time to invest in AMD?

[Comixbooks]

Consoles are going to steal the show maybe AMD will supply chips to the new systems I want to see the X-box 720 at E3.

 

[wurmy]

It took Microsoft 3 hardware generations to finally get the XBox 360 right, so what are you expecting from E3? More Red Rings of Death? -> during the demos no less?

You are not going to see the next true generation of consoles at E3 this year. If you do, or think you do, then it will be a failure. You need to look at how potential 4p resolution or even present 3D HD resolutions at 1080P simply destroy the ability of the current consoles to deliver at acceptable frame rates even IF the current consoles had enough video memory per bit, which they do not.

The next generation of consoles will be putting ownership of all of the tittles in "the cloud." No more re-selling games or being the "second owner." Both Microsoft and Sony will be beefing up their clouds to store ownership logic, and increasing local storage with large SSDs to store common content. Most games will not be playable unless a broadband connection is available. Console prices will rise to past $500-600 per unit at introduction, and your favorite Game Stop will need to Game Change or else disappear.

 

[wurmy]

That is a gross oversimplification. If it were easy to scale P6 as far as it has been, Intel would have done it over a decade ago and we'd have never seen Netburst in the first place.

Actually, it was easy. Intel always has at least two active CPU design teams, and it happened that the NetBurst team made the best case with their engineering data - before the internet exploded new applications and new data on to every PC with a connection.

The NetBurst architecture actually still lives on in even the Core series as Intel has incorporated lessons learned from NetBurst into even their latest offerings. Core would not be as good as it were today had Intel not learned from NetBurst. While a technological disappointment for some of us, NetBurst still made Intel tons of money, as did Hyper Threading.

As an American, I am grateful to be able to be able to choose between Intel, AMD, and nVidia offerings.

 

[wurmy]

In any other part of the world, our "least shitty" company would be the jewel of their economy and a source of national pride.

 

[High_Boost]

The next generation of consoles will be putting ownership of all of the tittles in "the cloud." No more re-selling games or being the "second owner."

That is the one thing I am looking forward to on the next consoles. It would be nice if games were distributed on thumb drives, but as cheap as those are now, they are still more expensive than cloud storage.

Consoles are mainly aimed at a young audience and kids dont take care of dvd's. I can't count the number of games my son has ruined between his wii and 360.

 

[pxc]

The NetBurst architecture actually still lives on in even the Core series as Intel has incorporated lessons learned from NetBurst into even their latest offerings.

As far as competition goes, Netburst was a necessary evil. Intel needed to experience that level of failure (arguably, we see AMD in Intel's Netburst position now, but with no way out other than an ARM hail mary). Trace cache/reorganizing the decode pipeline, engineering wide caches, "double-pumped" circuit techniques (running twice the clock of other circuits), HyperThreading and other techniques were all important lessons taken from Netburst.

I believe there were 2 main teams working on Netburst uarchs, but Core sort of came out of another research channel in Israel (Eben Mooley's team). It was promising enough for Intel to cancel future Netburst plans (Tejas) in favor of it. So yeah, it probably was relatively "easy" for Intel to make a new uarch from P6, like Netburst never existed. Some of the signs of that view are that Core did not include 64-bit or any of the improvements (or regressions) from Netburst. It was a lower clock speed design optimized for best performance per clock (and better per clock than P6). Core 2 of course was a much bigger uarch effort, with much less resemblance to P6 than Core, and the results show.

 

[Centauri]

As an American, I am grateful to be able to be able to choose between Intel, AMD, and nVidia offerings.

In any other part of the world, our "least shitty" company would be the jewel of their economy and a source of national pride.

Hmmm. So, uh, where exactly is this forcefully injected nationalism coming from and why do you feel it fits in this conversation?

I also take it you've never traveled, let alone to Germany, Japan or South Korea. We have plenty of competition.

 

[wurmy]

Thanks for pointing that out. my bad. I spent too much time drinking in a political forum and it kind of spewed out of me.

I've been to Japan and South Korea, but not Germany yet, but yeah, I don't really care to travel.