This remindes me of a situation that Tad Williams, in his sci-fi novel "Otherland" imagined concerning nano tech.
There was this company who produced molecular sized cleaning machines for your house - the idea being that you would never need a vaccum or duster again becuase these robots would remove all the dirt by "eating" it. Anyway, in the case of this one family, something went wrong with thier batch, some sort of environmental problem, and the robots were unable to distingush between dirt and non-dirt. The result bieng that they devoured, molecule by molecule, the entire house and the family cat!
We don't need them (at least not anytime soon) but Intel does. In the sense that, in order to apease thier shareholders, they have to be on the leading edge of the CPU market. If they don't come out with one then the next guy will, Intel will be 'behind the ball' and that doesn't help thier stock value.
Slashdot Mirror
This remindes me of a situation that Tad Williams, in his sci-fi novel "Otherland" imagined concerning nano tech.
There was this company who produced molecular sized cleaning machines for your house - the idea being that you would never need a vaccum or duster again becuase these robots would remove all the dirt by "eating" it. Anyway, in the case of this one family, something went wrong with thier batch, some sort of environmental problem, and the robots were unable to distingush between dirt and non-dirt. The result bieng that they devoured, molecule by molecule, the entire house and the family cat!
Ooops, Yeah I mixed them up, but Intel..AMD..same point applies to both of them anyway, but sorry for the confusion.
We don't need them (at least not anytime soon) but Intel does. In the sense that, in order to apease thier shareholders, they have to be on the leading edge of the CPU market. If they don't come out with one then the next guy will, Intel will be 'behind the ball' and that doesn't help thier stock value.
I think ZDNet just reported it *after* reporting the Intel announcement to give the impression that it was a defensive reaction by AMD.