Piracy study concludes, results are... inconclusive + AMD Phenom II X6 1090T tested early

The U.S. Government Accountability Office published its recent findings from a year-long study which analyzed the scope and impact of intellectual property infringement. Interestingly, the results claim estimates of economic losses "cannot be substantiated," and that "economy-wide impact of counterfeiting and piracy is unknown." Certainly not without a sense of irony either, the GAO goes as far to suggest that there could be some potential positive effects of counterfeiting and piracy on the economy which should be considered as well.

While the inability to assess economic harm seems to be the sweeping conclusion, the 32-page report does explore the negative aspects of both piracy and counterfeiting by discussing the obvious and non-obvious costs associated with IP crime. The GAO details that recent estimates show 20% of all business software is pirated and adds that the movie industry lost $6.1 billion in 2005, but also goes on to question those figures citing that data was merely collected through surveys and often times done so with a narrow scope.

It would seem obvious that piracy has a negative impact, and the document leaves little doubt the problem is rampant. But exactly how bad is it? If the GAO's study is any indication, we have a long way to go before meaningful numbers can be produced.

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AMD Phenom II X6 1090T tested early



It appears that yet another unreleased processor has trickled down to the hands of testers a bit early. This time it was AMD's Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition, the company's forthcoming top-of-the-line six core desktop part. The chip was apparently obtained by a user of Chinese forum coolaler.com, who has been putting through its paces on an MSI 790GX motherboard and comparing it with a few alternatives from Intel.

While we can't vouch for the test methods used, their results don't seem too surprising. The Phenom II X6 1090T managed to outperform the comparably priced (if rumors are accurate) Core i7 860 in multi-threaded apps, but it wasn't that impressive in less threaded applications. AMD's six core part was just marginally faster than the latter in Cinebench 11.5 and also marginally slower than a Core i7 960. In 3DMark Vantage we're looking at a CPU score of 16,430, which should put it in a lower performance level compared to both.

The Phenom II X6 1090T also appears to have managed a 4.2GHz overclock with a core voltage of 1.408V, which should give users an extra bit of performance.