What the fuck, is this "everybody bash Creative" time?
I'll have you know that the AWE32 (which is basically a SB16 + wavetable synth) is FULLY supported in Windows 2000 (SB16 and Wavetable Synth). Not only is it supported, but the drivers come with Windows.
Maybe if you bothered to actually TRY it rather than believing some rumor you read on some website, you might stop wrongfully bashing Creative's name.
Creative has been mostly decent for me...I have never had a serious issue with one of their soundcards. Although in some cases I have been more impressed with other competing products (like my old Ensoniq AudioPCI), Creative hasn't dropped the ball yet. My Audigy hasn't coughed at working with ANY games, and this is on a Via chipset motherboard (KT800 Pro).
AS for my experience with their mp3 players, I've been a fan of the Muvo series since the inception 4 years ago. I did not experience serious problems despite buying the first revision, and I have been impressed with the features and clean design improvements of the latest Muvo TX.
As an Inq reader since 2001, there are some simple truths:
1. Fuad is fun to read, but never to be believed.
2. In the big rivalries (ATI v Nvidia, Intel v AMD), the one that is down will always make as much noise as possible. That is why Faud reported so much inaccurate information about R520, even with insider information it's hard to see through the noise.
I remember from an article a few days back: "While the Yonah is slightly behind the Athlon X2 in performance, it outputs less heat under load than the Athlon X2 does when idling."
That preview from Anandtech failed to mention some key aspects necessary for comparison, such as: was Cool 'n Quiet enabled on the Athlon 64 processor?
But there was also no conjecture that took into account the comparison between a desktop and laptop chip. The Yonah, like Dothan and Turion will be binned based on a lower full-load operating voltage. The X2 desktop dual-core runs at 2.0 GHz with 1.35v, and idles at 1GHz at 1.1v. The Turion MT line, on the other hand, is much more aggressive: 1.2v full-speed, full-load, 1.0v at 800 MHz idle. The difference in power consumption is huge.
The fact that Anandtech didn't elaborate on the reality of the situation just speaks of their sensationalist writing style. When AMD releases their X2 Turion MT next year, it will be competitive.
And yes, while Yonah is a laptop chip, the desktop version of it isn't going to be far above that; the whole platform was designed to tweak for effecienty.
I expect Merom will use significantly more power than Yonah, and be in the same realm as desktop A64 processors. Do expect it to use a higher full-load voltage than Yonah. Do expect it to not turn off the second core when not loaded. Do expect the power-saving cache design to be deactivated as well, so the chips can be competitive in performance.
Yonah turns off the second core when not in use, thus negating one of the really nice features of dual-core (zippy responsiveness, even under load). If you want that benefit, Yonah uses twice as much power at idle. Otherwise, you have to wait for the monitoring software to pick up on the increased load and wake up the second core. No doubt, AMD will do the same thing with their Turion X2 offering...this is just intended to highlight the power consumption perspective between the deaktop and mobile versions.
New video games though, have barely moved in price over the same period.
Right. Over the years prices have gone up only slightly, even though game development costs have skyrocketed. Insead, pack-ins and media have gotten cheaper to cover part of the burden, and a growing market has taken the rest of the slack.
Back about the time SF2 was released on consoles, I bought Master of Orion for 40 bucks. It came on 4 floppy disks, and came with a nice beefy manual.
Two years later, I paid 40 bucks for Transport Tycoon Deluxe. Still 40 bucks, but the game came on a cheaper-to-manufacture CD, and the manual was smaller.
A few years later, I bought Fallout 2 for 45 bucks. My extra 5 bucks bought me a beefy, well-styled manual.
Then I started paying 50 bucks for games a few years ago. This started with titles like Battlefield 1942 and Freelancer, both of which came with tiny manuals (and Freelancer didn't even include a jewelcase). About this time, game boxes got a lot smaller...just another way to cut the costs.
Now you can buy Battlefield 2 for $50, and it is a pinnacle of cost reduction: a plastic DVD-style case, containing a single DVD and a brief manual. There is actually more advertising material in the case than manual. This is not new...but I have never before bought a game with so much advertising INSIDE the package.
The game makers can't get any cheaper, unless you go with something like Steam. Thus, game prices are going to have to go up.
They don't have to pay taxes on the 83.3 million "earned" because they "lost" 11 million on the investment venture. The way the law is structured, you don't have to pay taxes on capital invested in German movie productions, only the net earnings.
Do the math: 94 million in, 83.3 million out = a loss. No taxes.
Not quite. The picture the article paints is a one-time transaction, not a long-term investment they intend to pay off.
Take a closer look at the Tomb Raider situation. They found investors willing to pony up 94 million dollars to buy the rights to Tomb Raider. Paramount then repurchased the film for 83.3 million, making almost 11 million on the deal.
So, you say, how do the Germans make money? Simple:
Suppose you made 94 million dollars in income this year, and lived in Germany. You might be upset by the fact that Germany's income tax tops out at 42.5%. Suddenly, your 94 million dolllar earnings has shrunk to 54 million, a loss of 40 million.
But, if you invest in this movie, and play by the letter of the law, your entire 94 million dollar investment cannot be taxed. So what if you lose 11 million in the tranaction, the government was going to TAX YOU for 40 million if you did nothing.
You can't be serious. You're completely missing key components that add up to quite a pretty penny.
8 x 512Mb Samsung 1.2GHz GDDR3 chips ($50-70). If Microsoft is getting these for less than 6 bucks a pop, they're getting them for a STEAL. And considering how much the high-performance graphics industry is willing to pay for them, I don't see that happening right now. The price will, of course, come down significantly over time.
20GB SATA hard drive - no less than $40. The capacity doesn't matter...they just take whatever density single-platter drive they're selling in the mainstream and make up a special firmware run that only recognizes 20GB. The assembly costs of a drive cannot be reduced below some minimum.
Custom motherboard including ICs, assembly and testing - $40-50, minimum.
So, let's combine those minimums with your minimums:
Best case, the Xbox's major components cost $150 (CPU+GPU) + $130 (RAM, HDD, MB) = 280, MINIMUM. Add in the costs of non-trivial things like the case, the powersupply, the heatsinks and fans, the controller, the remote control, final assembly, and of course, distribution, and you've got an excellent chance of topping $400.
Don't forget that platform development and advertising have to be charged against the Xbox earnings to get the real cost of the device.
Desktop sales are dropping. Laptop sales are growing. The two lines on the graph are crossing right about now. Next year, laptop sales are projected to outnumber desktop sales, and keep growing. I think Intel are exactly right to bet on the laptop market. AMD are mainly targetting the supercomputer, server, and workstation markets. These are low-volume, high-margin areas, and are ideally suited to a company with a good R&D team (lots of ex-Alpha people) and a lower volume production capacity.
I guess you havn't heard of the flexibility of the Athlon 64 platform. Unlike the P4 with Netburst, the Athlon 64 is capable of extreme performance at the high-end, and competitive, low-voltage and low-wattage performance on notebooks.
Take this handy fact: all Athlon 64 and Opteron chips currently assembled are capable of running at 1.0 GHz at 1.1v. This is the Cool 'n Quiet low-power mode. It may surprise you to know that the power usage for an Athlon 64 at this clock and voltage, at full load, is .
It is not hard to imagine how low-power the Turion MT line goes, when you consider that is runs at a full-speed, full-load voltage of 1.2v. You might imagine that with that low voltage, the MT line lives up to its competitive 25w max TDP. You might put two and two togther now and realize that the Dothan max TDP is in that same range.
You might further realize that the Turion MT is a FEIRCE competitor to the Pentium M, especially since, with the exception of older games that don't stress the FPU, the Athlon 64 and Pentium M match up well clock-for-clock (and I fully expect newer games to stress the FPU, especially now that physics engines are taking center-stage).
You might also notice that there is a very small markup on the MT line (1.2v, 25w TDP) over the ML line (1.4v, 35w TDP), and that the MT line is offered as fast as 2.2 GHz. AMD is having NO trouble producing enough of these low-power chips to meet demand.
I do expect Yonah and Merom to be more competitive, so things will certainly be interesting in 2006. But don't for a minute think that AMD's push into the server space with the Opteron means they can't challenge Intel in the low-power desktop and mobile realm. Merom itself has been pushed, and is is ahead of schedule, for the sole fact that Intel needed it last year.
You may think it's weird that AMD can compete in the server space and notebooks with one basic chip design, but Intel is going to be doing the same thing once Merom replaces netburst on the desktop front. They even have Merom-derrived server cores planned.
If you're buying a 64-bit core for that reason you're clearly a bit naive. You can have upto 36-bits of addressing in 32-bit cores for quite some time [the PAE feature] which is 16GB total physical addressible.
PAE has been around for years. It is a hack that allows up to 64GB of addressable memory.
The drawback is that it only allows 4GB per process, and the overhead of switching between processes is huge. x86-64 seeks to remedy these issues.
or the average desktop user the most benefit you get out of x86_64 is the extra GPR registers. Which oddly enough don't help you on the Intel side of the camp [most ALU tasks are the same speed on the 540 and 820 cores w.r.t. cycles/operation].
This is the obvious reason to consider running Windows XP-64 on an x86-64 processor...there is no other benefit besides the memory space that is worth mentioning. The key is, some programs gain more from x86-64 than others. This can be due to the following complication:
x86-64 makes all pointers double in size. A program that uses lots of pointers will increase the code size and cut the efficiency of the cache significantly, which reduces the performance gains of having additional registers.
As for why the Pentium 4 sucks under x86-64...it's likely the very reason I stated above. The processor is already reaching the limits of its bus in the IA-32 world...it is not hard to guess that the extra bandwidth required by the larger x86-64 code is erasing any gains the extra registers give you.
Unfortunately, I've never seen someone do an x86-64 performance test on a P4 with 800 MHz versus a similarly-clocked P4 with a 1066 MHZ bus, so it simply remains my best guess.
If you run servers with things like SSL you want a 64-bit core even if your website is otherwise lean on the processing requirement. AMD64s can do things like RSA handshakes a lot faster than the 32-bit and Intel counterparts.
If you run a server, the vendor usually offers all sorts of options, including Server 2003 x86-64. When you said retail, I was thinking "retail," as in systems at Best Buy. For a server, you should most definitely run x86-64.
Which makes me ask the question why do retail boxes bundle winxp32 with AMD64s?
There are lots of reasons.
Because few retail boxes ship with more than 1GB of ram.
Because there are all sorts of bugs to be worked out. WinXP-64 is still considered an experimental platform by most companies, even though it has seen full release.
There are still many devices lacking drivers. Imagine handling the tech support for consumers who buy some random USB device and are appalled when it doesn't work because the driver isn't compatible.
I've also heard that the implementation of WOW is clumsy, in that you can only run 32-bit programs from the "Program Files (x86)" folder. I'll bet I could show you quite a few older 32-bit programs that shit a brick when their path contains spaces or parenthesis.
Manufacturers basically have until Vista ships to catch up, and they're damn well going to take every second.
"The dual-core Yonah chip could very likely deliver performance greater than Apple's current G4-based PowerBooks."
A SINGLE-CORE Yonah should run circles around a G4 processor for the same amount of power. That was the whole point of this messy changeover. The dual-core versions, while consuming much more power under full load, should deliver unheard of performance.
AMD will also be releasing their dual-core Turion in 2006, which should make for a very competitive market. However, I am curious to see if AMD will make the step up to dual-channel memory for the dual-core Turions. The current models are already a tad memory starved with single-channel DDR-333.
Unfortunately, even AMD's "simple" ratings system can go wrong.
Take the Sempron as an example. The 3400+, which is a 2.0GHz processor with 256k cache, running on Socket 754.
The name would suggest this processor outperforms an Athlon 64 3200+ Socket 939 (2.0 GHz, 512k cache). But, as the specs suggest, the Athlon 64 3200+ beats it soundly.
AMD has gotten sloppy as of late with the Sempron. The obvious reason for this lax ratings system is because AMD wants the Sempron to compete directly with the Celeron. But this is a fool's errand simply because the Celeron is no longer sold by core speed, but by confusing model number.
Intel, of course, adopted these confusing model numbers so consumers could not make direct comparisons in terms of performance.
I wouldn't be surprised if the lax ratings of the Sempron are costing AMD more higher-priced Athlon 64 sales, just because the model number of the Sempron is higher. I mean, which so many confusing Intel model numbers, what ARE consumers supposed to compare the Sempron's model number to?
The performance hit was incredible at the time. After the botched release of the FX 5800 Ultra, the rest of the FX series had turned out to be competitive in DX8 / DX8.1 games currently availavble, so this was quite a surprise. [H]ardOCP summed up Valve's report on the following pages:
The good news is Nvidia got faster [with the mixed-mode DX8/DX9 optimizations]. Bad news is that performance gains go away in the future as new DX9 functionality will be able to use fewer and fewer partial-precision functions.
I think that sums it up nicely. Battlefield 2 is a 100% DX9 game (hence the reason the GF4 and GF3 are not supported), and it performs like crap on the FX series.
The worst part is, the lack of registers seems to limit only the maximum performance of the faster FX-series cards. So, while DX9 mode only slows down the FX 5200 and 5600 slightly, the 5900 series is severly hampered.
The sad thing is. My favorite game from this genre is still RTCW. I just think the game play was so much better. Maybe the graphics weren't as advanced... but it was more fun. Knife fights under water... calling in air raids. Priming grenades before tossing them. It was a blast.
Priming grenades before you toss them? That's nothing.
How about carrying TWO different kinds of grenades, with different grenades for every class? And get this: you can prime and release a grenade WHILE YOU SHOOT YOU WEAPON, just like a bad-ass out of your favorite action movie!
And you can have all the underwater knife fights you want with the Spy class.
Hardware requirements? Don't make me laugh!
Hardware gets old. It doesn't help that you bought a card notorious for poor DX9 performance. Can you honestly say you didn't expect to see performance plummet in later games?
You can whine all you want, but you could always play something else.
Though I have matching 7800GTXs, I could just as easily pop one of them into another machine, and still SLI with a 6800 or even a 6600GTX board
Nvidia's official drivers do not allow you to mix different chipsets. So no, you cannot pair up a 6600 GT with whatever you want. You have to pair it with a 6600 GT, and that's a small upgrade.
The way the market is structured, you're usually better off paying more for a better card than buying low and upgrading later. The worst part is, some cards disappear from the market before the price can come down, like the 6800 Ultra. Good luck getting a reasonable price on that these days. This fits with my "fools" statement.
The newest games at 1600X1200 with full options on almost require SLI to play right
See my post about "rich" people buying SLI. You have to be rich to be able to drop $1000 on your video subsystem alone.
AMD hasn't consistenly offered better CPUs at a better price.
Back when they were lagging in the performance race, with the early XP line (Palomino) versus the P4 (Northwood), AMD was trying hard just to keep up. They priced their processors typically 20% below equivilant-performing Intel processors.
AMD also had a pathetic platform for the server space, which consisted of (at most) a 2-way Athlon MP system utilizing a single 266MHz bus. The only chipset available, the AMD 761MP, wasn't exactly a top performer.
Keep in mind: back in 2001, AMD had ZERO server presence. Now they own 10% of the server market, and they are a popular choice for supercomputing cluster projects. Most of that has come since the release of the Opteron. You can only grow so fast...10%, given the Opteron has only been out for 2.5 years, is quite impressive.
These days, AMD's average selling price has gone way up, and their sales have also been growing impressively, which is why the company has posted their first profitable quarters in years. And AMD is poised to grow dramatically in the next few years as Fab 35 ramps up, more than doubling their current production capacity.
The Athlon 64 marked Via crossing the threshold. The KT800 Pro is very stable, and works with everything I throw at it (including a Sound Blaster Audigy...imagine that, Creative and Via playing nice).
Now sure, Via doesn't have SLI, but the market is starting to get over SLI, and realize that it was simply a hypefest. Now only rich kids and fools buy SLI-capable boards with the intention of actually using it.
And Nvidia has recognized this...that's the reason why you can grab entry-level 939 SLI boards as low as $100.
The new chipsets Intel is working on will improve bus bandwidth available in multi-CPU systems.
Their new 4-socket chipset will have 4 separate busses in one northbridge. What this means is a big headache involving cache-coherency, And having four 64-bit busses is going to require more layers on the motherboard.
But the processors will get their bandwidth, and the performance will be impressive, for once. Unfortunately, the complexity means you won't see one of these in production for months.
And then, Intel has been working on their own "HyperTransport Killer", although it will probably not be all that impressive. I expect Intel to embrace HyperTransport within the next few years, especially with the new revisions of it coming down the pipe.
The power improvements in the Pentium D at idle using Enhanced Speedstep are not the trifle you seem to think they are.
The reduction in core speed (12.5%) also come with it a reduction in voltage (1.4 -> 1.2v).
Just do the math.
Your total power reduction is 12.5% (for frequency) + the reduction in voltage. Since power is related to the voltage squared, you get the following reduction from the voltage:
( 1 - 1.2^2 / 1.4^2 ) * 100 ~ 26%
So, you get a nearly 40% decrease in power usage. Hardly a measly 10w or so.
Not that this discounts the Athlon 64, it is an excellent platform in terms of efficiency. It is so capable and flexible, that the low-voltage Turion MT processors deliver competitive clock speeds AND performance-per-watt with the Pentium M.
Damn straight. They had a huge feature and performance advantage in the early 1990s, with powerful MIPS processors and their own custom 3D subsystems.
Under Jim Clark, SGI even proved they could create a powerful mass-market device by designing the N64, but then they dropped the ball and left Nintendo hanging on the next genration platform. They could have been huge as a console development house, but the company was unwilling to take such a risk.
They started using Intel processors and Windows NT for their workstations, just like everybody else. Then, they switched to using ATI graphics processors. Nobody was surprised when they couldn't compete with bigger players. SGI has just been waiting for a day to die.
Don't forget the insurance companies, they're a thriving pack of lies. Just save up hundreds of thousands of dollars in your emergency fund so you can:
* Put up a $50,000-80,000 bond (depending on the state) so you can drive legally without auto liability insurance. Why let Auto Insurance companies make money investing your premium, when you could lock a huge chunk of it away in a low-interest Bond?
* Set aside $200,000 to cover that unexpected house fire, because Homeowner's Insurance is a racket.
* Health Insurance? Who needs it...until you need that angioplasty. That'll be $30,000, thank you for playing.
Basically, debt, just like insurance, is a necessary evil in today's society.
Don't blame debt for people's misfortunes. These are the same kind of idiots who would build a house on sand (or below sea-level), and act amazed when the sea takes their house away.
Stupidity and foolishness are timeless human attributes. Debt is simply the latest way to take advantage of stupid or foolish people.
While we're on the subject, the tremendous growth in insurance itself, as well as minimum liability requirements, is a clear sign that the number of foolish / stupid people in the genepool (ie: not dying) are growing rapidly. So, basicalkly debt has been singled out simply because we have never had so many stupid people.
You know, it masquraded as a good review, until I read stupid-assed commentary like this:
Here, we see how the bloom effect starts to put a strain on the lower memory cards. The X800 and, in particular, the 6600 GT are the most memory-limited of these cards, but ATI's X800 does significantly better than the 6600 GT.
Welcome to Video Rendering 101. Tell me class, which card will be faster, and by how much:
The 12-pipe, 400 MHz core clock card (x800), or the 8-pipe, 500 MHz core card (6600 GT).
This isn't hard. The x800, when core-limited, should produce speeds 20% faster than the 6600 GT...and lord almighty, it's a miracle: the x800 is 20% faster than the 6600 GT with full HDR enabled! It must be the EXTRA 128MB RAM, or the 40% FASTER MEMORY SUBSYSTEM. It couldn't be the damn raw pixel processing power advantage.
And now class, why would the lower-end cards in this test show greater performance loss? Is it because Here, we see how the bloom effect starts to put a strain on the lower memory cards.
HELL NO.
It's called CPU-LIMITED. You can't measure true relative performance drops becuase the scene is CPU-limited to approximately 70fps. The 6600 GT is not even able to reach the 70fps mark without HDR, and suffers noticably with it on. The other cards scale as you would expect them to according to raw core clock speed, once you turn up the pixel processing requirements (full HDR), and the 7800 GTX is STILL CPU-limited.
And then, after mentioning it CLEARLY in the breakdown above that Valve's HDR implementation supports FSAA, AND after seeing plain-as-day that the 7800 GTX is still CPU-limited, the author doesn't try out FSAA performance. A 5-year old could write the same review.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if most of the language and pictures are verbatim from a Valve-supplied press pack.
You most certainly could purchase your very own Tualatin core. Intel just made a small change in the signaling logic to attempt to force users to buy a new motherboard, or upgrade to the new Pentium 4. Intel even sold a desktop chipset with full support for the Tualatin, called the i815E B-step.
Or, you could buy yourself a P3M.
And while we're talking about processrs that were READILY available back when the Epia was released, don't forget the P3 Coppermine 500E...with a peak consumption just under 9w, and better performance than even an 800MHz Ezra, it was a much better and readily available platform for low-power computing.
In addition, I didn't just mention Intel. If you bothered to read my whole post, you would have noticed that I mentioed you can make a DESKTOP (read: cheap and plentiful) AMD 64 solution use less power than a Nemiah of competitive core speed, and it will still outperform that Nemiah.
And it'a not as if Intel had the only competitive x86 low-power chip at the time the Epia was first released. Even though AMD wasn't exactly a low-power master at the time of the EPIA's release, they still had a competitive product: the Mobile K6-2. While it did not blow away the Epia like the Tualatin, it was competitive in performance-per-watt.
Basically, if VIA can make the C7M work, they're simply playing catch-up. If they manage to do so, it's about damn time. I've been waiting for 6 years for VIA to upgrade that anemic memory bus. Regardless of processing power, 2GB/s memory bandwidth just feels anemic in the rich environment of modern web browsing and GUIs.
Slashdot Mirror
What the fuck, is this "everybody bash Creative" time?
I'll have you know that the AWE32 (which is basically a SB16 + wavetable synth) is FULLY supported in Windows 2000 (SB16 and Wavetable Synth). Not only is it supported, but the drivers come with Windows.
Maybe if you bothered to actually TRY it rather than believing some rumor you read on some website, you might stop wrongfully bashing Creative's name.
Creative has been mostly decent for me...I have never had a serious issue with one of their soundcards. Although in some cases I have been more impressed with other competing products (like my old Ensoniq AudioPCI), Creative hasn't dropped the ball yet. My Audigy hasn't coughed at working with ANY games, and this is on a Via chipset motherboard (KT800 Pro).
AS for my experience with their mp3 players, I've been a fan of the Muvo series since the inception 4 years ago. I did not experience serious problems despite buying the first revision, and I have been impressed with the features and clean design improvements of the latest Muvo TX.
As an Inq reader since 2001, there are some simple truths:
1. Fuad is fun to read, but never to be believed.
2. In the big rivalries (ATI v Nvidia, Intel v AMD), the one that is down will always make as much noise as possible. That is why Faud reported so much inaccurate information about R520, even with insider information it's hard to see through the noise.
But even Faud gets it right some times: your R520 AGP card in 2005, as requested. You can even buy it online now.
I remember from an article a few days back: "While the Yonah is slightly behind the Athlon X2 in performance, it outputs less heat under load than the Athlon X2 does when idling."
That preview from Anandtech failed to mention some key aspects necessary for comparison, such as: was Cool 'n Quiet enabled on the Athlon 64 processor?
But there was also no conjecture that took into account the comparison between a desktop and laptop chip. The Yonah, like Dothan and Turion will be binned based on a lower full-load operating voltage. The X2 desktop dual-core runs at 2.0 GHz with 1.35v, and idles at 1GHz at 1.1v. The Turion MT line, on the other hand, is much more aggressive: 1.2v full-speed, full-load, 1.0v at 800 MHz idle. The difference in power consumption is huge.
The fact that Anandtech didn't elaborate on the reality of the situation just speaks of their sensationalist writing style. When AMD releases their X2 Turion MT next year, it will be competitive.
And yes, while Yonah is a laptop chip, the desktop version of it isn't going to be far above that; the whole platform was designed to tweak for effecienty.
I expect Merom will use significantly more power than Yonah, and be in the same realm as desktop A64 processors. Do expect it to use a higher full-load voltage than Yonah. Do expect it to not turn off the second core when not loaded. Do expect the power-saving cache design to be deactivated as well, so the chips can be competitive in performance.
Yonah turns off the second core when not in use, thus negating one of the really nice features of dual-core (zippy responsiveness, even under load). If you want that benefit, Yonah uses twice as much power at idle. Otherwise, you have to wait for the monitoring software to pick up on the increased load and wake up the second core. No doubt, AMD will do the same thing with their Turion X2 offering...this is just intended to highlight the power consumption perspective between the deaktop and mobile versions.
New video games though, have barely moved in price over the same period.
Right. Over the years prices have gone up only slightly, even though game development costs have skyrocketed. Insead, pack-ins and media have gotten cheaper to cover part of the burden, and a growing market has taken the rest of the slack.
Back about the time SF2 was released on consoles, I bought Master of Orion for 40 bucks. It came on 4 floppy disks, and came with a nice beefy manual.
Two years later, I paid 40 bucks for Transport Tycoon Deluxe. Still 40 bucks, but the game came on a cheaper-to-manufacture CD, and the manual was smaller.
A few years later, I bought Fallout 2 for 45 bucks. My extra 5 bucks bought me a beefy, well-styled manual.
Then I started paying 50 bucks for games a few years ago. This started with titles like Battlefield 1942 and Freelancer, both of which came with tiny manuals (and Freelancer didn't even include a jewelcase). About this time, game boxes got a lot smaller...just another way to cut the costs.
Now you can buy Battlefield 2 for $50, and it is a pinnacle of cost reduction: a plastic DVD-style case, containing a single DVD and a brief manual. There is actually more advertising material in the case than manual. This is not new...but I have never before bought a game with so much advertising INSIDE the package.
The game makers can't get any cheaper, unless you go with something like Steam. Thus, game prices are going to have to go up.
They don't have to pay taxes on the 83.3 million "earned" because they "lost" 11 million on the investment venture. The way the law is structured, you don't have to pay taxes on capital invested in German movie productions, only the net earnings.
Do the math: 94 million in, 83.3 million out = a loss. No taxes.
Not quite. The picture the article paints is a one-time transaction, not a long-term investment they intend to pay off.
Take a closer look at the Tomb Raider situation. They found investors willing to pony up 94 million dollars to buy the rights to Tomb Raider. Paramount then repurchased the film for 83.3 million, making almost 11 million on the deal.
So, you say, how do the Germans make money? Simple:
Suppose you made 94 million dollars in income this year, and lived in Germany. You might be upset by the fact that Germany's income tax tops out at 42.5%. Suddenly, your 94 million dolllar earnings has shrunk to 54 million, a loss of 40 million.
But, if you invest in this movie, and play by the letter of the law, your entire 94 million dollar investment cannot be taxed. So what if you lose 11 million in the tranaction, the government was going to TAX YOU for 40 million if you did nothing.
Thus, it truly is free money.
Yes, must agree.
I own an Asus A8V Deluxe (KT800 Pro), and it has been rock-solid for the last year. Via's drivers were easy to install and never gave me headaches.
And this is the kicker: I use a Soundblaster Audigy with my A8V.
You can't be serious. You're completely missing key components that add up to quite a pretty penny.
8 x 512Mb Samsung 1.2GHz GDDR3 chips ($50-70). If Microsoft is getting these for less than 6 bucks a pop, they're getting them for a STEAL. And considering how much the high-performance graphics industry is willing to pay for them, I don't see that happening right now. The price will, of course, come down significantly over time.
20GB SATA hard drive - no less than $40. The capacity doesn't matter...they just take whatever density single-platter drive they're selling in the mainstream and make up a special firmware run that only recognizes 20GB. The assembly costs of a drive cannot be reduced below some minimum.
Custom motherboard including ICs, assembly and testing - $40-50, minimum.
So, let's combine those minimums with your minimums:
Best case, the Xbox's major components cost $150 (CPU+GPU) + $130 (RAM, HDD, MB) = 280, MINIMUM. Add in the costs of non-trivial things like the case, the powersupply, the heatsinks and fans, the controller, the remote control, final assembly, and of course, distribution, and you've got an excellent chance of topping $400.
Don't forget that platform development and advertising have to be charged against the Xbox earnings to get the real cost of the device.
*note*
Did not intend to bold most of my statement.
Desktop sales are dropping. Laptop sales are growing. The two lines on the graph are crossing right about now. Next year, laptop sales are projected to outnumber desktop sales, and keep growing. I think Intel are exactly right to bet on the laptop market. AMD are mainly targetting the supercomputer, server, and workstation markets. These are low-volume, high-margin areas, and are ideally suited to a company with a good R&D team (lots of ex-Alpha people) and a lower volume production capacity.
I guess you havn't heard of the flexibility of the Athlon 64 platform. Unlike the P4 with Netburst, the Athlon 64 is capable of extreme performance at the high-end, and competitive, low-voltage and low-wattage performance on notebooks.
Take this handy fact: all Athlon 64 and Opteron chips currently assembled are capable of running at 1.0 GHz at 1.1v. This is the Cool 'n Quiet low-power mode. It may surprise you to know that the power usage for an Athlon 64 at this clock and voltage, at full load, is .
It is not hard to imagine how low-power the Turion MT line goes, when you consider that is runs at a full-speed, full-load voltage of 1.2v. You might imagine that with that low voltage, the MT line lives up to its competitive 25w max TDP. You might put two and two togther now and realize that the Dothan max TDP is in that same range.
You might further realize that the Turion MT is a FEIRCE competitor to the Pentium M, especially since, with the exception of older games that don't stress the FPU, the Athlon 64 and Pentium M match up well clock-for-clock (and I fully expect newer games to stress the FPU, especially now that physics engines are taking center-stage).
You might also notice that there is a very small markup on the MT line (1.2v, 25w TDP) over the ML line (1.4v, 35w TDP), and that the MT line is offered as fast as 2.2 GHz. AMD is having NO trouble producing enough of these low-power chips to meet demand.
I do expect Yonah and Merom to be more competitive, so things will certainly be interesting in 2006. But don't for a minute think that AMD's push into the server space with the Opteron means they can't challenge Intel in the low-power desktop and mobile realm. Merom itself has been pushed, and is is ahead of schedule, for the sole fact that Intel needed it last year.
You may think it's weird that AMD can compete in the server space and notebooks with one basic chip design, but Intel is going to be doing the same thing once Merom replaces netburst on the desktop front. They even have Merom-derrived server cores planned.
If you're buying a 64-bit core for that reason you're clearly a bit naive. You can have upto 36-bits of addressing in 32-bit cores for quite some time [the PAE feature] which is 16GB total physical addressible.
PAE has been around for years. It is a hack that allows up to 64GB of addressable memory.
The drawback is that it only allows 4GB per process, and the overhead of switching between processes is huge. x86-64 seeks to remedy these issues.
or the average desktop user the most benefit you get out of x86_64 is the extra GPR registers. Which oddly enough don't help you on the Intel side of the camp [most ALU tasks are the same speed on the 540 and 820 cores w.r.t. cycles/operation].
This is the obvious reason to consider running Windows XP-64 on an x86-64 processor...there is no other benefit besides the memory space that is worth mentioning. The key is, some programs gain more from x86-64 than others. This can be due to the following complication:
x86-64 makes all pointers double in size. A program that uses lots of pointers will increase the code size and cut the efficiency of the cache significantly, which reduces the performance gains of having additional registers.
As for why the Pentium 4 sucks under x86-64...it's likely the very reason I stated above. The processor is already reaching the limits of its bus in the IA-32 world...it is not hard to guess that the extra bandwidth required by the larger x86-64 code is erasing any gains the extra registers give you.
Unfortunately, I've never seen someone do an x86-64 performance test on a P4 with 800 MHz versus a similarly-clocked P4 with a 1066 MHZ bus, so it simply remains my best guess.
If you run servers with things like SSL you want a 64-bit core even if your website is otherwise lean on the processing requirement. AMD64s can do things like RSA handshakes a lot faster than the 32-bit and Intel counterparts.
If you run a server, the vendor usually offers all sorts of options, including Server 2003 x86-64. When you said retail, I was thinking "retail," as in systems at Best Buy. For a server, you should most definitely run x86-64.
Which makes me ask the question why do retail boxes bundle winxp32 with AMD64s?
There are lots of reasons.
Because few retail boxes ship with more than 1GB of ram.
Because there are all sorts of bugs to be worked out. WinXP-64 is still considered an experimental platform by most companies, even though it has seen full release.
There are still many devices lacking drivers. Imagine handling the tech support for consumers who buy some random USB device and are appalled when it doesn't work because the driver isn't compatible.
I've also heard that the implementation of WOW is clumsy, in that you can only run 32-bit programs from the "Program Files (x86)" folder. I'll bet I could show you quite a few older 32-bit programs that shit a brick when their path contains spaces or parenthesis.
Manufacturers basically have until Vista ships to catch up, and they're damn well going to take every second.
"The dual-core Yonah chip could very likely deliver performance greater than Apple's current G4-based PowerBooks."
A SINGLE-CORE Yonah should run circles around a G4 processor for the same amount of power. That was the whole point of this messy changeover. The dual-core versions, while consuming much more power under full load, should deliver unheard of performance.
AMD will also be releasing their dual-core Turion in 2006, which should make for a very competitive market. However, I am curious to see if AMD will make the step up to dual-channel memory for the dual-core Turions. The current models are already a tad memory starved with single-channel DDR-333.
THIS is why Apple chose x86.
Unfortunately, even AMD's "simple" ratings system can go wrong.
Take the Sempron as an example. The 3400+, which is a 2.0GHz processor with 256k cache, running on Socket 754.
The name would suggest this processor outperforms an Athlon 64 3200+ Socket 939 (2.0 GHz, 512k cache). But, as the specs suggest, the Athlon 64 3200+ beats it soundly.
AMD has gotten sloppy as of late with the Sempron. The obvious reason for this lax ratings system is because AMD wants the Sempron to compete directly with the Celeron. But this is a fool's errand simply because the Celeron is no longer sold by core speed, but by confusing model number.
Intel, of course, adopted these confusing model numbers so consumers could not make direct comparisons in terms of performance.
I wouldn't be surprised if the lax ratings of the Sempron are costing AMD more higher-priced Athlon 64 sales, just because the model number of the Sempron is higher. I mean, which so many confusing Intel model numbers, what ARE consumers supposed to compare the Sempron's model number to?
What, you were asleep when Valve's Gabe Newell announced that the Nvidia FX series had HUGE performance deficit while running in DX9 mode? The performance hit wass blamed on the number of available registers dropping by half in DX9 mode.
The performance hit was incredible at the time. After the botched release of the FX 5800 Ultra, the rest of the FX series had turned out to be competitive in DX8 / DX8.1 games currently availavble, so this was quite a surprise. [H]ardOCP summed up Valve's report on the following pages:
Performance in pure DX9 mode.
Nvidia FX-optimized "mixed mode" performance versus pure DX9.
The key quote:
The good news is Nvidia got faster [with the mixed-mode DX8/DX9 optimizations]. Bad news is that performance gains go away in the future as new DX9 functionality will be able to use fewer and fewer partial-precision functions.
I think that sums it up nicely. Battlefield 2 is a 100% DX9 game (hence the reason the GF4 and GF3 are not supported), and it performs like crap on the FX series.
The worst part is, the lack of registers seems to limit only the maximum performance of the faster FX-series cards. So, while DX9 mode only slows down the FX 5200 and 5600 slightly, the 5900 series is severly hampered.
The sad thing is. My favorite game from this genre is still RTCW. I just think the game play was so much better. Maybe the graphics weren't as advanced... but it was more fun. Knife fights under water... calling in air raids. Priming grenades before tossing them. It was a blast.
Sounds like you should be playing Quakeworld MegaTF.
Air raids? Snipers can call them in.
Priming grenades before you toss them? That's nothing.
How about carrying TWO different kinds of grenades, with different grenades for every class? And get this: you can prime and release a grenade WHILE YOU SHOOT YOU WEAPON, just like a bad-ass out of your favorite action movie!
And you can have all the underwater knife fights you want with the Spy class.
Hardware requirements? Don't make me laugh!
Hardware gets old. It doesn't help that you bought a card notorious for poor DX9 performance. Can you honestly say you didn't expect to see performance plummet in later games?
You can whine all you want, but you could always play something else.
Though I have matching 7800GTXs, I could just as easily pop one of them into another machine, and still SLI with a 6800 or even a 6600GTX board
Nvidia's official drivers do not allow you to mix different chipsets. So no, you cannot pair up a 6600 GT with whatever you want. You have to pair it with a 6600 GT, and that's a small upgrade.
The way the market is structured, you're usually better off paying more for a better card than buying low and upgrading later. The worst part is, some cards disappear from the market before the price can come down, like the 6800 Ultra. Good luck getting a reasonable price on that these days. This fits with my "fools" statement.
The newest games at 1600X1200 with full options on almost require SLI to play right
See my post about "rich" people buying SLI. You have to be rich to be able to drop $1000 on your video subsystem alone.
AMD hasn't consistenly offered better CPUs at a better price.
Back when they were lagging in the performance race, with the early XP line (Palomino) versus the P4 (Northwood), AMD was trying hard just to keep up. They priced their processors typically 20% below equivilant-performing Intel processors.
AMD also had a pathetic platform for the server space, which consisted of (at most) a 2-way Athlon MP system utilizing a single 266MHz bus. The only chipset available, the AMD 761MP, wasn't exactly a top performer.
Keep in mind: back in 2001, AMD had ZERO server presence. Now they own 10% of the server market, and they are a popular choice for supercomputing cluster projects. Most of that has come since the release of the Opteron. You can only grow so fast...10%, given the Opteron has only been out for 2.5 years, is quite impressive.
These days, AMD's average selling price has gone way up, and their sales have also been growing impressively, which is why the company has posted their first profitable quarters in years. And AMD is poised to grow dramatically in the next few years as Fab 35 ramps up, more than doubling their current production capacity.
The Athlon 64 marked Via crossing the threshold. The KT800 Pro is very stable, and works with everything I throw at it (including a Sound Blaster Audigy...imagine that, Creative and Via playing nice).
Now sure, Via doesn't have SLI, but the market is starting to get over SLI, and realize that it was simply a hypefest. Now only rich kids and fools buy SLI-capable boards with the intention of actually using it.
And Nvidia has recognized this...that's the reason why you can grab entry-level 939 SLI boards as low as $100.
The new chipsets Intel is working on will improve bus bandwidth available in multi-CPU systems.
Their new 4-socket chipset will have 4 separate busses in one northbridge. What this means is a big headache involving cache-coherency, And having four 64-bit busses is going to require more layers on the motherboard.
But the processors will get their bandwidth, and the performance will be impressive, for once. Unfortunately, the complexity means you won't see one of these in production for months.
And then, Intel has been working on their own "HyperTransport Killer", although it will probably not be all that impressive. I expect Intel to embrace HyperTransport within the next few years, especially with the new revisions of it coming down the pipe.
Just a clarification:
The power improvements in the Pentium D at idle using Enhanced Speedstep are not the trifle you seem to think they are.
The reduction in core speed (12.5%) also come with it a reduction in voltage (1.4 -> 1.2v).
Just do the math.
Your total power reduction is 12.5% (for frequency) + the reduction in voltage. Since power is related to the voltage squared, you get the following reduction from the voltage:
( 1 - 1.2^2 / 1.4^2 ) * 100 ~ 26%
So, you get a nearly 40% decrease in power usage. Hardly a measly 10w or so.
Not that this discounts the Athlon 64, it is an excellent platform in terms of efficiency. It is so capable and flexible, that the low-voltage Turion MT processors deliver competitive clock speeds AND performance-per-watt with the Pentium M.
Damn straight. They had a huge feature and performance advantage in the early 1990s, with powerful MIPS processors and their own custom 3D subsystems.
Under Jim Clark, SGI even proved they could create a powerful mass-market device by designing the N64, but then they dropped the ball and left Nintendo hanging on the next genration platform. They could have been huge as a console development house, but the company was unwilling to take such a risk.
They started using Intel processors and Windows NT for their workstations, just like everybody else. Then, they switched to using ATI graphics processors. Nobody was surprised when they couldn't compete with bigger players. SGI has just been waiting for a day to die.
Don't forget the insurance companies, they're a thriving pack of lies. Just save up hundreds of thousands of dollars in your emergency fund so you can:
* Put up a $50,000-80,000 bond (depending on the state) so you can drive legally without auto liability insurance. Why let Auto Insurance companies make money investing your premium, when you could lock a huge chunk of it away in a low-interest Bond?
* Set aside $200,000 to cover that unexpected house fire, because Homeowner's Insurance is a racket.
* Health Insurance? Who needs it...until you need that angioplasty. That'll be $30,000, thank you for playing.
Basically, debt, just like insurance, is a necessary evil in today's society.
Don't blame debt for people's misfortunes. These are the same kind of idiots who would build a house on sand (or below sea-level), and act amazed when the sea takes their house away.
Stupidity and foolishness are timeless human attributes. Debt is simply the latest way to take advantage of stupid or foolish people.
While we're on the subject, the tremendous growth in insurance itself, as well as minimum liability requirements, is a clear sign that the number of foolish / stupid people in the genepool (ie: not dying) are growing rapidly. So, basicalkly debt has been singled out simply because we have never had so many stupid people.
You know, it masquraded as a good review, until I read stupid-assed commentary like this:
Here, we see how the bloom effect starts to put a strain on the lower memory cards. The X800 and, in particular, the 6600 GT are the most memory-limited of these cards, but ATI's X800 does significantly better than the 6600 GT.
Welcome to Video Rendering 101. Tell me class, which card will be faster, and by how much:
The 12-pipe, 400 MHz core clock card (x800), or the 8-pipe, 500 MHz core card (6600 GT).
This isn't hard. The x800, when core-limited, should produce speeds 20% faster than the 6600 GT...and lord almighty, it's a miracle: the x800 is 20% faster than the 6600 GT with full HDR enabled! It must be the EXTRA 128MB RAM, or the 40% FASTER MEMORY SUBSYSTEM. It couldn't be the damn raw pixel processing power advantage.
And now class, why would the lower-end cards in this test show greater performance loss? Is it because Here, we see how the bloom effect starts to put a strain on the lower memory cards.
HELL NO.
It's called CPU-LIMITED. You can't measure true relative performance drops becuase the scene is CPU-limited to approximately 70fps. The 6600 GT is not even able to reach the 70fps mark without HDR, and suffers noticably with it on. The other cards scale as you would expect them to according to raw core clock speed, once you turn up the pixel processing requirements (full HDR), and the 7800 GTX is STILL CPU-limited.
And then, after mentioning it CLEARLY in the breakdown above that Valve's HDR implementation supports FSAA, AND after seeing plain-as-day that the 7800 GTX is still CPU-limited, the author doesn't try out FSAA performance. A 5-year old could write the same review.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if most of the language and pictures are verbatim from a Valve-supplied press pack.
You most certainly could purchase your very own Tualatin core. Intel just made a small change in the signaling logic to attempt to force users to buy a new motherboard, or upgrade to the new Pentium 4. Intel even sold a desktop chipset with full support for the Tualatin, called the i815E B-step.
Or, you could buy yourself a P3M.
And while we're talking about processrs that were READILY available back when the Epia was released, don't forget the P3 Coppermine 500E...with a peak consumption just under 9w, and better performance than even an 800MHz Ezra, it was a much better and readily available platform for low-power computing.
In addition, I didn't just mention Intel. If you bothered to read my whole post, you would have noticed that I mentioed you can make a DESKTOP (read: cheap and plentiful) AMD 64 solution use less power than a Nemiah of competitive core speed, and it will still outperform that Nemiah.
And it'a not as if Intel had the only competitive x86 low-power chip at the time the Epia was first released. Even though AMD wasn't exactly a low-power master at the time of the EPIA's release, they still had a competitive product: the Mobile K6-2. While it did not blow away the Epia like the Tualatin, it was competitive in performance-per-watt.
Basically, if VIA can make the C7M work, they're simply playing catch-up. If they manage to do so, it's about damn time. I've been waiting for 6 years for VIA to upgrade that anemic memory bus. Regardless of processing power, 2GB/s memory bandwidth just feels anemic in the rich environment of modern web browsing and GUIs.