blue refused to lose. The Cats got the ball to Master, who nailed a 12-foot jump shot with less than a second left.
The Dream Game was going to overtime!
By this point, the tension was almost unbearable. There was what can only be described as wild-eyed pandemonium on both sides. I could barely speak, my voice so raw from the shouting. This most hoped for victory by the Cards had been snatched away at the last possible second. I was drained dead.
Accounts after the game indicated that some people literally fainted and had to be helped out…
And then… what followed was what many, MANY fans still believe are the best five minutes in U of L basketball history.
As UK's Master said after the game, "It was like a cavalry charge."
The Cards took control from the tip. Gordon hit a baseline jumper for a 64-62 lead, which he followed with another jump shot. Jones contributed two free throws. Guard Milt Wagner hit a layup, then two free throws, threw down an exclamation-point dunk and drilled another two free throws to cap a 14-0 run. Two more dunks– by Gordon and Wagner–and three late Kentucky baskets led to a surprisingly lopsided final score, 80-68.
U of L had shot an unbelievable 81% during the second half and overtime and had been perfect in the extra period, hitting all six of its field goal attempts and all six free throws.
And on defense?
"They were all over the floor," said UK guard Dicky Beal. "They were just everywhere."
The Cardinals had made 30 of their final 36 shots. Crum described the Cardinals performace as "I don't think we ever played any second half or overtime any better than today." He went on to marvel at how Kentucky could shoot 56% from the field during the game and still get beat.
After the game, fans roared while players cut down the nets. Gordon, the regional MVP, stood on a ladder holding the rim with one hand. In the other was a sign that said, "Cardinals Best in State."
It was a game for the ages… one that is still unsurpassed in this intense rivalry.
Here are some of the interviews with the players before and after the game (just ck out the first 2 minutes.)
In Louisville, fans rushed from the Cardinal Inn out into the streets near campus. Students dangled from telephone poles and street signs. Fans drove throughout the city, hanging out car windows, honking their horns and waving flags.
Yes, we had been denied a seat at the family table for many, many long discouraging years.
And now, as we were seated at the head… it felt good. Oh so good….
After the game, my brother-in-law and I were of course ecstatic — but our wives…not so much so. : – )
Very prudently, we avoided any razzing on the trip home–although sorely tempted. My sister, when asked for her account of the Game today, simply says she was "devastated."
After the Game, an emotionally drained Card squad continued on to the Final Four that year, where they lost to the the Houston Cougar's 'Phi Slamma Jamma' squad in one of the more memorable games of the 1980's.
The Kentucky players–and Big Blue Nation– were heartbroken. Over a decade later, UK point guard Dirk Minniefield still couldn't bear to watch a replay of what was the final game of his career. After finally being talked into it, Minniefield remarked, "I played pretty well. Everybody on our team did. We played as hard as we could. Louisville just played better. I can give them credit." And then a pause. "But I still should have dunked that ball."
(Even as recently as last year, Dirk was STILL in denial, blaming a joint he smoked THE DAY before the Game for causing him to miss that layup!)
The Game caused seismic changes in Louisville and the State of Kentucky.
The governor, legendary entrepreneur John Y. Brown (who had diplomatically worn a half blue, half-red sport coat to the Game), legislators and even the boards of trustees of U of L and UK began to talk about a series between the schools. Shortly after, they announced that they would begin playing each other.
And, so …the U of L-UK series was born.
Denny's and Joe B's careers had run remarkably parallel time-wise to each other. And, although he posted a fine record at UK, Joe B suffered in the bright light of comparison to our truly brilliant coach– 1 championship to Denny's 2, and 2 Final Four's to Denny's 6!
The high-flying, full court pressing Louisville style of play had obviously prevailed. Three years later, Joe B was looking for a job.
Yes, this game–the Game –was the tipping point.
We had gotten that first NCAA championship–but we hadn't won our own State, yet. Now we had not only that inter-family vindication, but we also had cemented our position among the all-time basketball powers in the national consciousness. Denny put down his final exclamation point for emphasis in '86.
There is little question today whether U of L and UK should play each other in all sports. There is now at least grudging mutual respect.
Our own city of Louisville — previously dominated by UK fans — also began the major change to where the vast majority of Louisvillians are now Cards fans.
And the State of Kentucky — well, it's still Blue.
But there is little doubt that there are a lot more Cardinals flying high throughout the State today because of
The Game.
The following are memories of the Game that fans have sent to me. The very last one is one from my brother-in-law, Matt, who got us tickets for the game –and remembers some great details I had forgotten.
If anyone has any pictures or others story to share, please send them or leave a comment!
I was there as a 14 year old
sitting up in the corner behind the UofL bench. We were very lucky to squeek out a win and avoid overtimet on Scooters tip-in at the buzzer against Sutton's Arkansas team (they had knocked us out 2 of the previous 4 tourney's). They had Alvin Robertson, Darrell Walker, & Joe Kliene, all longtime NBA players. Against uk I seem to remenber we had a tough time stopping Turpin. After being down about 2/3 of the game, we grabbed a lead. Of course, everyone knows Master hit the shot to send it to OT before we blew it out.
I also remember as we walked in about 30 minutes before tip, scalpers outside the arena suprisingly had alot of tickets still to get rid of. And as the original post says, it was a very strange old arena with small balconies over each end zone
Actually if you will remember this game was pre shot clock days and the scored was tied at 64 at about the 2 minute mark and Kentucky held the ball till the Minniefield drive at about the 18 second mark. We all know that Jones blocked it we get a fast break and Gordon banks one in with about 10 seconds or so that set up the end. No 3 point line in those days either. Guys like Wagner, Jeff Hall and Jim Master would have had field days back then.
I was 7 yrs old. yet I remember it like it was literally yesterday!
I was 12. It was truly the most intense atmosphere Ive ever been to, even more so than the National championship games.IMO The best part of the whole weekend, with the exception of the overtime, was the tip at the buzzer in the sweet 16 game. Up to that point I was just sick that we were that close to getting to beat the hell out of UK finally and it was so close to slipping away. The year before in the tournament we were supposed to play them in the second round but they lose to middle tenn. st., I still think they threw that game just so they didnt get beat down by us.
I watched the ot on youtube a while back and it was as good as I remember. I thought we were toast at the end of regulation but that goofy Minnifield thought he could drive on Charles Jones – wrong. Blocked shot and Gordon bank shot and only Master saved them to take it into ot.
I was 29 years old and campus minister at the U of K…. it was fun "jawing" with the students and good naturedly watching the game together at our student center…it became wonder "fodder" for conversation for the next few years..
they were very good natured about the loss and it was edifying to see how they warmed up to some of the UL players afterwards.
In 1988 I was talking to Lancaster Gordon in a private health club (Louisville)…we talked about the Lakers and his time at UL….it was fascinating to listen to him vividly recall the small nuiances of the game itself ….and how defensive errors nearly cost them dearly near the end…. they just didn't think Masters could beat them, unfortunately he had the game of his life in that loss.
That article brought up a lot of good memories. I was 15 when they played that game. At that time, I was awestruck by these Louisville players. I consider them to be my first heroes in life and I still feel that way. They were 1st class all the way.
Before the Pitino era, a friend's wife decided it would be a great gift to get her husband a copy of the 1st Dream Game. She called the UofL athletics office and spoke with one of Denny's former assistants. I believe his name was Jones. He was one of Crum's long-time assistants (the other great being Wade Houston). He kindly responded he would look around and see what he could find. A week later she received in the mail, not only the Dream Game, but also the Houston Final 4 game and the '86 championship. We spent all night watching all three games. Even in a loss, the Houston game was great to watch as was the '86 game. But nothing was more exciting than to watch the '83 game again. As thrilling as the comeback in the 2nd half was, the overtime was pure magic. They released the '80 championship on DVD to celebrate its 25th anniversary and I suspect they'll do the same for the '86 game as well. More than anything I'd like to have the '83 game in my library.
That game still gives me chills thinking about it. I personally felt I had so much at stake because of the trash-talking I'd done against all the other UK fans I'd grown up with. It was put up or shut up time and I was praying they'd take care of business like I knew they could. And while they scared me for the most part of 40 minutes despite still playing very good ball, I couldn't ask for more from that overtime. To this day, about as good a five minutes of basketball that I've ever seen anyone play. Absolutely amazing.
've noted that most on this board are 'fairly' young and only think of UL in terms of their generation. I go back almost 3 generations of being a UL fan; and, I'm here to tell you the real UL vs UK dream game was in the 1958-59 basketball season. I was there; and, also present, at the previous game against Eastern KY at the old arena in Lexington.
After beating Eastern 77-63 in the game before the big one I was in 7th heaven; the minute the game was over UK fans in the arena were chanting something like, "We finally get to stomp your ass".
It was hard to scrape up the money to go to the NCAA Mideast regional at Evanston, Illinois where finally after decades UL would meet then #2 UK. I had my future mortgaged to cover bets with rabid UK fans I knew.
The game was a real nail bitter, somewhat similar to the 1983 meeting. In the first half, UL could do no right and trailed by 15 points at the intermission. A big red-headed fellow, Don Goldstein, from New York was our shooter. Coach Peck Hickman must have given a whale of a half-time pep talk as UL came out on fire. Now it was UK who could do no right and UL went on to win 76-61 (by 15). That's a 30 point swing in the second half.
UK coach Rupp was unable to talk after the game and it was days later he finally admitted to Peck Hickman that, "You (UL) really kicked out butts."
I sure wish video (movies back then) was available of that game on DVD. Maybe UL has film buried in some archive somewhere. But, unlike today, filming of games wasn't as prevalent back then.
Unfortunately, UL lost next game to WVa (Jerry West) in a good game. I think they were totally worn out.
That was the first of second year the NCAA finals were held in then fairly new Freedom Hall which for years was the biggest indoor arena in the country for basketball. 6 or 7 championships were held here through the mid60s.
None of this should be taken as anything against the 1983 game which is one of my all time favorites too; and, of course, was the first to carry the "Dream Game" moniker.
Swamp Daddy
And now, from my brother-in-law, Matt, who went with me to the Game:
Dream Game 1983 – Leaving Las Ville
1983 was a hopeful year for the Card Fans. We still had lingering karma from the 1980 championship, and we all thought we had the team to do it again. Little during the season occurred to sway our opinion. We lost to UCLA (we were robbed), and we beat a lot of very good teams. We strung together a couple of streaks, including beating NC State, which we didn't think much of at the time. Milt "Ice" Wagner sank two clutch free throws to defeat Memphis in the regular season, and then we beat them again in the Metro Conference semis. We went on to win the conference tournament, and were waiting for a great draw in the NC-dubs. I don't really remember when it started happening, but sometime around that time I started to feel that Louisville always got the short end of the stick in the draws. Instead of a slot in the Mideast, where they would have played in Freedom Hall, they drew the Midwest along with Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, and a tough Indiana team. Denny said it was the toughest region. We all saw the possibility of the Kentucky game, but we knew it wasn't a sure thing, since we were disappointed when Kentucky lost to Middle Tennessee in 1982 to kill our joy.
We were sure that Kentucky was avoiding playing Louisville, since the 1980 team had taken the national spotlight and Louisville was on a roll. If you were a Kentucky fan, you saw your beloved team in a transition period, with at least some loss of prestige. You probably knew you were the second best team in Kentucky, but you didn't need any proof. The average Kentucky fan was in denial in the 80's.
Kentucky beat IU in a close game, and the Kentucky fans and students lined up their tickets to Knoxville. Louisville had to go against a tough Arkansas team, which sunk the hearts and minds of Louisville in 1981 with the name US Reed forever etched into our minds when he sank a 50 foot prayer to end our run. This game was a cardio cards game as well, with this game ending in the final seconds with a miss by Ice and a tip-in by Scooter McCray. The impossible dream was set!
I remember the next morning being a turning point in my card fandom. The paper and the rest of the media jumped all over it, and didn't hold back on any sensationalism. I had to look up the headlines, but the Louisville Times headline was WAR! in gigantic Pearl Harbor sized type. The papers printed special sections for the first time, and if you were a sports fan in Kentucky, you quickly got caught up in all the excitement.
I never got to see an NCAA semi or final in person, and fewer Louisville games in Freedom Hall than I would like. I was a poor working man at the time, with some prospects and a 1983 Renault Alliance 1.4 liter that I bought in 1982 at around a 14% interest rate. George C. Scott was touting the paint job on the car, and it surprisingly won the 1983 Motor Trend Car of the Year. It was about the only thing I could afford, as the government tried to kill inflation, I felt like they were killing me with a 13% mortgage to boot. But I was determined to see this game. The next day, I scoured the classified ads in every publication available to see about tickets. After a few calls, I found a UK student in Lexington that had 4 seats together for $50 bucks each. I couldn't believe it. I called Frank, and he agreed to spring for the tickets if I could get them. (Thanks again Frank).
We set up the trip with myself and my wife Robin picking up the tickets at a typical UK off-campus apartment. I remember being a little wary about the ticket drop, but there was kind of a festive air about it, and to the best of my recollection the UK student said something about you guys will probably win it, good luck and all. Its kind of hard to understand now, but there were not a lot of confident UK fans, and a lot of them just did not want to go to the game. They had all the tickets, because they knew they were in, and we just appreciated being able to buy them.
We rendezvoused with Frank and Deb at the Holiday Inn on I-75 in Lexington, a famous place that everyone I know seems to use as a meeting point for going south. Not so odd in Kentucky, each car contained a set of UofL and Kentucky Fans in equal numbers (2 and 2). Each of us carried our respective colors, and we would root our teams on in typical fashion. Robin was a big Masters fan. Deb was a diehard UK fan. And Frank and I could hold our own in any arena in the country. So with great anticipation and fanfare, we headed down the winding road. I remember the Renault would go about 90 mph down the hills around London and beyond, and I could push it to 68 mph up the hills. It seemed like but a flash till we arrived for the big show.
The ambiance in the hotel was electric. We checked in and quickly got to the lobby bar. There were minor celebrities galore, and sports figures and team luminaries abounded. But I honestly can't remember any of them. Maybe it was the Jack and Cokes we were consuming abundantly, or maybe it was the heady feeling that came with the Mardi Gras atmosphere. I do remember people without tickets trying to get them. I heard of $1000 courtside tickets, and all manner of transactions occurring around us. But the thing I remember most vividly was a pair of tickets going for face value just moments before we left for the game, probably around $24. Bottom line was that if you really wanted to get into this game, you could have done it.
The Knoxville Coliseum only seats around 12,000 {check this out}. We were in the upper deck, about 10 rows from the top, and towards the UK side. But I remember fairly good leg room and visibility. If you see the camera angle from the game, that's about what we saw. It was all in all a pretty good venue for a game.
I will leave it to others to give details on the game itself. The game did not disappoint in any way. U of L center Charles Jones made one of the greatest blocks in UL history with the score tied 60-60, and UL drove the floor and scored with a short jumper to put them up 62-60 with 8 seconds. UK Jim Master hits a basket at the buzzer to tie it at 62 all.
I still regret this a little, it must have been the excitement and the need to relieve a little of the tension, but I got up and went to the concession stand to get a beer. By the time I got back to our seats, UL was up 6 in overtime and it never was in doubt from there. They ran 14 straight before UK scored. U of L won handily 80-62.
Another thing I remember was that UK players were classy throughout the game and afterwards in the interview. They came to play, and even though UL looked to have the better record and the better team, UK played like they didn't know it, and when they got beat, they recognized U of L as probably the top team in the Nation. Except Louisville lost to the Phi Slamma Jamma in the semis in Albuquerque. They finished the season 32-4. Some say it was the altitude, others say that maybe beating Kentucky emotionally drained Louisville. I just remember that I don't remember anything about the Houston loss. And remember the NC State team Louisville beat earlier in the year? They won the title that appears every year on your screen during March Madness with Jim Valvano running crazily out on the floor in celebration.
Billy Packard called the original dream game on TV, and every year Billy and Dick tout the great Duke/NC rivalry as the tops in college basketball. But Kentucky knows, and you know, and a large part of the sports nation knows that the Annual UofL/UK game is the original and the best Dream game in the country. They only thing that really comes close is the OSU/Michigan football game.
Lest you doubt the seriousness that UK fans take with the annual dream game, here is a random quote Googled off the net from a UK blog:
"BUT….I grew up as a small child hating UL, lived through the original "Dream Game", and cried when UK was blow out in the OT. I waited in line for HOURS to get a student ticket to watch UK beat a sorry UL team. I give nose-bleed tickets to UK/UL to 2 uncles that bleed blue and it was like I had given them the winning powerball ticket. UK/UL is a passion. It is much more than a UK/TN or UK/Fla rivalry., although I do hate Tenn and recently learned to hate Fla. UK/UL IS unc/duke, it IS Kansas/Missou, not only is UK/UL a great rivalry it is one of the 5 greatest rivalrys in the country. When is the last time your family held an annual UK/Florida party???????? OH YEA I forgot, now Slicky Ricky coaches there. I wouldn't root for UL to win a chess tourny, can't stand to watch them win in football, girls' BBall, baseball, or swimming for that matter."
And so time goes on, and the dream continues. The Renault paint job that George C. Scott touted as the best in the world oxidized mysteriously in 5 years and flaked off. The 1986 Consumer Reports "Annual Auto Issue" surveyed owners after five years , and the 1983 Renault Alliance scored worst ratings in "Engine", "Clutch", "Driveline", "Engine cooling", "Suspension", "Exhaust system", "Automatic transmission" and "Manual transmission". I managed to trade the vehicle in for another Renault that I bought in a giddy frenzy caused by mortgage refinancing my house for 8%, which blew a timing belt 4 years later, thus proving the definition of insanity is doing things repeatedly while expecting different results.
I still expect U of L to win every dream game every year. Regardless, we were young once, and we were there for the first one, and we have the liver spots to show for it.
20 Responses to "The Original Dream Game — U of L -UK 1983"
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Link Google Analytics and AdWords
Linking a Google Analytics property to your AdWords account can help you analyze customer activity on your website after an ad click or impression. This information can shed light on how much of your website traffic or business comes from AdWords, and help you improve your ads and website.
Linking accounts allows you to import Google Analytics goals and transactions, see Google Analytics data in your AdWords reports, and import Analytics remarketing audiences. You'll also see AdWords data in your Analytics reports.
This article will show you how to link your accounts, or how to edit or unlink Google Analytics properties.
Before you begin
To link AdWords and Google Analytics, or to unlink or edit your link, you'll need to use a Google Account with the following permissions to Google Analytics and AdWords:
- For the Google Analytics property, you'll need "Edit" permissions.
- To check your permissions, in Google Analytics, click Admin at the top of the page, select the property you want to link, and click User Management. If you don't see "User Management" in the property column, ask your account administrator if you have "Edit" permissions.
- For the AdWords account, you'll need administrative access.
- To check your account access, click the gear menu (), and select Account settings. In the menu on the left, select Account access.
How to link AdWords and Google Analytics
- Sign in to your AdWords account.
- Click the gear menu (), then select Linked accounts.
- Under "Google Analytics," click View details. You'll see a list of Google Analytics properties to which you have access. (If you don't see an Analytics property here, make sure you have "Edit" permission to that property.)
- Click Set up link next to the property you want to link to AdWords. Choose a property for the business you advertise with AdWords. (You'll be able to link more than one.) If you've already linked a property, you'll see "Edit" instead of "Set up link."
- Now you'll see one of the two screens described below:
- If the property you chose only has one view, you'll see the name of that view. Select Import site metrics to be able to see Google Analytics data in AdWords reports. (To add this data to your reports, you'll also need to follow the instructions to add Google Analytics columns to your AdWords reports.)
- If the property has multiple views, you'll see a list of the views from this property that you can link. There are two settings:
- Link: Link as many views as you'd like. This will make AdWords click and cost data available in Analytics, and Analytics goals and transactions available for import into AdWords.
- Import site metrics: (Recommended) Choose one view from which to import site engagement metrics. While this is optional, we recommend choosing one view that will be used to show site engagement metrics in the Google Analytics reporting columns of your account.
- Click Save.
You can repeat this process for any additional properties you want to link.
When you link an AdWords account to an Analytics property, anyone with access to the views you selected during linking will be able to see your imported AdWords data. Likewise, if you choose to import Analytics data (such as goals and transactions, metrics, or remarketing lists) into your AdWords account, anyone with access to that AdWords account will be able to see your imported Analytics data.
Once Analytics data (for example, goals) has been imported to AdWords, it is subject to the AdWords terms of service.
Google Analytics account administrators can move their Analytics property from one Analytics account to another. Any linked AdWords accounts will continue to be linked to the property. After the move, users of the new Analytics account will be able to see data from the linked AdWords accounts.
Best practices
Read the Google Best Practices guide about improving AdWords performance with Google Analytics.
Optimizing AdWords with Google Analytics: Google Best Practices
Edit or remove linked Analytics properties
Once you've created a link to an Analytics property, you can add or remove views, edit settings, or unlink the property entirely. You must have Analytics "Edit" permission or AdWords administrative access to edit or remove a link.
- Sign in to your AdWords account.
- Click the gear menu (), then select Linked accounts.
- Under "Google Analytics," click View details.
- You'll see a list of Google Analytics properties to which you have access. Click Edit next to the property you want to edit or unlink.
- To edit: Turn off links to any views you want to unlink, or change which view to use for site engagement metrics.
- To unlink: Click Remove link.
- Click Save.
If you unlink a previously linked property, data from AdWords (such as clicks, impressions, CPC, etc.) will no longer be visible in Analytics reports. Session data up until the time you unlink the account will still be available. Any new sessions that result from clicks in these linked AdWords accounts after you have unlinked will appear in Analytics reports as "(not set)". Any remarketing lists based on the link will also be closed, and any goals or transactions that you are importing in AdWords from Analytics will stop.


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DUDLEY people are being urged to make sure they are registered to have a say in who will run the region's police force.
Following the sudden death of West Midlands police and crime commissioner, Bob Jones, on July 1, there will be a by-election on Thursday August 21 to choose his successor.
Residents are being reminded to make sure they have registered to vote by Tuesday August 5.
John Polychronakis, chief executive and elections returning officer at Dudley Council, said: "It is an important opportunity for people to have their say on how policing is carried out across the West Midlands."
People can register to vote online by visiting www.gov.uk/register-to-vote or by calling 01384 814740.


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Melvin Arthur was a paratrooper during WW2.
He was in the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment and was awarded the Purple Heart upon his death.
Grave marker for Sgt Melvin A. Moses at Plot E Row 6 Grave 18 in the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in Colleville-sur-Mer, France
Sgt Moses was killed in action on June 23, 1944 and was awarded the Purple Heart
"...2.056 men of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment (attached to the 82nd Airborne) jumped into Normandy on D-Day, and on July 15, [only] 918 returned. The rest had been killed, captured or wounded. "
Source: The late O. B. Hill, 508th P.I.R. Association, 82nd Airborne Division, Cathedral Hill, CA
His death is mentioned in the book "From Heaven to Hell" by Benoit-Lelandais. Published in 2007.
Sgt Melvin A. Moses (Asst Jumpmaster) He was in HQ1st Company


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Best Joint: Leonard's BBQ
Where: Foxworth Dr., Memphis, TN
Online: they are too quaint to have a web address!
What: They serve pork in all forms, no chicken.
Why: This is the best joint because my mom and dad used to dine there when they were dating and that was 30 years ago. They have Elvis memorbilia hanging on the walls and they serve the best pulled pork bbq around. They have the best onion rings too!! gotta try them!! MMMMMMMMMMMMMM good--making my mouth water just thinking about it!
Mel Balducci
4848 Huron Rd.
Nesbit, MS 38651


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Bargain Bin Games Revue - Round Oneby Eddie Turner on 9/1/2008 12:00 AM EST
- Posted in
- GPUs
35 Comments
Back to Article
alexruiz - Thursday, November 06, 2008 - linkHow about Universe at War: Earth Assault?
Great RTS game, and priced to move. Anandtech should have reviewed this one ;) Reply
Pirks - Wednesday, September 03, 2008 - linkThe author of this review totally misrepresented "You are empty", his take on this cool game is totally clueless, let me explain where and why.
1) Sorry Eddie, but you look like a total noob, have you even played at least one level of this game? This game has NOTHING to do with Nazi and/or Germany! In fact it's the total opposite: the main hero is a Soviet NKVD officer that got into a car accident, spent several months in coma after that and when he woke up he found himself in a totally different world - the world where communism has been really built, I mean it was really finally pushed upon Soviet people... in some peculiar "scientific" way... which way exactly? You'll see this if you throw out this Eddies clueless shit about "nazi" and start really understanding what this game is about.
2) Black and white arty cutscenes in fact are ABOUT this game and they tell the story of the main antihero of the game - the guy who ultimately helped the Party to implement communism with his special device (again play the game and pay attention to the plot to understand what was that device)
3) The last cut scene shows how and why the main hero (NKVD officer) dies at the end
4) The last cutscene also hints at a couple of pretty famous Soviet political figures of the last century (again play the game to understand whom exactly)
5) If you are not Russian and/or you don't know anything about Soviet history - this game will look like this crazy "nazi" nonsense to you. Hence Eddie's BS about nazi and such.
I as a former Soviet citizen enjoyed it very very _VERY_ much.
It's just not for you lazy rich Americans :P
Sorry, Eddie, nothing personal, but for me your review of this game looks totally idiotic and waaaaaaaay off the ground. At least I can understand why. Reply
EddieTurner - Wednesday, September 03, 2008 - linkWell, it looks like you've done your homework. As for me, I didn't. In fact, I made it a point not to. As I stated in my initial paragraphs, I read nothing about this game. No previews, no reviews. I didn't even check out the official site. I sinply saw the box, thought it looked interesting, and popped it into my machine. Just goes to show that different people can take away different impressions of the games they play.
Anyway, I'm not a German or a Soviet, so forgive me if I didn't recognize the writing on banners and signs in the game as such. Truth be known, the game had no recognizable story and I was not able to put together any aspect of the cutscenes with what I was experiencing. After I played the game, I handed it over to a much more weathered PC gamer who did not take away much more than I did. So what I wrote about was not BS. All that you pointed aout may be evident to some, but it wasn't to me. Reply
Frumious1 - Wednesday, September 03, 2008 - linkBefore you go flaming at someone, try to tuck the raging fanboy into a corner. You liked You Are Empty? That makes you relatively unique... or clueless about what's involved in a good game. But don't take my word for it - or Anandtech's word. Let's see what others have to say.
"...you've already wasted too much of your life reading about You Are Empty.... Now move on with your life and try to pretend that games like You Are Empty don't exist." Score: 1.5
"You Are Empty needs a lot of things, aside from a title change. More intelligent enemies would have been great, or at least greater numbers of stupid foes. Digital Spray instead decided to throw small numbers of morons at you, give you an infuriatingly inadequate run speed, and make available one of the most boring arsenals in recent memory. It's an absolute must-bypass." Score: 2.1
"So now, we are left wondering what the point is of You Are Empty, because it certainly doesn't even rate as a modern game. Bereft of any sort of challenging AI and sporting a handful of weapons that all seem to have been dredged from some imaginary WWII shooter from the eighties, this game is the kind of thing you can expect to get for Christmas from a grandma that knows nothing about video games and relies on a shifty game store employee looking to move the non-sellers." Score: 1.5 stars = "Poor"
34 generally negative reviews
"That feeling of mild disappointment is a good way to sum up You Are Empty. It feels a little behind the times and doesn't fully deliver in every respect, but it's still fun from start to finish. To really get the most out of the game, you need to look past the shortcomings and appreciate the work that went into making the levels and setting the atmosphere. I'd certainly like to see Digital Spray do more with their engine—they are obviously quite talented. You Are Empty is a pretty average FPS, but its sense of style makes it much more than the sum of its parts." The only "not lousy" review with a score of C. Of course, when I went to school getting a C was cause for severe lectures.
In summary: Take your communist political views elsewhere. Lazy, rich Americans we may be, but at least we know a pile of shit when we see it! Eddie may have called some stuff "Nazi" when in fact it's "Soviet" (or something), but the game is still garbage based on all the reasonable data out there. As far as I'm concerned, Pirks, your comments in the future now deserve the right to be ignored by anyone with half a brain. Reply
7Enigma - Wednesday, September 03, 2008 - linkMe thinks he works for the company that made the game. Think about how powerful this review is. The thousands of people that will read it could easily have doubled, quadrupled the sales of this apparently horrifyingly bad game. It's very likely Penumbra will see a fantastic surge of sales after people read this article, and for good reason as it apparently deserves it. If I owned any of the companies or worked at any of the development houses that produced these I would bombard the messages with faulty praise trying to salvage a possible goldmine.
As it is, you can't polish a turd. Reply
Jynx980 - Wednesday, September 03, 2008 - linkA limit of one year on budget games is pretty conservative. Several titles on budgets shelves are at least 3 years old and can date back to 2000.
Another thing to consider is that people who buy budget games are not likely to have powerful systems. The system requirements for Tarr Chronicles and You are Empty are pretty high.
I picked up three titles up from Target awhile ago. They were Gunmetal, Black Buccaneer, and Divine Divinity. While Gunmetal was fair, and Black Buccaneer a bit better, Divine Divinity was definitely a diamond in the rough. To complete it your looking at 40-50 hours! The system requirements are a measly 450mhz cpu, 128mb of ram, and a directx 8, 8mb video card!
If you do another budget review give the time frame more leeway and consider the system requirements.
Additionally, I do agree with Nihility about the index titles. It would be fine for the title of the page, but the index needs to be just that, the index of the game reviews. Quotations don't work well when text space is limited. Reply
R4F43LZiN - Tuesday, September 02, 2008 - linkDude, Freelancer was freaking awesome. I can't see how can you recommeding a so-so game for a Freelancer fan. Thats just wrong. Freelancer is a top-notch game.
But hey, since Microsoft don't release a sequel to it... I might just give this one a try.
Overall I like you article because I'm running a low-end machine, built in 2003. yeah! So I was hoping to find some decent but not-exchange-your-videocard games. Well, live can't always be good. =P
But keep'em comming. Three cheap games worth a try is kinda nice. Reply
Krioni - Tuesday, September 02, 2008 - linkThis is just what I needed!
I've been playing my PS3 for a while and have missed out on some PC gaming for the past year. I was just telling myself that I should go back and pick up on some of the great PC games from the past year or so. They'll be new to me and I should be able to get them at a great price.
BTW, I second the idea of looking at the bargain games on Steam... that's a great resource for those of us that are too lazy to go to a B&M store.
Thanks for this series of articles. A wonderful idea! Reply
Vidmo - Tuesday, September 02, 2008 - linkIt's great that you went into a B&M to buy what they might have on the shelves. But, how about doing round 2 from Steam?
EddieTurner - Wednesday, September 03, 2008 - linkDefinitely. While my next round of games may not be totally from Steam, I'll surely give the games their due and include one or two. Thanks! Reply
steveyballme - Tuesday, September 02, 2008 - linkGeekwad 09 will be here for Christmas!
Look for it people!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com">http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com Reply
lunarx3dfx - Tuesday, September 02, 2008 - linkGreat article, but in the last game review, you forgot to mention one very important title seeing as it was the predecessor to freelancer. You forgot about Allegiance. If you haven't heard about it, I suggest you take a look. It's still played today.
Also, the literary quotes were cool. Thanks. Reply
insurgent - Monday, September 01, 2008 - linkAn enjoyable read and I haven't played most of the games here, I'll keep my eyes open when I go to the mall :D Reply
Nfarce - Monday, September 01, 2008 - linkAs someone who travels for work on occasion and is really not up for lugging both a laptop and a PS3 for after hours hotel entertainment away from home, some of these games look pretty cool! As a plus, they appear to be easy on the CPU and graphics cards of today's mid-range laptops like mine.
Thanks for this. Even though most games probably wouldn't score a 5.0 on IGN, I'll seriously consider picking up two or three of these, two being shooters.
Thanks guys, and again as I stated on your Grid review from several weeks ago, don't let the naysayers here poor mouth and sway you from changing things up around here from time to time! Reply
DirtMcGirt - Monday, September 01, 2008 - linkNice feature, keeping them coming! Reply
Leirith - Monday, September 01, 2008 - linkThe Incredible Machine! That game was awesome. I'll definitely have to check out these Crazy Machines games! Reply
Woodchuck2000 - Monday, September 01, 2008 - linkhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revue">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revue Reply
EddieTurner - Monday, September 01, 2008 - linkI chose 'revue' as it represents a multi-part extravaganza. Multiple games, multiple rounds. I think it's fitting. Reply
tviceman - Monday, September 01, 2008 - linkI didn't know Penumbra Overture was released as a free title last year, as I paid $15 for it. But I don't mind, it was well worth it. Black Plague is even better, and I'm having a blast with the newly released Penumbra: Requiem!
For anyone who enjoyed Portal, Requiem is right in the same vein. Instead of a game you traverse through, Requiem is set in Penumbra's atmosphere and you go through levels of the game, figuring out how to get to the exit (only w/o a portal gun).
All three games are great and are well worth checking out! Reply
cordas - Monday, September 01, 2008 - linkGreat article, it would have been nice to have the game titles listed as page headings, just so that when i come back to check the game names before going game hunting they are easier to find.
I also think it would be great if you added more to the conclusions page, maybe a 2 or 3 line summary of each game, strenghs and weaknesses and if you feel like it give them a fun rating.
Can't wait for more of these articles, I am sick of spending big bundles of cash on new "big name" games that disappoint.... I tend to run shy from the bargin games as there is a reason why many of them are there and its cos they are naff. Reply
nubie - Monday, September 01, 2008 - linkNeato on the Novint, haptic is cool.
Don't forget on Penumbra you need to wiggle side to side for stuck drawers.
I like this article, I was afraid there would be EA crap with price at $10 (or worse a 2-pack for $10), good job overturning my fears.
The only two that seem attractive to me so far are Penumbra and definitely Contraptions/whatever it is called now. (Yes, TIM as we called him was a favorite game of mine) Reply
kilkennycat - Monday, September 01, 2008 - linkPenumbra:Black Plague is the second game in a trilogy. The first is Penumbra: Overture, still available retail from Gamestop and on-line sources for $19.99. The game mechanics in Black Plague are a lot less awkward than in Overture. The third in the series Penumbra:Requiem has just been released in the past few days and is available as an add-on EXPANSION to Black Plague. Afaik, there will never be a retail version of the Requiem expansion, however it is available for download purchase for $9.99, currently from www.gamersgate.com. The download version will run with either a retail copy or download copy of Black Plague. Gamersgate has all parts of the trilogy separately available for download purchase and also offers Black Plague Gold Edition for $19.99, which contains both Black Plague and Requiem. This combo may also be released retail, but I have not come across any (US) sources so far. See:-
Not affiliated in any way with Gamersgate. I have not (yet) purchased any games from them. I have retail copies of both Overture and Black Plague, knew that Requiem had just been released for download only, so came across Gamersgate yesterday in my hunt. Reply
duderockin - Monday, September 01, 2008 - linkthis could also be a useful article series for those who want the more zen perspective of 20/20 hindsight.
also good for those who hate spending more time on video card catch-up than actual gaming. Reply
GTForce - Monday, September 01, 2008 - linkCheck out Falcon:
and how Penumbra series benefits from it:
http://home.novint.com/games/games_list.php?c=0&am...">http://home.novint.com/games/games_list.php?c=0&am... Reply
cosmotic - Monday, September 01, 2008 - linkI don't really see any need to do (Ed: blah blah) notes. I presume there is an editorial process that is two way? Maybe these 'issues' should be resolved and the text of the article changed. This makes for an easier read and would help the professionalism of the articles. Thanks. Reply
JarredWalton - Monday, September 01, 2008 - linkI felt most were somewhat humorous. Sorry they didn't please, since I added them. Without having Crazy Machines 2 I couldn't verify whether PhysX drivers were sufficient or not. Reply
Pottervilla - Monday, September 01, 2008 - linkI agree with the humorous part.
However, you guys are one of the premier hardware review sites on the web--I would expect you to know about things like drivers. Also, I would expect that if you were reviewing a game, you would have a copy of it somewhere, and maybe a couple PhysX capable graphics cards.
Overall, it was still a good thing to mention (the possibility that PhysX drivers might open up the extra levels), but I have come to expect a little more than maybes from this site--and a little communication between editor and reviewer would be nice too. :)
I hope this is constructive criticism--keep up the good work. Reply
Nihility - Monday, September 01, 2008 - link...suck.
The whole point of the titles is to make it easier to navigate a 7 page article. Sure it's fun to be random at times and be witty, but seriously give us readers a break please. Reply
StormEffect - Monday, September 01, 2008 - linkI thought they were clever. Enjoy the creativity, if you want numbers and easily searchable reviews go to google or use meta-critic.
Anandtech readers can be so dry and boring sometimes. Waa waa waa.
JarredWalton - Monday, September 01, 2008 - linkAnd here I thought the readers might enjoy some literary quotes as a change of pace. I mean, isn't the point that you actually read about the games rather than just look at a page heading and decide whether or not that's worth reading? Or you can treat it like a magazine and click through the pages; if you see the pictures and don't feel like reading, click to the next page. It takes all of 5 seconds. Besides, more page views are good for the articles - the popular stuff is more likely to get similar articles in the future, since after all we are a business the depends on advertising. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, September 02, 2008 - linkHonestly I think it's got to be a balance between something creative and something functional, I try to blend the two as much as I can whenever I write - sometimes I get it right, other times I don't.
I've never been a fan of forcing pageviews on an article, my thinking is always that if an article is good enough it'll attract its own traffic, regardless of how it's structured.
Thanks for the feedback, while I can't always guarantee that we'll be perfect - we'll definitely try :)
Take care,
Anand Reply
boboko - Monday, September 08, 2008 - link>"I've never been a fan of forcing pageviews on an article, my thinking is always that if an article is good enough it'll attract its own traffic, regardless of how it's structured.
Thanks for the feedback"
If you would like some more feedback, it is the ability to "print" an article on one web page, rather than being forced to click through it one paragraph at a time, that has made me a regular on your website, and a VERY seldom visitor to a certain site whose initials are T'sHW. Reply
EglsFly - Tuesday, September 02, 2008 - linkI think you left out the best Bargain Bin game that is FREE...
America's Army
FPS Shooter developed by the Army based on the Unreal Engine.
Has over 9 million registered users, and ranks in the Top 10 Online played games. AA is available at:
There are also FREE stat tracker sites where you can track your frag rate, map time, compare to other users in the "User-Top" lists etc..
such as, http://aaotracker.com">http://aaotracker.com
Calin - Wednesday, September 03, 2008 - linkMost everyone knows about America's Army, so it really wasn't qualifying for this kind of article. Also, I don't think you can find America's Army on shelves - but I might be wrong on this.
As for now, a random sampling of 5 low cost games shows that they are mostly worthy of their cheap price. Reply
JarredWalton - Tuesday, September 02, 2008 - linkI should mention that I have never in the ~4 years I've been with AnandTech heard him complain or discuss traffic for a type or class of article. I've also never heard him say, "that idea for an article suck...." At the end of the day, we write about what we find interesting or pertinent, and hopefully we're similar enough that our interests pass on to the readers. Passion for a subject tends to be the bigger concern than what the topic happens to be.
I think if readers like an article, and more importantly tell us they like a type of article, it's something we will continue to do. If you absolutely hate certain types of articles, sound off on how they should be changed and we'll try to accommodate. Constructive criticism is always appreciated. We can't please everyone all the time, of course, but we try.
(I'm just sad the first couple of people hated my little quotes for the pages. I mean dang, I spent like 30-60 minutes trying to find something appropriate on some of those games! *Sniffle*) ;-) Reply


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More Lenovo Krait Tablet Details: $399 Price Targetby Jason Inofuentes on 1/11/2012 2:48 AM EST
2 Comments
Back to Article
dagamer34 - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 - linkConsidering all the high DPI tablets being announced, it seems production is going better than expected. But we'll see if stock keeps up. It's still very silly that these tablets have a higher resolution than their laptop counterparts at a lower price point, but hopefully it's because of OS/app support and not because manufacturers are simply cutting corners (which I sadly know they are). Reply
CityZen - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 - linkGood article, Jason, but as you said the pictures are quite bad. What kind of camera were you using? It missed focus in at least 50% of the shots Reply


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Help Wanted and Found (Multimedia)
News & Events
The spring Job and Internship Fair brought to campus 60 organizations, drawing approximately 400 students. The annual event connects those seeking employment with area companies and organizations with openings.
Several participants took time out from the event to talk about the day's activities. (Video by students Nicholas Allende, Erin O'Leary, Michelle Jennett and Erick Dalmolin; photos by student Steve Rowell, University News)