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Perhaps another question might be "how many games haven't included a PC release because the developer doesn't believe it can make money due to piracy?"

Or, "How many Flying Spaghetti Monsters can we fit in a TARDIS?," which makes about as much sense and has an equal amount of relevance as the speculative, subjective queries you've posted.

You claim that these questions are unreal. Epic Games focused on consoles because of widespread infringement on PCs.

I do want general computation. Did you miss the part where I have a workstation and server? I also have a laptop. I don't currently have a Linux desktop going, but I do have a mix of Windows, MacOS, and FreeBSD running at the moment. Thing is, I've experimented with general-purpose OS cheap computers, and the hardware is not really suited for the purpose. You are more effective using the crappy hardware to access the good stuff if you can't be sitting in front of the good stuff. I've tried Linux on a craptop, and it was... crappy. I'm not sure Android would be much better, but at least it is designed around crappy hardware. Doing video conversion on a craptop is something best left to masochists. In theory it sounds like a good idea, but something that would take maybe 10 minutes on a fast workstation would take an hour or more on an Atom. Even a plain old i3 simply crushes an Atom.

I'd be very, very sad if I couldn't run a variety of OSs on my workstations or laptops, but I'm not really shedding a tear if my Kindle only runs Android. The fact that a ChromeBook will not run Windows does not distress me.

You can probably count on one hand all the directly life critical software running as a regular app on XP, in the whole world.

Life critical software... Ummm, like the "next gen" command center of the UK's nuclear subs?

It refers to AMDs "Never-Settle-Bundles ". You buy an AMD card and you get a bunch of free games.

If Microsoft would just offer Windows for a "few dollars", i.e. for a "low enough cost that there was no advantage looking for other competitors to get a better deal" like you say, there wouldn't by any problems.

The problems arises from the facts that a) Microsoft demanded higher prices for a Windows license if the OEMs sold PCs without Windows and b) Microsoft gets money from OEMs on PCs sold that do not included Windows at all. See Wikipedia for references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows

The Findings of Fact in the United States Microsoft antitrust case of 1998 established that "One of the ways Microsoft combats piracy is by advising OEMs that they will be charged a higher price for Windows unless they drastically limit the number of PCs that they sell without an operating system pre-installed. In 1998, all major OEMs agreed to this restriction."[5] Microsoft also once assessed license fees based on the number of computers an OEM sold, regardless of whether a Windows license was included; Microsoft was forced to end this practice due to a consent decree.[9] The decree, entered into in 1994, barred Microsoft from conditioning the availability of Windows licenses or varying their prices based on whether OEMs distributed other operating systems; author Wendy Goldman Rohm said that the decree was effective in allowing Dell and HP to offer Linux computers.[11]

Btw, Windows 8 costs them between 50$ and 100$. Windows 7 costs them between 100$ and 175$.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Windows-RT-Windows-8-Licensing-Supply-Chain-OEM,16267.html
For each x86-based machine, OEMs will have to shell out $80 to $100 USD for using both Windows 8 Pro and Office 2013. For devices packing an ARM-based chip, OEMs will be required to pay between $50 and $65 USD for using Windows RT and Office 13 on each device.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/29/windows-7-oem-pricing-revealed-by-newegg/

once they buy pixibooks and tablets we will be left to pick up the full price for our dedicated high power PCs

Time travel? Looks more like space travel.

Most of the decline in price in desktop systems results from chip-scale integration. I can't even figure out what you mean by "pick up the full price". We've been paying less? This is news to me. The only reason the price will bounce upwards is further consolidation of the market, as we saw with Seagate and Western Digital.

The largest overhead in the PC business stems from the design cadence. Every shrink is more expensive than the last one. I wouldn't be the least surprised if Intel's two year shrink cadence begins to stretch out, which might slow the investment cycle and reduce prices in the short run, but publicly Intel seems to think not.

From Intel Has 5 nm Processors in Sight -- September 2012 by Wolfgang Gruener

According to the company, future production processes down to 5 nm are on the horizon and will most likely be reached without significant problems. Following the current 22 nm process, Intel's manufacturing cadence suggests that the first 14 nm products will arrive in late 2013, 10 nm in 2015, 7 nm in 2017, and 5 nm in 2019. A slight adjustment has been made to include different production processes for traditional processors and now SoCs. The company previously indicated that SoCs will be accelerated to catch up with the process applied to Intel's main processor products.

Looks like the underlying cost structure is largely shared.

Online is built-in DRM.

As a side effect. Those games aren't online just for the sake of DRM. They're MMOs with technical and/or gameplay justification for online. They offer value to customers for being online (i.e large persistent world, in-game interaction with lots of other players)

Where's the AAA, single-player campaign game coming out of China, marketed to China?

Missing the point. I brought up China to show that there are other video game makers in other countries, and if/when they make games, they'll market it to their countries and region first. The point is that your "other markets get games later because they don't pay first class dollar" is bullshit.

You're really just trying to argue up a strawman, going after China and ignoring Japan or Korea, who do have their AAA single player games, coming out of their countries, and marketed to their own markets.

Do you really think such a game can be supported in a market so pervasive with a copy culture?

You're putting the cart before the horse. The market decides what games get made, not the other way around. Few/nobody wants a single player game in China. Thus, China is full of online games, but again, they offer value for customers, not just to protect the game makers' profits... which DRM keeps failing to do

And again, I must stress about profits. Fighting piracy is nice and all, but at the end of the day, are you making more money? Not even Ubisoft thinks so. The guys who made Witcher 2 don't think so.

And yet there are games that people need to pirate.

That's a point to support that DRM doesn't work on piracy. If people aren't gonna pay, they're gonna find a way not to pay.

I hear them all the time justifying it. And there's the class of people that will casually copy but not hardcore pirate, and that will fork out bucks to play a game they would otherwise casually copy.

Just as there's a class of people who'll go from casual to hardcore pirate, or casually not play at all, rather than forking out bucks.

Which many people have, see StarCraft 2 as one example,

And there are many who have not.

If a pirated copy is a potential lost sale, then so is somebody who didn't buy a game because of DRM.

Likewise, if you say people buy game despite DRM, then I say people are buying games despite the option to pirate, which has been just as long, if not longer than DRM, what with games used to be on easy-to-copy floppies or tapes and all.

despite all the bitching about the removal of LAN play and online requirements.

LAN is not DRM. And the online requirements of SC2 is very light. You can actually play single player offline.

Completely different from SimCity (more below)

It wasn't the DRM, as that was known upfront, but their failure to handle the post-launch load. And to give some credit to the pubs/devs, they actually tried to build a game with meaningful online features -- an MMO, which requires lots of data sharing. If all they wanted was DRM they probably could have handled it.

No, DRM is a big part. They bullshitted how the servers are doing important calculations. Even a Maxis dev came out and said the game that's wrong. It's DRM and only DRM that is forcing you to connect online for single player

They could have handled the load better if they did NOT do DRM, and let single players play offline (and it would gave people who want online something to do while they fixed their load problem)

It's really a big unknown. You can make arguments for either side.

You made it all this way without even mentioning DRM. I'm kinda impressed.

Those dick moves you outlined actually sound more like CapCom than EA, though.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/GamePad-Jelly-Bean-Cortex-A9-Thumbpad-ABXY,21678.html from toms hardware "Powering this "gablet" are two 1.6 GHz Cortex-A9 CPU cores and four Mali 400 MP GPU cores, 1 GB of RAM, and Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean". For storage, the gadget coughs up 8 GB of internal space (less than that after Android) and a microSD card slot for up to 64 GB of added space."

Last I'd heard, the HP memristor hadn't entered production yet because it was intentionally pushed back, due to fears by Hynix that it would eat all of their other product lines.

32GB is an artificial limit

I agree. It's artificial, but it exists, so it must be worked around.

newly introduced in Windows 7

I disagree. I thought Microsoft introduced the limit in Windows XP. This forum post, for example, predates the release of Windows Vista.

in an attempt to force people onto exFAT

What will force people onto exFAT is the fact that SDXC cards come preformatted to exFAT, and other devices that use SDXC cards will expect exFAT.

That sounds like a fire hazard, not to mention a source of dust - do people really put wooden shelves in their datacenters?

The autoignition temperature for generic cheapo plywood is somewhere on the order of 300 degrees C. If you went with pine, which is still pretty cheap, it goes up to 427 degrees C.

How hot do you think computers run?

It's not normal operation that would concern me with wooden rack shelves, but failures like this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/26/exploding_computer_vs_reg_reader/
http://ronaldlan.dyndns.org/index.php
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/inadequate-deceptive-product-labeling,536.html

One bad power supply could set the whole cabinet on fire -- and perhaps worse, set off the server room fire suppression system.

Comparing the results against several other phones, it was evident that Tegra 4 will make for the fastest mobile phones yet.

Tegra 4 will not be a phone part (at least not in any phoe that values battery life). Those A15 cores suck down batter life like vampires.

Like Tegra 3, Tegra 4 uses far too much power for mobile phones. The plan this time is to produce two products:

Tegra 4: 4 + 1 Coretex A15 + 72 shaders, several watts power consumption, aimed at tablets.

Tegra 4i: 4 + 1 tweaked Coretex A9 + 60 shaders + integrated LTE, much lower power. Aimed at phones.

Nobody has committed to a Smartphone platform using the A15 precisely because the power consumption is too high. It may be tweaked over time, but right out the gate the power is just not there. This is why Apple went their own way with the A6.

Agreed. If benchmarks were all that mattered, we'd have i7s in our phones :D Obviously we don't. Efficiency matters. Hence one reason why I mentioned K900. Terga 4 may be great, but not for a phone if it isn't efficient.

How about the Tegra 3 in the Nexus 7? I see 63 fps. The Tegra 4 better use far less power. This shows that the Nexus 7 makes a good developer platform since the performance is almost identical to future phones. Here's the full article.

Yes a little explanation is probably in order for those that haven't kept up with GPU arches, which frankly has been pretty interesting as of late. For every card up to and including the HD6xxx the graphics cores were based on VLIW, this gives great performance in games but is very difficult to use efficiently for GP-GPU work like video decoding/transcoding which of course means more power used in those applications.

Starting with the 7xxx series AMD went to a new design called Graphics Core Next or GCN. GCN is based not on VLIW but on Vector units, this allows it to have good gaming performance but gives an additional advantage when it comes to GP-GPU work. If you will scroll down to the bottom of the page I linked to you will see an illustration that sums it up nicely, in their illustration you can see a job that would take 6 cycles due to dependencies in VLIW would only take 4 cycles in GCN thanks to the way it can split up the loads more efficiently.

So while IRL its doubtful you'll get every load to split up that nicely you are still looking at anywhere from 20%-30% less cycles required to do the same amount of useful work, which should be better for both desktop and especially mobile users as it means less power and time required for the same load.

The anecdotes from places like Coding Horror are just that: anecdotes. Were early SSD failure rates higher up to 2011 than regular drives? I think they've gotten better as years pass. What about now though? Even the 2011 survey from Tom's Hardware already put SSD reliability as already higher than regular drives.

I've had plenty of spinning drives that didn't last more than a hundred days too. Hard drive controllers fail with no warning, just like SSD ones do. I think this is emphasized as more associated with SSD failures because it's the only way SSDs die.

In the middle of 2011 Intel raised warranties to 5 years on the main SSD I use in my systems. In late 2011 Seagate dropped warranties to a year. If you don't care about high capacity, it's possible for a SSD to cost less per year than a mechanical drive now. That's not a glowing statement about the manufacturers thinking SSD is more likely to fail either.

It looks like the BB 10 specs are the same or better than the iPhone 5 at least. It only comes with 16GB storage, but upgradable with a card. Faster processors on BB 10 and a few more pixels on the screen (if you get the big one) and better resolution.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/specs-blackberry-10-models-stack-18357208

BB Z10 (big touch screen version):
Display: 4.2-inch (diagonal) with a resolution of 1280 by 768 pixels (356 pixels per inch)

iPhone 5:
Display: 4-inch (diagonal) with a resolution of 1136 by 640 pixels (326 pixels per inch).

Weird, I don't see the processor specs on that page, but I checked them at another site a week or two ago.

More on these pages:
http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/blackberry-z10-vs-iphone-5-vs-galaxy-s3/

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/iphone-5-benchmark-lightning,3312-3.html

Says that iPhone 5 is dual core 1.29 GHz, while the BB 10 is dual core 1.5 GHz.

My biggest thing is the CAMERA! Not the specs so much, but the software. You take one picture, it gives you a couple of seconds to scroll through and pick the best picture during that time... so no more blinks and yawns in my damn pictures. THANK YOU!

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-graphics-thunderbolt,3263.html

I've been told that a lot of new laptops sold with Windows 8 have Wi-Fi chips with no Windows 7 driver.

May have been a slick sales pitch. Windows 8 software should run just fine on Windows 7. (Metro apps won't run under Windows 7.)

"If your PC is running Windows 7, your files, apps, and settings will easily transfer to Windows 8."
"Programs that run on Windows 7 will run on Windows 8."
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/meet

"The gateway to get to Windows 8 is Windows 7, and we will have backward compatibility with Windows 7 embedded into Windows 8. That's something that we're very committed to. But that's a really important first pillar" Kevin Turner - Microsoft's COO said at the Worldwide Partner Conference 2011.
Despite having a slick new tile interface, the desktop underneath for Windows 8 appears to closely resemble that from Windows 7.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-win8-win7-software-compatibility,13085.html

I have used Vista 64 bit drivers on Windows 7 before, and they have worked just fine. Just because there aren't "official" drivers for Windows 7 doesn't meant the drivers that are out won't run on it.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html

Per that list, even the Intel 4000 series is behind GPUs from years ago. Integrated still sucks, I can't imagine what kind of games on how small a screen these people that claim it doesn't are playing.

Discrete all the way if you play any modern games on big displays with settings turned up.

This is the year...

...that Windows fucked gamers/steam, pushing users onto alternative platforms [and I mean Android], but providing an unpleasant Desktop experience, with a future that promises censored gaming, and alternative stores locked out. Ironically I'm counting 3 Linux console launches this year so far[one of them from steam], and Android the best known Linux is set to overtake Window in Market share this year [some figures claim it already had happened] http://www.tomshardware.com/gallery/IDC-GS,0101-366874-0-2-3-1-png-.html...not Desktop enough for you...in case you were still wondering the Chromebook is STILL the best selling laptop on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Laptop-Computers/zgbs/electronics/565108/ref=pd_ts_zgc_e_565108_morl?pf_rd_p=1299888842&pf_rd_s=right-5&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_i=565108&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1J8F0Q3S9TFWX2J2ZRAD

Get over it the pack of four is all people talk about...and Microsoft is not one of them.

... would any machine running Windows be attached to or associated with anything that was critical to the operation of a power plant?!

Just in case you are scared about power plants failures - don't! There are much better things to be worried about.

For example - only a bit more that 4 years ago, the UK Navy finished retrofitting its nuclear subs with... Window XP and 2000! For sensors and weapons control no less. At the time, /.ers coined a new meaning for the BSOD.

There is yet to be a release day DRM system that lasts a few days, let alone a month. Bioshock, Assassins Creed, all those bollocks online only systems were broken within days if not before release day.

Just to counter that with a simple fact: Assasin's Creed II has been cracked after more than a month of its PC release (3/4/10, cracked around 4/26/10).

This is because of the way most Triple A games are designed. 1/3 of the budget goes on marketing, not to mention that console games in general don't make money as they have to pay a per disk fee as well as extra fees to push patches out via Xbox Live or PSN. The PC version is more profitable per unit, the problem is they do everything to prevent people from buying the game on PC.

True, PC version is more profitable, but it also sells like 1/10 compared to console versions. Why? Certainly not because of lack of marketing...

"Triple A games" are build on a fundamentally flawed system that will fall over in the near future. Too much is spent on marketing and costs that add nothing to the game itself, like DRM.

Try releasing a game without marketing. Advertise it on company website only, or only using company-associated social network accounts. Come on... You know that even viral marketing (the holy grail - word of mouth) isn't free these days, right?

No, no it doesn't.

Yes it does!

It gets beaten by the i3 3220

No it doesn't!

Oh waid, you've compared a fusion processor to an i3 rather than the non fusion ones I was talking about.

Firstly, let's try here, for some multithreaded benchmarks:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_fx8350_visherabdver2&num=4

If you look the reports are generally exactly what I said with the addition that the A10 is much flower than the 8350. Generally, the 8350 is between the i5 and i7, occasionally a bit slower than the i5 sometimes much faster than the i7. That's a 100% multithreaded benchmark. It includes things like compiling, rendering, compression, image manipulation, media transcoding and some scientific work. Scientific codes are actually used inside modern games and modern filters in things like photoshop aso you can't dismiss them as "not for normal people".

In fact, the conclusion of that benchmark is that the 8350 is competetive with the 3770k which is much more expensive.

For a nice extreme example look at the CRay benchmark, where the FX8350 runs in under 2/3 of the time of the i7 3770K. There are extremes in the opposite direction, too.

There actually really aren't that many tasks where multithreading makes up the difference,

Apart from all the cases I listed. Running 200 single threaded benchmarks and 10 multithreaded ones doesn't imply single threaded tasks are more common.

And if you want a more mixed benchmark, go here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-8350-vishera-review,3328-12.html

Where for a lot of tasks, like single threaded media encoding, the AMD processors are about 75% as fast.

And... back to your benchmarks.

So, I looked at the benchmarks, and the results were pretty mixed. Sometimes one processor wins by a large margin, other times the other one does. No graphics intensive or OpenCL benchmarkes are included for fusion versus i3 I note. There would be a no contest win to the fusion for those.

It takes a -company- like Microsoft to bring the PC to the unwashed masses and all the ancillary technology that goes along with it. And it had to be an open platform. IBM almost succeeded in keeping the PC platform closed in a way that Apple succeeded in. Below are some facts.

IBM and MS both worked on OS2, which MS eventually named Windows NT. MS screwed their partner by introducing incompatibilities with OS2, as MS had done with DOS back when DR DOS was a competitor. IBM now advocates Linux. You're pretty far from the mark if you think it was MS that caused all the openness. It was Intel when they allowed "clones", for fuck's sake man. THINK.

Without a world of Microsoft.

1. GPUs wouldn't be as advanced today.

Why's that? OpenGL existed DirectX was never really needed, it was just yet another proprietary MS standard to assist with vendor lock-in. MS doesn't make GPU hardware, but the vendors now had to support two drivers instead of one. That means more work for no good reason -- even if they make a good DX driver and skimp on the OGL one, that's still extra wheel spinning for no fucking reason. Why would MS not use OpenGL instead of wasting time on DX? The early versions of DX was an OpenGL wrapper. There must have been some reason for MS to embrace and extend... OH! Extinguish. I'd say that was a step backwards. We could have had one really awesome cross platform driver stack, but because of MS that didn't happen. This means your selection of Games is dependent on the OS you use, which is fucking retarded in every sense of the word -- It's bad for gamers, it's bad for game devs, it's bad for hardware makers, it's bad for everyone but.... Microsoft.

2. CPUs wouldn't be as advanced today.

What? No. MS didn't make CPUs better. Chip makers did. In fact, because of so much proprietary Windows market share, and resistance to architecture changes meant that the bloated x86 had to stick around FAR longer than it was actually needed. For fuck's sake man, we have interpretors on the chip just to emulate rarely used instructions! That's not an advance! That's Retardation!

3. Fuck it- **HARDWARE** wouldn't be as advanced as today.

I might give you this one just for the hell of it. It's blatantly wrong, but for the sake of argument, Windows consumes more cycles than BSD, Linux, and some OSX versions. The consumers had to buy new hardware to run the bloat ware... "and there was much rejoicing. yay"

4. You wouldn't have the Internet you're using today.

"The Internet is just a Fad", Bill Gates. Seriously, they were pushing some other proprietary bullshit networking standard. Their decade long lag with IE6, and non adherence to standards is the scourge of every the web designer. We'd have had the web we have now, but Sooner and FASTER without MS's browser shenanigans, i.e., w/o IE.

5. Smartphones wouldn't have advanced in technology because of all the aforementioned progress in fabrication R&D.

Hahah, no. My PDA wouldn't have gotten faster without MS's R&D? I don't think so. Even if I gave you this one too, the progress would have been made by someone else. If Alexander G. Bell would have died at birth, we'd have had the Telephone one hour later. We had incandescent bulbs two years before Edison figured out which gas to put in them, others were doing the same work, but he had more money -- Someone would have replaced the vacuum bulb with argon, there's only so many known elements. MS could have never existed and nothing of value would have been lost.

6. On and on and so forth....

Bitch, moan, and whine about Microsoft all you want. But most people are not techno

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/snapdragon-s4-pro-apq8064-msm8960t,3291-4.html

Atom isn't here, but perhaps because it is too new, but it's clear from this graph that at least Tom's Hardware seems to agree that the Snapdragon eats Tegra's lunch.

I have a Nexus 4 (Snapdragon S4) and a Nexus 7 (Tegra 3), and the 4 is WAY, WAY faster than the 7 in almost every experience.

On the Nexus 4 I can leave a movie playing in the background and keep listening to it while I check an important email that just came in or make a move in a game of Words with my wife. Attempting the exact same thing on the Nexus 7 results in the movie skipping and the user experience slowing to a crawl.

Perhaps there are some significant architecture differences between the two, but at least from a real-world user experience standpoint, I would not characterize the OP's assertion as "random conjecture" at all.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-arm-processor-soc-atom,17476.html When that story was posted i said that all ARM was doing was poking the bear. Didn't take long for Intel to get there either. Just shows you don't piss off a company with a lot of $ for R&D

When somebody actually bothered to measure it, it turned out that Windows 8 was actually slower. AND it had compatibility problems. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-8-gaming-performance,3331-13.html

I just have a different idea of not so long ago. I was thinking pre-PC era, although nobody was thinking about 60fps Wing Commander. But go further forward and read a review of a 3dfx voodoo card, which revolutionised PC gaming, and they'll talk about smooth 30fps gaming: http://tech.mit.edu/V117/N49/threedfx.49a.html

That's 1997 and we're still only talking 16bit colour, so I still think you're lightly rewriting history.

Roll forwards to 2000 and the geforce 256 was the next real revolution.

  http://m.tomshardware.com/reviews/leadtek-winfast-geforce-256-ddr-review,157-4.html

They describe 31fps as reasonable, and they're still benchmarking with 16bit colour. Indeed later in that article they refer to 30fps as "the magical barrier".

Also, you must be joking about running windowed for more performance. Dropping resolution, sure, but not windowed. voodoo and voodoo 2 couldn't even do windowed 3d.

Corsair's AX850 is a solid power supply OEM'd from Seasonic. But you can't cost justify buying one unless you have a truly ridiculous system. As of a few years ago, a good 500W power supply was already plenty to handle even three video card systems, and CPUs in particular have just reduced power requirements since. Newegg is showing me the AX850 as $189. You can get their similarly constructed 650W TX650M instead for $109. I was willing to pay whatever I had to in order to get the most reliable setup possible, but it was impossible to justify buying something more expensive than that. Computers nowadays just don't draw that much power. And if you only have one video card...anything over the good 400W power supplies in the $60 to $70 range is overkill.

The fact that it effects single GPU in addition to SLI and Crossfire is worry some.

Micro-Stuttering And GPU Scaling In CrossFire And SLI
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-stutter-crossfire,2995.html

The "problem" is not new in any way, ANY 2-bit video game developer remotely concerned about performance is aware of stuttering because it's easy for their own code to cause it.

Benchmarks measuring frame timing across the board are newish, but this article is not about the technique, it's about findings regarding Radeon cards. Duh, "Frame Latency Spikes Plague Radeon Graphics Cards"...

The fact that it effects single GPU in addition to SLI and Crossfire is worry some.

Micro-Stuttering And GPU Scaling In CrossFire And SLI
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-stutter-crossfire,2995.html

Allow me to educate you with this link: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/lucid-gpu-graphics-thunderbolt-external,17520.html

Or €150 for an Archos Gamepad

Which launches "in early Q1 2013" with support for Google Play Store.

easily mappable for the tons of older games that lack button support.

But how much time are people willing to spend mapping as opposed to playing? I'm told they're already turned off by the plethora of layouts of non-Xbox 360 controllers on the PC.

Okay so they're the only x86 CPU offering 1.25v DDR3 support but the difference between a pair of 1.25v and 1.5v DIMMs is around 4 W and you can save 3 of those 4 W moving to the commonly available 1.35v DDR3. Meanwhile AMD keeps putting out 125W processors like the FX-8350 to not really compete with a 77W processor like the i7-3770K, so this "major datacenter advantage" I think I'll file under "major wishful thinking". Not to mention you're investing into a platform with little future since AMD wants to push ARM servers now. But I guess Intel has let AMD put a positive spin on continuing to deliver on old sockets.

.

Thus the expectation that next gen consoles will be mostly off-the-shelf parts. That's fine with me, so long as they equal the performance of a current $500 gaming PC. Today's chips are finally fulfilling the vision of the Cell processor, because they are expanding beyond graphics to parallel computation in general, such as physics for games. Coming from the other direction, CPUs are also fulfilling the vision of the Cell processor, because they offer GPUs that aren't horrible. Current integrated graphics are finally getting to the point of viability at 1080p, which current-gen consoles (PS3 and XBox 360) simply are not. If next year's consoles are released with integrated graphics one step beyond those reviewed in that article, on a memory architecture specialized for games, I think we are there.

Intel M - an excellent laptop chip in 2005 that kinda embarrassed the P4. Intel made it one pin different from the popular P4 socket, and Asus made an adapter board for the enthusiasts.

um.... here we go. Tomshardward about that in the day:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/dothan-netburst,1041-2.html

Riiight, because this hurts Windows.....how exactly? this just makes Mozilla look Mickey mouse, because IE comes in 64 bit and has for something like 7 years now poor lame Mozilla can't even write well enough to tell the difference between 32bit and 64bit bugs.

And I hate to break the news to ya, but most Windows users have no clue if what they are using is 32 bit or 64 bit nor do they care, it "just works" either way and that is all they give a shit about. Besides most won't notice this as they've switched to Chrome as the falling numbers clearly indicate.

As someone who used and advocated Firefox before it was even called firefox frankly.....sigh, the company just seems to be a trainwreck ATM. They've been all over the place instead of focusing on their browser which IMHO has gone to shit since around V6. I have to support plenty of low power devices and older office boxes and frankly Mozilla Firefox is just god awful on anything less than a dual core,especially if you have a decent amount of bookmarks, as it'll slam the hell out of the CPU when you do...well pretty much anything. This is why I moved my customers over to Comodo dragon (Chromium variant) several versions back, because between the UI changes, the bugs, and the CPU and memory usage frankly Firefox can't hold a candle to anything Webkit based, it just can't.

So frankly this doesn't hurt Windows in the slightest, it just makes Mozilla look lame but since more and more are jumping on Chrome I just don't see this affecting too many people.

Chrome runs a separate process for each window. I'm pretty sure Firefox is 1 process. With 1 process normally freeing memory does not return it to the OS. So closing a Firefox tab would not really shrink the Firefox process, while closing a Chrome tab would end a process and return its memory to the OS for re-use. It makes sense that Chrome might be better memory usage after extended use.

The article is a little out of date, but you get the point.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-7-chrome-20-firefox-13-opera-12,3228-12.html
"IE9 uses half as much memory as most of the competition with only one tab open. Firefox has always had the lowest 40-tab memory usage total, but version 13 takes its single-tab total down to just 61 MB, which is right in line with Safari and Opera. What the composite score does not show is the speed at which the different browsers return memory back to the operating system. Chrome is the only contender to do this instantaneously. While Firefox and IE9 drop usage totals a great deal, they can take a minute to do so."

As you see what you said does not refute my point, just adds to it.

What, pray tell, is the purpose of education if each person has to find out everything by themselves, and no one can take advantage of the collective wisdom of society, and the accumulated learning built up over history?

They don't have to find out everything by themselves. Chances are people have done what this guy is trying to do and have written about their experiences. If only there was some way to find this information, perhaps someone has asked the question before?

It's like what you do when your production server starts to run amok.

You don't shoot it, you undo recent changes.

Wrong!
Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Joshua-Lee-Campbell-Server-Shoot-Gun-alcohol,11171.html

Yep: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_hard_disk_manufacturers
And Toshiba has only about 10% of the market: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-seagate-toshiba-hdd-hard-drives,17227.html

I'm not so sure about the imminent demise of the spinning platter. Homemade video (didn't GoPro release a 1080p60-cam recently?) and high-res photo's are still on the rise and the existing data isn't going anywhere. Well, the stuff that people really care about, at least. I wouldn't trust any childhood memories to the cloud.

Of course, other high data density technologies (which flash is not, or so I've been told) could supplant the spinning platter. I'm not aware of any commercially viable ones, though.

• microSD: 4-23MB/s
• Samsung Galaxy SIII: 11.8MB/s
• HTC One X+: 21.5MB/s
• iPhone4s: 38MB/s
• iPhone5: 100MB/s

iPhone benchmarks
microSD benchmarks
Android Benchmarks

We're on the same boat. I don't really fancy buying Nvidia, either, mainly because I'm a rancorous sucker that once bought an FX card. The trick for buying AMD graphics is buying outdated crap. My HD5570 works like a charm, even on Linux (when I'm not trapped in that limbo that follows every Xorg ABI change, of course).

We might not have to buy Intel next time, though. AMD still has a trump card, namely earlier and better OpenCL support in widely used products like Adobe's CS. Tom's has a preview bench of the performance gains: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/photoshop-cs6-gimp-aftershot-pro,3208-13.html

Looking at the charts, we see some workloads benefit more from weaker IGPs than from much more powerful discrete cards. That puts AMD's best IGPs on the market in a very unique and advantageous position. This has been AMD's plan since they bought ATI, and I hope they survive long enough to see it through, at least.

Those CRTs will eat your lunch on power consumption. Let's say you're spending 80 hours/week in front of the screen, electricity is $0.10/kWh and your screens are burning 100w each. Each screen would consume $41.60/year in electricity.

It adds up if you go crazy.

Not necessarily Microsoft that had people switching. Fire Firefox's ever growing memory footprint, and frequent update cycle that broke extensions are main reasons people stopped downloading FF.

Wow. What a load of nonsense, Firefox has a tiny footprint stop spreading this lie. As for the frequent update cycle, that may be an enterprise issue, but why would it be for a home user. I stopped looking at extensions breaking a long time ago. I think you would have a hard lime listing one popular addon that is not working under firefox 16.

Again http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-7-chrome-20-firefox-13-opera-12,3228.html Chrome does win these tests, but not on lies, but by being a great browser.

Make a RAM Drive! Try one of these products and insert your RAM. Then you have the FASTEST Hard Drive in the world! http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hyperos-dram-hard-drive-block,1186.html http://techreport.com/review/9312/gigabyte-i-ram-storage-device

>using almost exclusively standard equipment and materials already needed to make conventional chips.

So that will be a small $5,000,000,000 for a state of the art semiconductor factory then.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-fab42-14nm-cpu-factory,14545.html

Uhh...what great chips? The Thubans were good, but everything based on Bulldozer just blows through power while having terrible IPC, thanks to having shared integer and floating point units. If they were to be honest the "modules" would be treated as single cores with hardware assisted hyperthreading, because the benches show that is a hell of a lot closer to what they are than to true cores. Hell since the release of BD they don't even have a single slot anymore on Tom's Hardware "Best Gaming CPU" list whereas they used to pretty much OWN everything under $200. Hell look at how badly their new chips rate compared to even their old chips, with not only the X6 but no less than TWO of the X4s, the 980 and 955, scoring better than their new FX 8120. So I'm sorry, this is coming from someone who has been building AMD exclusively since i heard about the OEM bribery, but the new chips? Just not good.

And sadly ARM isn't gonna save them either, they are too late to the game and from the looks of it ARM simply isn't gonna scale while keeping its lower power budget. Just look at how companies like Nvidia, that have been sinking a ton into ARM, are having to use ever more cores to get the performance up, it just doesn't scale. And since Intel has the fabs they can get to the lower sizes quicker, and their chips are frankly getting lower powered all the time. A 55w Ivy will frankly curbstomp a 125w Piledriver and with servers while there are some loads you can run without the IPC frankly there are a LOT more loads where you'll need that IPC and AMD just doesn't have it, and with electricity costs and cooling costs? It really don't look good for AMD, damned I wish it weren't true but it is what it is, AMD is in REAL bad shape right now.