Posted 11/17/09 at 01:47:35 PM by Loyd Case

In the past year, AMD seems to have been taking a sort of “strategy du jour” approach. We ship low cost processors! We do low power CPUs! Our parts are great for overclockers! We love home theater PCs!

Those messages weren’t really different from anything Intel, the 900 pound velociraptor in the CPU  business, would offer up, but there was always a tinge of desperation. This became more noticeable as Intel slowly and methodically stripped away whatever technology edge AMD had. Intel’s Nehalem was really the last straw: AMD couldn’t even claim “true quad core” any longer.

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Posted 11/03/09 at 11:45:00 AM by Loyd Case

Whenever I think about Games for Windows Live, I feel like Charlie Brown, trying to kick the football that Lucy is holding. Ever optimistic, Charlie runs at the ball, only to have it jerked away at the last second. Games for Windows Live is like that – heavy on of promises, light on delivery. Someone needs to wrestle Windows gaming from the gaming group at Microsoft and give it back to the Windows team.

In other words, give the Games for Windows task to someone at Microsoft who actually cares about the PC. Windows 7 has been an impressive success, and it would be great of the team that’s responsible for making a better Windows for the PC take on the chore of making a better gaming experience for Windows.

Right now PC gaming at Microsoft lives in the Entertainment and Devices division, those edgy folks who brought you the Xbox, Xbox 360, Zune, Windows Mobile and Windows Automotive. While the Xbox 360 is finally profitable, the system has certainly has had its issues – red ring of death, anyone?

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Posted 10/20/09 at 12:00:00 PM by Loyd Case

Windows 7 is almost upon us.

It’s odd to write those words, because most of the tech press has been using, commenting and reviewing Microsoft’s new progeny for months now. Maximum PC proclaimed it to be “unquestionably the best version of Windows that Microsoft has ever released, and is the true successor to Windows XP.” I’d certainly agree with Will Smith’s assessment.

Given all the hoopla, Windows 7 almost seems like old hat. (When’s Windows 8 coming out again?) But for normal humans who don’t travel at Internet speeds, Windows 7 arrives on October 22nd. And for Microsoft, Windows 7 is something of a missed opportunity.

Wait, what?

To understand what I mean, we have to go back in time.

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Posted 10/06/09 at 12:00:00 PM by Loyd Case

As a developer of graphics technology, Nvidia has been incredibly successful. Despite severe competitive pressure from AMD, Nvidia’s desktop GPUs still hold the number one market share, though AMD recently upped the ante with the release of the Radeon HD 5870, which is hands down the fastest single GPU card today.

It’s clear, though, after Nvidia’s recent GPU Technology Conference, that the company’s aspirations lie well beyond building graphics chips. That’s not a revelation – Nvidia’s been saying this for several years now. For an industry observer, though, the GPU Tech Conference lays out Nvidia’s model for moving beyond just graphics.

That model, ironically, is Intel.

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Posted 09/22/09 at 12:30:00 PM by Loyd Case

So AMD’s ATI graphics division has got something in the works that supports up to six monitors.

If you’ve ever navigated even two displays with a mouse, you may realize something: multiple, high resolution displays may be outstripping the mouse’s capability as a primary user interface tool. Now toss in six 30-inch monitors – 24 whopping megapixels in all – and you’ve got a real problem. Even if you drop that to six more affordable 1920x1080 displays, that’s still over 12 megapixels you need to navigate. Just visually tracking the mouse cursor becomes problematic.

Still, it's a setup I’d love to have.

What’s needed for huge pixel count displays is multi-touch. Windows 7 now incorporates an actually useful multi-touch display capability, but it’s currently relegated to all-in-one PCs with multi-touch, a handful of laptops and the expensive (at $12,500 a pop) Microsoft Surface. Still, multi-touch isn’t perfect.

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Posted 09/10/09 at 12:00:00 PM by Loyd Case

Francois Piednoel is worried.

For those of you who have never met Francois, he’s a member of the performance marketing team at Intel. It’s always entertaining to carry on a conversation with Francois. He was the guy at Intel who first steered me to the idea of building small systems around an X58 micro ATX motherboard and undervolting the CPU while maintaining the reference clock speed. This is sort of the inverse of overclocking, and results in pretty high performance systems that run cooler and quieter than the norm. What worries Piednoel, though, is this: what are desktop users ever going to do with six cores?

Moore’s Law means we get more CPUs with more and more transistors. Or we get smaller CPUs with the same number of transistors as past products. But what are the practical benefits for users?

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