....until it's in a form where the end user can control what it's used for. Cheap flexable displays sound like a cool technology, but until you can control what's displayed on them, what the hell good are they?
Why can't the shelf power the box? All you need is a small coil of wire in there and a capacitor big enough to power the display long enough for you to get to the checkout.
It would seem that Microsoft is balking at pitching its lot with HD [...]
Microsoft never said it wouldn't support Blu-Ray. All they said was that they were supporting HD-DVD. There's no reason why Windows, and most other Microsoft software products couldn't and shouldn't support both.
What they do with the 360, however is another matter. Even if thy do have plans to upgrade it with some nextgen video format, they're certainly going to deny it up until the day it's released, because they don't want to kill sales. If the rumor were confirmed that an update was planned, they'd instantly have blown any advantage they may or may not have gained by getting the 360 to market before the PS3.
Call me when a few of those have gone a couple hundred thousand miles with a decent amount of city driving in the mix. I'll believe they've solved all the problems when I see that they last like you would expect for how rediculously high their cost is. I don't have enough cash around to be an early adopter of technology that will cost several thousand dollars to fix when it proves to be defficient.
Also, the RX 400 really isn't that big or heavy. The Highlander may be, but I can't get Toyota's all flash website to reveal it's curb weight. They're definatly making progress, but I still wouldn't buy one until they've been around a while longer.
Yup, that's pretty much it. Well, that and the duribility issues. The strenth limitation, the duribility issues, and the fact that the torque curve requires a CVT, or multiple 'gears' at all for that matter in the first place...
This is turning into the Spanish Inquisition!
Anyway, a pure electric drive wouldn't require a CVT, much less one that is better than the ones they've got out there now.
You jest, but when you combine something like a diesel electric model with the regenerative braking used in current hybrids, you could probably make a really efficient car without the need for the elusive CVT that doesn't suck. Plus as a bonus, when fuel cell technology matures, you could replace the diesel engine and generator head with a cell stack and a hydrogen tank.
Granting the ability to reduce costs of 80 million dollar titles to an only 40 million,
That story summary is just plain wrong. The submitter earns an 'F' in reading comprehension.
The interview doesn't say that... It doesn't even come close to saying that. It says they are always looking for ways to do that, and that they're also looking for tools to help them streamline development. If $40m of an $80m goes to licensing, marketing, distribution, and placement, no process automation is going to accomplish that, clearly the two goals were stated independantly.
If anybody thinks that $80 million goes into the development budget of any game, they're crazy. Development is only a fraction of the cost, and looking at EA's list of games and licences, I'd guess it's frequently less than half.
What is the world coming to when even the submitter doesn't read the article?
That still doesn't have anything to do with whether the architecture is NUMA or not. Neither of these platforms are going across multiple busses to hit their memory. Don't think of NUMA as a performance hit for some addresses in the cell architecture. Think of it as a performance boost for memory that's only being used by a single cell. All accesses go through a single switch fabric that (depending on the internals that Sony hasn't told the public about) could easily be faster than the bus model that the intel FSB in the 360 uses. Depending on how many transistors they were willing to dedicate to the problem, the switch architecture could theoretically be the superior interconnect in all respects.
Both of these boxes are powerful machines. The PS3 is a little cooler, but mostly because it's something new and interesting while the 360 is more traditional. At the end of the day, the games are going to look the same for the most part though.
A few parent posts ago, I suggested some reasons implied by the article - not to do so might be greedy, monopolistic, unethical, or anti-music industry. To be honest, I don't buy any of the arguments in support of these claims.
Neither do I, but I can do one better. I can give a single reason that any of those reasons are inarguably incorrect:
The iPod will play anybody's music.
The only thing it won't do is support other people's DRM. So essentially Apple is saying "Anybody can put their content on our device, but we're not spending a dime on letting you do it in such a way that makes you money. The suit against Real Networks takes that one step further and says they'll go out of their way to stop you from making money with their device if it's at the expense of Apple's own profits. That's exactly how I would expect a responsible business to be run, and with the added benefit of allowing user control of the device. Indisputable proof that it's not greedy, monopolistic, unethical, or anti-music industry. Just plain sensable business.
Too bad their prices or so high, or I might actually buy some music from them.
Uh, what? You clearly have no idea what NUMA means.
NUMA means that memory access times are non-uniform. In other words, longer for some addresses and shorter for others. Unified memory architecure means that all the memory in the system shares a common address space. You can't compare NUMA to UMA because they don't have anything do do with each other. A system can be NUMA and unified at the same time. It can also be non-unified and non-NUMA.
There is no documented evidence that I can find that the PS3 doesn't have a unified memory address space, dispite the NUMAness of it. In fact it looks like it probably *does* have a unified memory architecture. Also, from what I can tell of the architecture diagrams, it's only NUMA due to the necessity of cache coherancy between the cells (all cells talk to one central memory bank through a switch, cells accessing the same memory need to coordinate before accessing thus slowing down access to shared regions while non-shared regions will have one-step access), and a well written application will not experience the NUMA behavior very often.
That has to be one of the most arbitrary and stupid ways to distinguish between future gaming platforms. Pick on the quality and quantity of the games, and not on the specs that you don't understand anyway.
Napster advocates a recurring revenue model instead of the fixed fee model that Apple has. Like you said, you "rent" music...sortof.
Apple's model is more expensive up front, but becomes less and less expensive over time. Napster has a lower up front cost, but a higher long term cost. For most listeners Napster is more expensive, and if it wasn't you can bet the music publishers (who do you think owns Napster now?) wouldn't be pushing it. Also, if the Napster rental model were more appealing to consumers, a player that supported Napster would be more popular than the iPod by now, but it hasn't happened. Clearly people don't want another monthly fee, or don't want one for something they never had to pay monthly for before.
One other thing is certain. Napster's model doesn't make Apple any money, so why should Apple support it?
Microsoft is more than happy to help publishers get their obscure Japanese stuff onto the Xbox. Hell, Microsoft even funded a port of Guilty Gear #Reload to the Japanese Xbox just to win over Japanese gamers, and it was then ported to the USA! That beats the hell out of Sony and Nintendo who don't want to see a sprite on a screen larger than a credit card.
That's because they're struggling for market share. Once, and if they become established you can bet they'll be up to the same tricks as all the other console makers. There's a reason Sony and Nintendo do what they do. It's because they've shifted from the mindshare building mode into the profit building mode. They know that there are certain costs associated with publishing a game, and that certain pricing structures need to be applied to certain markets in order to turn the biggest possible profit (remember, they're in this for profit, not for the games). Working Designs games were hardly what you could call mainstream, so it shouldn't be too hard to see why Sony might have wanted them to carry budget prices or perhaps pay a higer percentage as a royalty or higher up front cost or whatever they're not telling us about the details of what made ths fall through. That might make the Xbox a promising platform for them, but you can be sure that when Microsoft starts focusing on profits instead of on market share, they'll stop proping developers like this up too.
You don't think Sony was proping WD up? Well, why couldn't they just start releasing for the PC? It's because they relied on console publishing practices to shift some of the development, marketing and placement costs onto the console manufacturer. High voilume titles cover those costs for a company like Sony, but niche titles don't, and the PS2 market isn't a growth market for Sony anymore. They only want cash cows on their platform now so they can cash in on the last few years of their investment. It all comes down to money, and at the end of the day, WD must not have been making enough of it. Don't be foolish enough to think that any other console manufacturer has your best interests as a gamer in mind though. Especially if their stock is publically traded. You'll just be setting yourself up to be broken hearted again in a few years.
Suffice it to say that you don't know the whole story...
Obviously console makers have a vested interest in making sure the games available for their platform are of a certain quality level and could reject things on those grounds, but I'm guessing in this particular case it came down to money. Sony probably wanted a certain amount, and WD probably realized that they couldn't sell enough of certain niche titles to make that work. I mean, let's face it, the games they released weren't exactly mainstream. What Sony rejected was likely a proposed licensing fee structure.
You could build your own scanning tunneling electron microsope. It doesn't seem to me that it would be too hard. The disadvantages, of course, are that you can't look at things that are as large as what you are thinking (instead of stuff from your refrigerator, think small molecules), and that it destroys the target object. The upside is that you can use it to manipulate individual atoms and create your own nanotech...
Those selling DRMed music that won't play natively on iPods have a massive interest in changing this.
It doesn't matter if they do. If their business model is one that nets more cash for the music industry out of your pocket, which are you going to choose? I bet it's not the one that costs more. If it isn't than this practice of Apple's isn't hurting the music industry's bottom line at all.
Wrong. He's implying that Apple has created a device that Apple can sell music for.
How does that make me wrong? Can't he imply more than one thing in an article?
I fail to see how anything Apple does makes it OK for anybody else to bitch that they're not making money off of it. If you want a piece of the action, it's not Apple's job to open the door for you. In fact it's their job to keep it shut and protect their profits. It's rediculous for anybody in the music industry, or any other business, to expect Apple to do them any favors.
Who cares if other businesses aren't permitted to offer alternative services?
If you want to make money in the digital music market, you need to do it yourself. Why should Apple help you to make money off their product?
If this guy is so smart, he should make a better store and a better player. If he's right, it should be possible, and people should flock to it and leave the iPod behind. Anything he can come up with that nets the recording distribution industry more profits is pretty much guarantreeed to be seen as *worse* by consumers though, so he'll never pull it off. He doesn't want to offer you choice, he wants Apple to stop being so damned nice (in his opinion; obviouly not in your opinion) to consumers because it's preventing them from getting away with charging more (where more is most likely a pay-per-listen or some other recurring revenue model).
We love Apple, the iPod, and iTunes. Who cares...
I don't understand why you assume that any opinion of Apple or their products has anything to do with my point. I'm talking business here, I'm not being some fanboy. I don't have to like or dislike Apple's practices for me to see why it makes sense for them to do that stuff interms of their bottom line. The goal is to make money, not to win a popularity contest.
He's implying that without Apple, the music industry would have some great online business going and be selling tons more music. That's clearly bullshit. If it were true, they would have their thing going dispite Apple, and people would be using it.
The music industry is pissed because Apple came up with a device that everybody wants, and instead of using it to make zillions of dollars for the music industry, they're using it to make zillions of dollars for themselves.
Boo hoo.
Apple doesn't owe the music industry *anything*. If the iTunes music store didn't exist, people would *still* buy iPods like crazy, because it's the only player out there that is user friendly, stylish, and completely impartail to whether you choose to listen to licensed or DRM-free content. It seems to me that iTunes is just a big shield from lawsuits, because as long as it exists there are considerable and obvious non-infringing uses for Apple's device. iTMS is Apple covering their ass. If this Napster guy wants more control, then he should come up with a device that people like better than an iPod and tie it to his service instead. He won't though, because he can't build a device that allows people to play pirated music, and consumers are fed up with paying high prices for music.
Apple isn't holding the music industry back, consumers are. They've reached the limit of how much money they're willing to fork over. They're going to have to be sitisfied with their revenue pit just being bottomless, and learn to live with the fact that they can't keep making it wider too.
There is already such a device. It takes an HDCP signal, and outputs unencrypted DVI and component. It has almost all of the electronics from inside an HDTV in it though, and costs over $350.
Rich kids who care more about bragging about their benchmark scores than playing games...
Which, incidentally, is a market that is just the right size to extract the maximum amount of profit out of while the yields still suck on their latest chips.
The high end market is a place for these manufacturers to test and refine their manufacturing process before selling to the mass market.
At $1200, you're better off spending $800 on a system that will play every current game at high speed and using the remaining $400 for something else... Games, bills, whatever. Or better yet, save it for 6 to 8 months, and spend it on a card that will be better than what you would have had if you spent the $1200 up front, that also uses less power. All that, and you don't even lose any enjoyment, because your lesser card runs practically as well in the meantime. Unless, of course, what you really enjoy is bragging about your benchmark results.
Consoles do this by taking the right shortcuts. They have a very focused performance target for very specific tasks. No need to add anything more than the minimum. Plus, they sell more than nearly any OEM PC maker so they get good prices on the parts.
Plus they have no (or sometimes negative) margin. I'm not talking retail margins, which are notoriously thin for electronics, I'm talking about the nice healthy margins that high end chip makers get on their latest stuff... Just because Best Buy or wherever only pulls 4% on a CPU or video card doesn't mean that ATI, or Intel, or whoever your maker of choice is isn't pulling 600%. When you get a game console though, the manufacturer operates at an average of zero margin over the life of the hardware. Essentially that means you get the latest hardware at the same price you'd expect to pay for the previous generation. The only thing that is 'miraculous' about it is that it's *you* paying the low price, and not somebody farther up the food chain.
Is it really such a deal though, when you consider that they plan to make their money back plus some on selling you software and accessories with vendor lock in? I'd rather pay a few extra dollars up front and have some competition in the software and accessory market. It would keep the overall cost down. Essentially what this all means is that if you buy several games a year or more, PC gaming can be cheaper. Add up the costs of all those accessories you need to buy for your console, and consider that console games are more expensive on average than PC games, and discounts are applied to PC games much sooner than to console games. And that's before you take into account the new, outrageously high pricing they're pushing for next-gen titles, and Microsoft's single price-point model for game prices...
If only I could convince myself to allow sanity (and math) to prevail instead of buying a gaming PC *and* multiple consoles. Oh well.
Have you seen what you can get for $400 these days? Plus generally you can run whatevery you want on those other machines. When you consider all the stuff a game console *doesn't* have when compared to a PC, and take into account the enormous profit margins on the top of the line PC components, I'd say the only thing that's miraculous is that console makers continue to convince their customers that the machine they're getting has a value signifigantly higher than the price tag.
This stuff even less impressive when you take into account that IBM has been putting multiple cores on a die for low cost embedded use for well over a decade, and this is only the latest generation of that technology.
Slashdot Mirror
....until it's in a form where the end user can control what it's used for. Cheap flexable displays sound like a cool technology, but until you can control what's displayed on them, what the hell good are they?
Why can't the shelf power the box? All you need is a small coil of wire in there and a capacitor big enough to power the display long enough for you to get to the checkout.
It would seem that Microsoft is balking at pitching its lot with HD [...]
Microsoft never said it wouldn't support Blu-Ray. All they said was that they were supporting HD-DVD. There's no reason why Windows, and most other Microsoft software products couldn't and shouldn't support both.
What they do with the 360, however is another matter. Even if thy do have plans to upgrade it with some nextgen video format, they're certainly going to deny it up until the day it's released, because they don't want to kill sales. If the rumor were confirmed that an update was planned, they'd instantly have blown any advantage they may or may not have gained by getting the 360 to market before the PS3.
Two.
Disk switching is so 20th century.
Call me when a few of those have gone a couple hundred thousand miles with a decent amount of city driving in the mix. I'll believe they've solved all the problems when I see that they last like you would expect for how rediculously high their cost is. I don't have enough cash around to be an early adopter of technology that will cost several thousand dollars to fix when it proves to be defficient.
Also, the RX 400 really isn't that big or heavy. The Highlander may be, but I can't get Toyota's all flash website to reveal it's curb weight. They're definatly making progress, but I still wouldn't buy one until they've been around a while longer.
Yup, that's pretty much it. Well, that and the duribility issues. The strenth limitation, the duribility issues, and the fact that the torque curve requires a CVT, or multiple 'gears' at all for that matter in the first place...
This is turning into the Spanish Inquisition!
Anyway, a pure electric drive wouldn't require a CVT, much less one that is better than the ones they've got out there now.
You jest, but when you combine something like a diesel electric model with the regenerative braking used in current hybrids, you could probably make a really efficient car without the need for the elusive CVT that doesn't suck. Plus as a bonus, when fuel cell technology matures, you could replace the diesel engine and generator head with a cell stack and a hydrogen tank.
...the huge plume of steam coming out the 'smokestack' on the top of your BMW....
Just kidding, of course. It's probably a closed system, but the headline of this story certainly produces some amusing mental images.
Granting the ability to reduce costs of 80 million dollar titles to an only 40 million,
That story summary is just plain wrong. The submitter earns an 'F' in reading comprehension.
The interview doesn't say that... It doesn't even come close to saying that. It says they are always looking for ways to do that, and that they're also looking for tools to help them streamline development. If $40m of an $80m goes to licensing, marketing, distribution, and placement, no process automation is going to accomplish that, clearly the two goals were stated independantly.
If anybody thinks that $80 million goes into the development budget of any game, they're crazy. Development is only a fraction of the cost, and looking at EA's list of games and licences, I'd guess it's frequently less than half.
What is the world coming to when even the submitter doesn't read the article?
That still doesn't have anything to do with whether the architecture is NUMA or not. Neither of these platforms are going across multiple busses to hit their memory. Don't think of NUMA as a performance hit for some addresses in the cell architecture. Think of it as a performance boost for memory that's only being used by a single cell. All accesses go through a single switch fabric that (depending on the internals that Sony hasn't told the public about) could easily be faster than the bus model that the intel FSB in the 360 uses. Depending on how many transistors they were willing to dedicate to the problem, the switch architecture could theoretically be the superior interconnect in all respects.
Both of these boxes are powerful machines. The PS3 is a little cooler, but mostly because it's something new and interesting while the 360 is more traditional. At the end of the day, the games are going to look the same for the most part though.
A few parent posts ago, I suggested some reasons implied by the article - not to do so might be greedy, monopolistic, unethical, or anti-music industry. To be honest, I don't buy any of the arguments in support of these claims.
Neither do I, but I can do one better. I can give a single reason that any of those reasons are inarguably incorrect:
The iPod will play anybody's music.
The only thing it won't do is support other people's DRM. So essentially Apple is saying "Anybody can put their content on our device, but we're not spending a dime on letting you do it in such a way that makes you money. The suit against Real Networks takes that one step further and says they'll go out of their way to stop you from making money with their device if it's at the expense of Apple's own profits. That's exactly how I would expect a responsible business to be run, and with the added benefit of allowing user control of the device. Indisputable proof that it's not greedy, monopolistic, unethical, or anti-music industry. Just plain sensable business.
Too bad their prices or so high, or I might actually buy some music from them.
Uh, what? You clearly have no idea what NUMA means.
NUMA means that memory access times are non-uniform. In other words, longer for some addresses and shorter for others. Unified memory architecure means that all the memory in the system shares a common address space. You can't compare NUMA to UMA because they don't have anything do do with each other. A system can be NUMA and unified at the same time. It can also be non-unified and non-NUMA.
There is no documented evidence that I can find that the PS3 doesn't have a unified memory address space, dispite the NUMAness of it. In fact it looks like it probably *does* have a unified memory architecture. Also, from what I can tell of the architecture diagrams, it's only NUMA due to the necessity of cache coherancy between the cells (all cells talk to one central memory bank through a switch, cells accessing the same memory need to coordinate before accessing thus slowing down access to shared regions while non-shared regions will have one-step access), and a well written application will not experience the NUMA behavior very often.
That has to be one of the most arbitrary and stupid ways to distinguish between future gaming platforms. Pick on the quality and quantity of the games, and not on the specs that you don't understand anyway.
Napster advocates a recurring revenue model instead of the fixed fee model that Apple has. Like you said, you "rent" music...sortof.
Apple's model is more expensive up front, but becomes less and less expensive over time. Napster has a lower up front cost, but a higher long term cost. For most listeners Napster is more expensive, and if it wasn't you can bet the music publishers (who do you think owns Napster now?) wouldn't be pushing it. Also, if the Napster rental model were more appealing to consumers, a player that supported Napster would be more popular than the iPod by now, but it hasn't happened. Clearly people don't want another monthly fee, or don't want one for something they never had to pay monthly for before.
One other thing is certain. Napster's model doesn't make Apple any money, so why should Apple support it?
Microsoft is more than happy to help publishers get their obscure Japanese stuff onto the Xbox. Hell, Microsoft even funded a port of Guilty Gear #Reload to the Japanese Xbox just to win over Japanese gamers, and it was then ported to the USA! That beats the hell out of Sony and Nintendo who don't want to see a sprite on a screen larger than a credit card.
That's because they're struggling for market share. Once, and if they become established you can bet they'll be up to the same tricks as all the other console makers. There's a reason Sony and Nintendo do what they do. It's because they've shifted from the mindshare building mode into the profit building mode. They know that there are certain costs associated with publishing a game, and that certain pricing structures need to be applied to certain markets in order to turn the biggest possible profit (remember, they're in this for profit, not for the games). Working Designs games were hardly what you could call mainstream, so it shouldn't be too hard to see why Sony might have wanted them to carry budget prices or perhaps pay a higer percentage as a royalty or higher up front cost or whatever they're not telling us about the details of what made ths fall through. That might make the Xbox a promising platform for them, but you can be sure that when Microsoft starts focusing on profits instead of on market share, they'll stop proping developers like this up too.
You don't think Sony was proping WD up? Well, why couldn't they just start releasing for the PC? It's because they relied on console publishing practices to shift some of the development, marketing and placement costs onto the console manufacturer. High voilume titles cover those costs for a company like Sony, but niche titles don't, and the PS2 market isn't a growth market for Sony anymore. They only want cash cows on their platform now so they can cash in on the last few years of their investment. It all comes down to money, and at the end of the day, WD must not have been making enough of it. Don't be foolish enough to think that any other console manufacturer has your best interests as a gamer in mind though. Especially if their stock is publically traded. You'll just be setting yourself up to be broken hearted again in a few years.
Suffice it to say that you don't know the whole story...
Obviously console makers have a vested interest in making sure the games available for their platform are of a certain quality level and could reject things on those grounds, but I'm guessing in this particular case it came down to money. Sony probably wanted a certain amount, and WD probably realized that they couldn't sell enough of certain niche titles to make that work. I mean, let's face it, the games they released weren't exactly mainstream. What Sony rejected was likely a proposed licensing fee structure.
You could build your own scanning tunneling electron microsope. It doesn't seem to me that it would be too hard. The disadvantages, of course, are that you can't look at things that are as large as what you are thinking (instead of stuff from your refrigerator, think small molecules), and that it destroys the target object. The upside is that you can use it to manipulate individual atoms and create your own nanotech...
It's definatly on my list of things to do.
Those selling DRMed music that won't play natively on iPods have a massive interest in changing this.
It doesn't matter if they do. If their business model is one that nets more cash for the music industry out of your pocket, which are you going to choose? I bet it's not the one that costs more. If it isn't than this practice of Apple's isn't hurting the music industry's bottom line at all.
Wrong. He's implying that Apple has created a device that Apple can sell music for.
How does that make me wrong? Can't he imply more than one thing in an article?
I fail to see how anything Apple does makes it OK for anybody else to bitch that they're not making money off of it. If you want a piece of the action, it's not Apple's job to open the door for you. In fact it's their job to keep it shut and protect their profits. It's rediculous for anybody in the music industry, or any other business, to expect Apple to do them any favors.
Who cares if other businesses aren't permitted to offer alternative services?
If you want to make money in the digital music market, you need to do it yourself. Why should Apple help you to make money off their product?
If this guy is so smart, he should make a better store and a better player. If he's right, it should be possible, and people should flock to it and leave the iPod behind. Anything he can come up with that nets the recording distribution industry more profits is pretty much guarantreeed to be seen as *worse* by consumers though, so he'll never pull it off. He doesn't want to offer you choice, he wants Apple to stop being so damned nice (in his opinion; obviouly not in your opinion) to consumers because it's preventing them from getting away with charging more (where more is most likely a pay-per-listen or some other recurring revenue model).
We love Apple, the iPod, and iTunes. Who cares...
I don't understand why you assume that any opinion of Apple or their products has anything to do with my point. I'm talking business here, I'm not being some fanboy. I don't have to like or dislike Apple's practices for me to see why it makes sense for them to do that stuff interms of their bottom line. The goal is to make money, not to win a popularity contest.
He's still got a point.
No he doesn't.
He's implying that without Apple, the music industry would have some great online business going and be selling tons more music. That's clearly bullshit. If it were true, they would have their thing going dispite Apple, and people would be using it.
The music industry is pissed because Apple came up with a device that everybody wants, and instead of using it to make zillions of dollars for the music industry, they're using it to make zillions of dollars for themselves.
Boo hoo.
Apple doesn't owe the music industry *anything*. If the iTunes music store didn't exist, people would *still* buy iPods like crazy, because it's the only player out there that is user friendly, stylish, and completely impartail to whether you choose to listen to licensed or DRM-free content. It seems to me that iTunes is just a big shield from lawsuits, because as long as it exists there are considerable and obvious non-infringing uses for Apple's device. iTMS is Apple covering their ass. If this Napster guy wants more control, then he should come up with a device that people like better than an iPod and tie it to his service instead. He won't though, because he can't build a device that allows people to play pirated music, and consumers are fed up with paying high prices for music.
Apple isn't holding the music industry back, consumers are. They've reached the limit of how much money they're willing to fork over. They're going to have to be sitisfied with their revenue pit just being bottomless, and learn to live with the fact that they can't keep making it wider too.
There is already such a device. It takes an HDCP signal, and outputs unencrypted DVI and component. It has almost all of the electronics from inside an HDTV in it though, and costs over $350.
Every night I pray for the day that a few senators and congrespeople realize that their HDTV doesn't support HDCP. Only then will the shit fly.
What is ATI's intended market?
Rich kids who care more about bragging about their benchmark scores than playing games...
Which, incidentally, is a market that is just the right size to extract the maximum amount of profit out of while the yields still suck on their latest chips.
The high end market is a place for these manufacturers to test and refine their manufacturing process before selling to the mass market.
At $1200, you're better off spending $800 on a system that will play every current game at high speed and using the remaining $400 for something else... Games, bills, whatever. Or better yet, save it for 6 to 8 months, and spend it on a card that will be better than what you would have had if you spent the $1200 up front, that also uses less power. All that, and you don't even lose any enjoyment, because your lesser card runs practically as well in the meantime. Unless, of course, what you really enjoy is bragging about your benchmark results.
Consoles do this by taking the right shortcuts. They have a very focused performance target for very specific tasks. No need to add anything more than the minimum. Plus, they sell more than nearly any OEM PC maker so they get good prices on the parts.
Plus they have no (or sometimes negative) margin. I'm not talking retail margins, which are notoriously thin for electronics, I'm talking about the nice healthy margins that high end chip makers get on their latest stuff... Just because Best Buy or wherever only pulls 4% on a CPU or video card doesn't mean that ATI, or Intel, or whoever your maker of choice is isn't pulling 600%. When you get a game console though, the manufacturer operates at an average of zero margin over the life of the hardware. Essentially that means you get the latest hardware at the same price you'd expect to pay for the previous generation. The only thing that is 'miraculous' about it is that it's *you* paying the low price, and not somebody farther up the food chain.
Is it really such a deal though, when you consider that they plan to make their money back plus some on selling you software and accessories with vendor lock in? I'd rather pay a few extra dollars up front and have some competition in the software and accessory market. It would keep the overall cost down. Essentially what this all means is that if you buy several games a year or more, PC gaming can be cheaper. Add up the costs of all those accessories you need to buy for your console, and consider that console games are more expensive on average than PC games, and discounts are applied to PC games much sooner than to console games. And that's before you take into account the new, outrageously high pricing they're pushing for next-gen titles, and Microsoft's single price-point model for game prices...
If only I could convince myself to allow sanity (and math) to prevail instead of buying a gaming PC *and* multiple consoles. Oh well.
Miracle?
Have you seen what you can get for $400 these days? Plus generally you can run whatevery you want on those other machines. When you consider all the stuff a game console *doesn't* have when compared to a PC, and take into account the enormous profit margins on the top of the line PC components, I'd say the only thing that's miraculous is that console makers continue to convince their customers that the machine they're getting has a value signifigantly higher than the price tag.
This stuff even less impressive when you take into account that IBM has been putting multiple cores on a die for low cost embedded use for well over a decade, and this is only the latest generation of that technology.