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"You're also ignoring Intel's plans to introduce Merom in 2H of this year."

The Merom, "shows higher power consumption levels than the company anticipated" and if they can fix that, it will be introduced at a paltry 2.33GHz in September... The Merom is already obsolete. http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/01/11/merom_to_be_laun ched_in_september/

The AMD FX60 dual-core available _today_ is already at 2.4Ghz in 90nm silicon, and will definitely switch Fab36 to 65nm before Merom is out.

And this page http://www.penstarsys.com/editor/company/intel/con roe/optimism_2.htm explains why ZRAM is the answer of AMD to Merom's large cache, but without needing to match the high manufacturing cost and power problems of the Merom...

ZRAM is in line with Merom, we're talking about the end of this year, or later, here (if Intel can't fix the problems with Merom, it's schedule will slip again.

Oh, btw M2 adds DDR2 support, not DDR, and that's hardly a tweak.

A very good article has detailed why the shift from nVidia to ATI happened, it's very enlightening. It's interesting to note that ATI wouldn't be where it is today had Microsoft not adopted their pixel shading implementation for DirectX. Perhaps their feud with nVidia over the X-Box has led to this, along with ATI being chosen for X-Box 2?

> If this was the case, it would cause a stir in stock markets

Visiontek is privately owned company, it does not have such tight restrictions as a publicly traded company. See, this for example.

Then you will really this this article. It is some speculation that AMD might enable 64 bit instructions on all (new) platforms.

salesman: Sir, do you want this 2 Ghz 32 bit PC or this 2 Ghz 64 bit pc?

Many people disable vsync when they play games, so their monitors set refresh rate won't matter.

Coupled with the fact that the majority of people aren't sensitive to frame rates over about 30fps, it makes even less sense. There's a reason movies run at about 24fps, after all.

This isn't true at all, if it was, a 70hz refresh rate would be useless as well. There are a few variable that make a difference in your perception of PC monitors, TV displays, and movies.

From Article

There's much more detail in the article than what I've posted below, and it's defintely worth reading.

First off, you are sitting in a dark movie theater and the projector is flashing a really bright light on a highly reflective screen. What does this do? Have you ever had a doctor flash a bright light in your eye to look at your retina? Most of us have. What happens? A thing called "afterimage". When the doctor turns off the bright light, you see an afterimage of the light (and it is not real comfortable). Movie theaters do the same thing. The light reflected off the screen is much brighter than the theater surroundings. You get an afterimage of the screen after the frame is passed on, so the next frame change is not as noticable.

...Screen refresh is also a very important factor in this equation. Unlike a television or a computer monitor, the movie theater screen is refreshed all at once (the entire frame is instantly projected and not drawn line for line horizontally as in a TV or monitor). So every frame is projected in its entirety all at once. This then leads back to afterimage due to the large neurotransmitter release in the retina.

...TV's run at a refresh rate of 60 Hz. This is not bad for viewing due to the distance we usually sit from the TV, and the size of the phosphors on your average set and the distance between phosphors (between .39 for a high end one, to .5 and higher for cheaper models). This is actually quite big and fuzzy for most of us, but as long as we are not doing any kind of productivity software (such as word processing) and just watching movies at least 6 feet from the TV, that is just fine.

...Let us start with how a scene or frame is set up by the computer. Each frame is put together in the frame buffer of the video card and is then sent out through the RAMDAC to the monitor. That part is very easy, nothing complex there (except the actual setup of the frame). Now each frame is perfectly rendered and sent to the monitor. It looks good on the screen, but there is something missing when that action gets fast. So far, programmers have been unable to make motion blur in these scenes. When a game runs at 30 fps, you are getting 30 perfectly rendered scenes. This does not fool the eye one bit. There is no motion blur, so the transition from frame to frame is not as smooth as in movies. 3dfx put out a demo that runs half the screen at 30 fps, and the other half at 60 fps. There is a definite difference between the two scenes, with the 60 fps looking much better and smoother than the 30 fps.

Actually, the threshhold for human flicker resolution is about 72 fps. See previous slashdot coverage or the original article.

Film works at 24 fps because of Motion blur. Your brain can put together motion blurred images with a smaller framerate than non-motion blurred images. Since 3D cards don't do motion blurring, you have to up the frame rate to 60 fps, to beat the refresh rate of your eyes. A better explanation can be found at http://www.penstarsys.com/editor /30v60/30v60p1.htm