well, technically intel processors have featured hardware register renaming since the ppro, so to say they only have 8 registers isn't really the whole story.
of course these are hidden from the programmer, but they still contribute to overall performance.
I seriously doubt ATI will come out as the winner, but I hope they will prove me wrong. All the problems NVidia has experienced as of late has been because they were way overambitious about next generation technology. ATI played their cards safe and went for tried and tested.15 micron technology (NVidia went for.13).
If the Geforce FX 5800 Ultra had been released when it was supposed to, ATI wouldn't have had the speed crown over xmas. At the moment the world is waiting for the R350 which will temporarily hand it back to ATI, but the NV35 is scheduled for release in only a few months time, and that will definitely pass the bragging rights back to NVidia.
Besides, don't forget NVidia is a financially sound business with $1bn in the bank. ATI are seriously in debt at the moment.
But we're at an interesting point in time from a GPU point of view. All the basic features (and a lot of advanced) are now in place, and we now see the similar Intel vs AMD speed race happen in the GPU market. Higher order surface (hardware) support is the next really big thing on the horizon, but it's turning out to be more difficult than originally anticipated for various reasons.
I must be a weirdo, cos I actually find it interesting and quite amusing. I spent my entire childhood on a PC (my dad brought one home in 1983), all my friends back then had Vic-20's, C-64's or Spectrums.
I find it particularly amazing to see how much instructions sets have progressed. I really do like the ARM instruction set (but how will they make a superscalar ARM CPU with conditional instructions?), the PowerPC is pretty damn good too. MIPS is bearable, but the x86 set with it's ridiculous 8 registers is a horrible patched-then-repatched abortion that should be put to sleep asap!
Then again, 8 registers is bliss in comparison to the 3 I just found out the 6502 has!:-)
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>> Tetris! WHILE YOUR OS INSTALLED!
This is rather amusing, especially considering Konami patented letting the user play a game while loading the application.
Which is the reason no other computer games company does this.
well, technically intel processors have featured hardware register renaming since the ppro, so to say they only have 8 registers isn't really the whole story.
of course these are hidden from the programmer, but they still contribute to overall performance.
I seriously doubt ATI will come out as the winner, but I hope they will prove me wrong. All the problems NVidia has experienced as of late has been because they were way overambitious about next generation technology. ATI played their cards safe and went for tried and tested
If the Geforce FX 5800 Ultra had been released when it was supposed to, ATI wouldn't have had the speed crown over xmas. At the moment the world is waiting for the R350 which will temporarily hand it back to ATI, but the NV35 is scheduled for release in only a few months time, and that will definitely pass the bragging rights back to NVidia.
Besides, don't forget NVidia is a financially sound business with $1bn in the bank. ATI are seriously in debt at the moment.
But we're at an interesting point in time from a GPU point of view. All the basic features (and a lot of advanced) are now in place, and we now see the similar Intel vs AMD speed race happen in the GPU market. Higher order surface (hardware) support is the next really big thing on the horizon, but it's turning out to be more difficult than originally anticipated for various reasons.
I must be a weirdo, cos I actually find it interesting and quite amusing. I spent my entire childhood on a PC (my dad brought one home in 1983), all my friends back then had Vic-20's, C-64's or Spectrums.
I find it particularly amazing to see how much instructions sets have progressed. I really do like the ARM instruction set (but how will they make a superscalar ARM CPU with conditional instructions?), the PowerPC is pretty damn good too. MIPS is bearable, but the x86 set with it's ridiculous 8 registers is a horrible patched-then-repatched abortion that should be put to sleep asap!
Then again, 8 registers is bliss in comparison to the 3 I just found out the 6502 has!