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AMD Announces A Shift In Focus From PC Processors
slughead writes "Forbes Magazine is reporting that AMD will no longer compete with Intel to make faster, smaller, and more efficient processors. Just as Mac users would be worse off if Windows didn't exist, Intel users will be much worse now that AMD will no longer compete. You see, there's this thing called demand, and when there are no competing products in a market, a good or service will always increase the price to the economic equilibrium, unless forced not to by the state (forget that right now, communists!!). In English: you're going to get less new technology, and higher prices on existing technology." On the other hand, AMD is definitely not exiting the chip business -- they're just trying to branch out from chips for microcomputers.
Speaking of extra performance that is not necessary, how much longer will processor speed really matter? I mean, come on, even by (the now pretty conservative) Moore's law we'll be at 10 Ghz in 3 1/2 years. Speed really only matters up to a certain point. Do you really notice the difference in a 32X and a 46X CDROM? Processor speed is quickly becoming less and less a factor in computing.
my $0.02.
I submitted this yesterday and it got rejected for some bizarre reason.
2002-11-23 05:25:42 Scientist Burns His Genitals With A Laptop (articles,humor) (rejected)
Of course many of the rumors are very silly. (i.e. the rumors going around that OSX will run on AMD's Hammer chips - difficult if not impossible due to the difficulty of emulating PPC code on a x86 platform) > I don't know if you know this or not but it was a posted on /. back in October I think. Apple has been maintaining a i386 version of OSX since the beginning and keeps its features in step with the PowerPC version. I like to think of it as a big giant Microsoft f*cker.