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Intel To Redesign PC With "Grantsdale" Chip
MarkRH writes "Over at ExtremeTech, we tracked down some Intel roadmaps that discuss "Grantsdale", Intel's most important chipset in nearly a decade. Grantsdale brings PCI Express to the PC, so get ready to toss out your motherboard, AGP graphics card, and maybe a host of other components, too. Also check out our articles on the "Tejas" microprocessor, Intel's first CPU to forego pins (check out the waffle iron socket!), as well as the real reason Banias saves so much power."
Intel's most important chipset in nearly a decade
Of course, because this will be the first chipset to fail in the marketplace because computers are already fast enough for businesses, and gamers already have overkill. The first market failure is always an important landmark.
In the long run, we're all dead.
If Intel stays on it's current plans, the only markets for the GeForce and Quadro FX as well as the ATI R400 (refreshed 9700) will be the AMD market. But then, if new Intel CPU's can't use them, such cards may only have a limited production run before being taken off until PCI Express versions come out.
Intel, of course, is making exactly the same mistake by attempting to emulate x86 modes on the Itaniums.
Because of its abysmal performance, Intel has abandoned this approach and now uses a Celeron coprocessor to handle x86 software execution.
Take Intel CPUs. They're a kludge. A terrible, messy, evil kludge. And they're a kludge because they have to support legacy applications that ran on the 8086.
Even though this is quite a popular sentiment on /., the reality is that consumers and businesses don't want their computers to be some sort of Platonic ideal of a perfect machine. They just want the damn things to work reliably, chock full of "evil kludges" or not.
So the attitude you're propagating, that older is bad and anything supporting something older is therefore also bad, is pretty much not a viable approach to the economic realities at work here. You seem to think that sweeping revisions and corrections that throw out the work of previous generations are justified, but really all they would do is anger users and create chaos. It might be faster, cleaner, easier to use, and sexier, but it also be much less useful simply because there wouldn't be any software that ran on it.
And you can argue that it's the principle of the matter, and that we shouldn't compromise our ideals just because they are unworkable in the market. But keep in mind that computers are a tool, not a religion, however tempting it may be to categorize them as such, and it's a bit silly to attach an ideology and a morality ("evil kludges" indeed!) to tools.