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Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
08/04/09
To address the some issues raised below, R+D costs are essentially negligible when bringing a drug to market. More money is spent in marketing a drug before it is even approved by the FDA than is spent on R+D. This chip would be only a tiny part of R+D.
Secondly, the analysis of the reaction products is not that hard. You run the product solution into the mass spec and measure the ratio of reaction substrates to reaction product. The only trick is to develop a valve system that controls the delivery of the reactions to the mass spec.
Third, the big use for these devices is their use in sensors that allow a small amount of sample (like blood) to be tested against a large panel of drugs. It could give you a deep view into a patients metabolic state, for example.
08/04/09
08/04/09
08/04/09
"hurry up and wait"... Just curious, do you actually know anything about the FDA approval process for new drugs or are you just echoing what you've heard other say?
08/04/09
08/04/09
08/04/09
08/04/09
...to reduce costs for drug companies, so they can get a new set of gold rims on their bentley golf carts.
08/04/09
08/04/09
08/04/09
08/04/09
Today, it might take 10 years and $100 million to create and market a new drug. Since only huge companies can put up such a large initial investment and wait that long to turn a profit, they dominate the industry. However, there must be a turning point at which smaller companies will be willing to enter the market. It might be 5 years and $50 million, or 2 years and $25 million - who knows? The point is, as drug development time and costs decrease, we get incrementally closer to that turning point.
05/01/09
It eventually kicked the bucket and was replaced with a Sempron 2800+ and a Biostar M7VIG with a gig of cheap RAM and (the only real flaw) a Radeon 9250. Incredible compared to the Duron and its onboard video, but still no rocket ship. I upgraded that machine one piece at a time, replacing the slow, then dead, POS Seagate 80GB with a WD 160, then the motherboard (to a proper nForce2 Epox 8RDA3IPro), a new video card (x1600Pro) and power supply (420w Enermax, as the 300w CWT [Antec] was running a bit warm), and finally some better RAM and a new CPU, an unlocked low-voltage 2500+ Barton-core XP.
That machine taught me many things, through my adventures in overclocking, ghetto-ass cooling overkill, and countless case transplants. And even after it got flaky and ended up shelved, it eventually donated some of its parts (case, PSU, combo drive) after my friend gave me two-thirds of his old system last year.
At the time I built my new system, shortly before my friend gave me most of his, Intel still didn't have an affordable Core Duo solution. So I recommended a then-new AM2 setup to a friend of mine. He assumed his first CPU was DOA after the machine failed to POST; it turned out to be a dead motherboard, and he had a second CPU. Since he had a terrible 15" CRT at the time, and I was running dual 21"s that I'd gotten cheaply off of Craigslist, he offered to trade me this chip, a 3500+ single-core, for a decent 17" CRT I'd gotten for free.
I knew a good deal when I saw one, though I didn't end up building the system for another year afterward (and, after buying all the parts - nF570 Leadtek, Radeon x1950Pro, and a couple gigs of RAM, all of which were dirt cheap after MIR - I broke off a pin installing that CPU, but it worked fine anyway). I eventually traded that chip to a friend of mine who was downgrading a computer from his mother's work to XP Pro from Vista; got the 4400+ it had in it, and that's what I'm running to date.
However, my other two machines are Intel - the 3.2 P4 box (half of which I got from that friend, the case/PSU/drives I had, and the CPU I was able to steal from school) and my grandmother's Core Duo Dell laptop, which was given to me after she passed away.
I can't speak ill of the Cores. Mine's great. The P4's hot but seems quick enough (his was also a 3.2 and, with a 6600 PCIe, kept up with my 2500@3200/x1600Pro) for what it is.
tl;dr: I'm an AMD guy, but I can go either way quite happily. I'm here for the cheap thrills.
05/01/09
05/01/09
05/01/09
They consistently keep Intel honest by providing serious price/performance competition, so that as consumers we don't get raped by Intel. Intel has a horrible track record when it comes to monopolistic practices and honest product competition. If AMD ever falls, it's quite possibly the worst thing that could ever happen for PC hobbyists.
Before AMD was a serious contender in the race with the Athlon, intel was charging $400-$600 for their midrange P3 chips. Today I can get a supercomputer like Phenom II Quad core chip for $200.
05/01/09
I've read the benchmarks/reviews, you'd be better off spending the extra $70 to get an i7...
05/01/09
05/01/09
The i7s are just too good tbh. A $200ish chip beating those older $400-600 chips? Consider me sold.
05/01/09
Don't get me wrong, AMD has always had a nice price/power ratio, but the i7 is the best that I've seen in a long time.
05/01/09
The difference between a run of the mill Q6600 setup and the first i7 920 setup I built is astounding. But obviously there are about a hundred other variables involved beyond the CPU.
The second i7 box I built (I am still tweaking it) is actually a custom home PC for one of the higher ups...
Core i7 920
ASUS P6T Deluxe V2
6GB OCZ Reaper 1866mhz DDR3
BFG GeForce GTX 295
CoolMax 1200W 80+ PSU
VelociRaptor 300GB SATA II
And all things considered that setup only came out to be a hair over $2k (parts/shipping only)... It will probably be running ~3.0-3.2Ghz (CPU) / ~2024mhz (RAM) by the time I deliver it to the owner.
The OCZ DDR 1866 is AMAZING RAM for the price, I recommend anyone in the market for DDR3 RAM check it out.
05/01/09
And when looking at the numbers I care about the benchmarks/reviews give me little reason to be interested in the Phenom II, from either a value or performance standpoint.
05/01/09
05/01/09
05/02/09
I'd switch to Mac OS, myself, if Apple would let hobbyist's build thier own hardware. You'd think that would be in Apple's philosiphy, since they were basically founded by selling Apple 1 kits to hobbyists...
05/02/09
05/01/09
The one thing that realy hurt AMD was their focus on adding cores to CPU's, but not increasing the speeds of the core's frequency. It's like when AMD chips crossed the 2.6ghz barrier, even before the dual-cores, they gave up on increasing speeds.
Intel had 3+ghz cpu's, on the market, almost years before AMD had their first.
05/01/09
05/01/09
You are talking about nested ecosystems at that point, and while it is true that back when Intel was on their PIV high mhz kick, those higher numbers didn't really add up to much when compared to AMDs more efficient arcetecture.
However, on chips that have no significant bottle necks to throughput to and from the CPU cores, mhz does matter, A LOT. Speeding up and/or integrating the FSB into the CPU die means that, provided no one is slacking off on maintaining efficiency in the architecture, higher mhz do actually mean something again...
Too bad AMD is just a budget brand these days.
05/01/09
05/01/09
05/01/09
Peace out, thug.
05/01/09
05/01/09
05/01/09
05/01/09
05/01/09
All three AMD CPUs I have ever purchased fried in under a year; and all three took the MoBo with them. AMD can lick my purple happy starfish...
05/01/09
That said, I still have my 1.67GHz AMD CPU running stable on my XP system and I've had that for going on 6 or 7 years now. That thing has been more stable than any Intel system I've seen/used.
05/01/09
The phenom was the only one that was ever overclocked (mildly, and with a more than adequate heat sink).
All three of the PSUs involved lived long, uneventful lives after the fact (and it wasn't the same PSU that was on the two durons I had fail).
And yes I tried all three mobos with equivalent CPUs after the fact and they were all verifiably KIA.
Dunno, prob just bad luck, but you'll have to excuse me if I stick to Intel henceforth.
When you can get a Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 2.66GHz for under $200, why bother taking a leap of faith?
05/01/09
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05/01/09
It worked for my plumber "AAA Plumbing", lol!
03/16/09