That's only DX11 cards/cards sold in 2010 since Nvidia dragged their feet on Fermi. When you look at the bigger picture (ie NOT just 2010), Nvidia is still far in the lead thanks to their relative dominance starting from the 6800 series and ending with the 280s.
Go reread your article bro, the very first sentence points out that their info is based off 2010 sales.
The steam survey is just that, it takes everyone who is using steam and counts if they have Nvidia or ATI. Clearly, Nvidia is a good deal in the lead.
So was General Motors, not so long ago. It still didn't ultimately change the fact that they made products that the market didn't want to buy.
I'm also not sure what the point is here. The original claim (not by you, of course) was that Nvidia's greater market share made games "more optimized" for Nvidia, but vague claims of that nature are inconsequential to the fact that any way you slice it, ati cards are a better value that run games faster for a given price paid.
Nvidia's only response to this fact has been to bottom out prices to the point of not even making a profit, and even then, it doesn't do much for most of their lineup. After only competing with the HD 4000 series by selling their cards for far less than they were designed to be sold for (because $600 280s just didn't compete well with $300 4870s), they spent six months literally having no video cards of note while Ati swept up the market with Evergreen.
Once Fermi came out, it was overcomplicated, overconsuming, overheating, overpriced, and under-performing. It barely matched the performance per dollar of Evergreen counting just the cards, and fell way behind there when you added in the additional energy costs, and the added price of the beefy mcbeefy power supply that one needed to own just to run Fermi. To make matters worse, Nvidia completely lacked mainstream parts for the lower-priced segments, so they barely competed in the enthusiast market, and failed totally in the mainstream market. The GTX465 failed to solve that problem, proving to be even more underperforming and power hungry. Even in the enthusiast market, where people will pay anything for the fastest card, the 5970 outstrips the 480, so even the maximum performance at any cost types had no reason to buy Nvidia cards. Basically, the only people who did/do were/are the brand-loyalty types.
By the time Nvidia got a functional mainstream-level chip out, the GF104, Evergreen had had dominance over most of the market for the better part of a year, and Northern Islands came hot on its coat tails, and Barts became an instant no-contest winner over the slower, more expensive GF104. With the 6850 beating out the 460, and the 6870 beating the 470, Nvidia is only being competitive with the 460 by bottoming out prices to WAY below what that card is designed to be sold at (precluding any real profits). Even then, the lead of the 6850 over the 1GB 460, while not enormous, is easily bigger than the ~5% difference in price (presently it's about $190 vs $180), being an average of 10% faster in Guru3d's review (that's counting the Farcry 2 outlier), and being between 10% and 15% faster in most games tested (that's basically the median average of their tests).
Even the "great" GTX580 isn't likely going to compete with the 6900 series, because even if Cayman somehow isn't as fast (doubtful given the stellar performance of Barts), it doesn't need to be, so much as it just needs to be vastly cheaper for the performance it offers. Given the history between these two companies with AMD's last three generations of cards, I think that's a given.
In short, Nvidia is really not doing that well, and games certainly don't better on them (again, that wasn't your claim anyways, but it's what started this little sub-discussion). In fact, their market performance has been so bad over the past year, that they weren't even MAKING higher end video cards for much of Q4 2009 and Q1 2010. Since then their performance has been sub-mediocre. They can't survive off of G80 era dominance forever (and that really WAS the last time Nvidia was notably dominant).
Originally posted by Quizzical
If you look at who has more cards out there, then yes, Nvidia has more than AMD. But AMD is selling more now than Nvidia, and has more cards of the more recent generations out there. I'm betting that older cards will tend to be retired from use before newer cards, and that alone means that if AMD and Nvidia were exactly even on sales from today onward, AMD would probably eventually pull ahead in market share on Steam.
Don't start talking about AMD as though they are some stellar company.
1) AMD uses INTEL's FABs to make their processors and thanks to the litigation with Intel, Intel was forced into doing three things..
~They can not update their Assembly Language which is what Intel and AMD processors are made with.
~They can not change the PCI-Express technology and are not allowed to release the successor to PCI-Express until 2015 - 2016 or unless all parties deem it necessary.
~AMD is allowed to lower prices to compete against Intel. Intel can not lower the price of their processor beyond a certain amount. This applies to selling processors under any conditions (specially bulk conditions).
You can read all of this in the actual settlement documentation which is plastered on practically every major AMD fanboy site out there. The agreement also screws Nvidia heavily too.
AMD loves talking about innovation, but are the ones suing all over the place to make the industry slow down so they can have time to release that innovation. Once released Intel releases something that blows things away. It is the complete reversal to the Athlon 64 single-core that wiped out Intel in gaming when they competed against the Pentium 4.
If I was Intel I would say "Our Fabs, Our rules" but thanks to everyone elses inability and power to sue, Intel has to provide others their resources to remain competitive. Intel remains one of the few companies that not just has created almost every component to a motherboard (NB, SB, Motherboard, Processor, Video (which sucks), except memory AND also owns the factories/foundries. Now they also make Hard Drives. All they need to do is make System Memory and you could buy a 100% Intel System. The one company ahead of Intel in a full design of all motherboard core components and processors + memory is Via.
The REASON why I have to wait an extra year or two for new ground-breaking technology is thanks to all the lawsuits that protect others by limiting intel's research and technological releases. Thanks AMD, for screwing the majority in favor of supporting the minority at the EXPENSE of still using your main rival's fabs to produce your chips.
ati and nvidia both make some good cards and some god awfull bargain junk
but nvidia beats ati hands down on update and support on the software end, cant use your fancy card on that new game when catalyst hasnt been updated in months and the current versions dont work with game.
Originally posted by Shinami Don't start talking about AMD as though they are some stellar company.
1) AMD uses INTEL's FABs to make their processors and thanks to the litigation with Intel, Intel was forced into doing three things..~They can not update their Assembly Language which is what Intel and AMD processors are made with.
~They can not change the PCI-Express technology and are not allowed to release the successor to PCI-Express until 2015 - 2016 or unless all parties deem it necessary.
~AMD is allowed to lower prices to compete against Intel. Intel can not lower the price of their processor beyond a certain amount. This applies to selling processors under any conditions (specially bulk conditions).
You can read all of this in the actual settlement documentation which is plastered on practically every major AMD fanboy site out there. The agreement also screws Nvidia heavily too.
AMD loves talking about innovation, but are the ones suing all over the place to make the industry slow down so they can have time to release that innovation. Once released Intel releases something that blows things away. It is the complete reversal to the Athlon 64 single-core that wiped out Intel in gaming when they competed against the Pentium 4.
If I was Intel I would say "Our Fabs, Our rules" but thanks to everyone elses inability and power to sue, Intel has to provide others their resources to remain competitive. Intel remains one of the few companies that not just has created almost every component to a motherboard (NB, SB, Motherboard, Processor, Video (which sucks), except memory AND also owns the factories/foundries. Now they also make Hard Drives. All they need to do is make System Memory and you could buy a 100% Intel System. The one company ahead of Intel in a full design of all motherboard core components and processors + memory is Via.
The REASON why I have to wait an extra year or two for new ground-breaking technology is thanks to all the lawsuits that protect others by limiting intel's research and technological releases. Thanks AMD, for screwing the majority in favor of supporting the minority at the EXPENSE of still using your main rival's fabs to produce your chips.
You've misrepresented everything about the settlement.
"1)" AMD could only produce their chips at AMD owned factories because of the strict interpretation of their old x86 license. The settlement does not force Intel to let AMD to use their fabs, it allows AMD to fab their chips where they please. Currently they have had to maintain a controlling stake in GlobalFoundries to meet the terms of the license that requires them to produce CPUs at a foundry owned by AMD. What this means in practice is that AMD will be able to further divest itself of GlobalFoundries even though their CPUs will still be made there. They will definitely not be made at Intel's superior fabrication plants.
"~They can not update their Assembly Language which is what Intel and AMD processors are made with."
Not sure what you're talking about here. I assume you mean they can not update the x86 instruction set. Which is a meaningless statement. Intel can't alter the x86 instruction set because then it wouldn't be x86. They can add extensions to it, and the settlement does not change this. The only thing dealing with this at all is that Intel is required to extend the x86 license VIA holds for another 5 years. AMD has a permanent x86 license. It says nothing about being unable to change x86, because Intel can't change it anyway or it would be broken.
"~They can not change the PCI-Express technology and are not allowed to release the successor to PCI-Express until 2015 - 2016 or unless all parties deem it necessary."
No, they just cannot discontinue the PCI-e technology, the only thing this does is force Intel to continue providing PCI-e slots on their motherboards for 5 years so they can't close their environment off and force people to use only Intel IGP's. Even if some new bus technology magically appeared, as long as PCI-e slots are still available on the board (like we have PCI and PCI-e slots on motherboards now and old motherboards had both PCI and ISA slots) they're fine. Furthermore, the successor to PCI-e 2.0 is PCI-e 3.0 anyway, which is still PCI-e technology - and there's no way we'll be past that within 5 years.
"~AMD is allowed to lower prices to compete against Intel. Intel can not lower the price of their processor beyond a certain amount. This applies to selling processors under any conditions (specially bulk conditions)." This is an important anti-monopoly rule. A company with deep pockets can sell at a loss until they force their competition out of business. That is actually illegal for a company in Intel's position to do because of its anti-competitive nature. But the main purpose of this was to change the strong arming Intel was doing that brought about the lawsuit to begin with - selling at discount to wholesalers who bought only Intel, and punishing those that purchased any AMD. If they didn't do this in the settlement the government would've told them the same thing pretty soon anyway.
"All they need to do is make System Memory and you could buy a 100% Intel System. The one company ahead of Intel in a full design of all motherboard core components and processors + memory is Via."
Yeaaa.... guess that woulda been great back in the P4 days when Intel thought marketing > technology huh? Woulda been nice if AMD never had an x86 license so they couldn't introduce the x64 extensions we use now in all AMD and Intel cpu's? And how are you gonna game if Intel ditches video card slots since you only need their 100% Intel system IGP?
Closing off the ecosystem and letting Intel create 100% closed systems would stagnate innovation entirely and that's what most of this settlement is trying to prevent.
Shinami, your post is so wildly wrong that it's going to take a while to correct. Noquarter has already taken his stab at doing so, and I'll take mine.
"AMD uses INTEL's FABs to make their processors and thanks to the litigation with Intel"
No. The previous x86 license agreement between AMD and Intel required both companies to make x86 chips only at their own in-house fabs. Fabs are tremendously expensive, so AMD wanted to sell off their fabs, and partially did so. Intel sued AMD over this, and part of the new x86 license agreement is that either company can design chips and have them built at whatever fabs they want--provided that the fab is willing to build the chips.
Today, AMD uses Global Foundries for their chips on an SOI process, which is formerly AMD's fabs before they mostly sold them off to ATIC, which is owned by Abu Dhabi. AMD uses TSMC for their chips on a bulk silicon process. Among chips already launched, x86 processors are on an SOI process and video cards are on a bulk silicon process. Bobcat is going to be x86 on a bulk silicon process and fabbed at TSMC. Rumors say that AMD will move some of their GPU production to Global Foundries.
The reason AMD wanted to sell off their fabs is that it's tremendously expensive to bring new process nodes up, and AMD was losing money on their fabs because they didn't have enough volume to cover the costs of process node research. Selling off the fabs means that now Global Foundries can pay to bring up a process node once, and then sell capacity on that process node to dozens of different companies, effectively spreading the node research costs much wider.
Intel doesn't let anyone else fab chips at their own in-house fabs. Nor do they have to. There apparently was a recent agreement that Intel would allow some other company to fab something; presumably Intel doesn't regard them as a competitor.
Furthermore, even if Intel did allow AMD to build processors at Intel fabs, AMD probably wouldn't want to. They'd (rightly) expect Intel to sabotage their designs every step of the way.
"They can not update their Assembly Language which is what Intel and AMD processors are made with."
There was nothing remotely like that in the settlement between Intel and AMD. There was a separate settlement between Intel and some US government agency that you might be incorrectly referring to.
Intel makes their own C++ compiler. Compilers have to check what instructions a processor has available so that they only ask it to execute instructions that the processor can handle. Normally, a compiler can check a flag for the processor to tell the compiler which instructions it can handle. Rather than doing that, Intel was simply having its compiler disable certain instructions on AMD processors, even if the processor could handle them just fine. Thus, code compiled with Intel's C++ compiler would run artificially worse on AMD processors.
This is a dirty business practice, but it's not illegal. Unless, of course, you advertise your compiler as being optimized for everything, in which case, you're defrauding whoever buys your compiler. As part of the settlement, if Intel does this in the future, they have to basically give a warning label on their compiler about it, and let customers make a decision on whether they really want to use Intel's C++ compiler. Furthermore, Intel had to pay for past customers who objected and want to switch compilers to buy a competitor's compiler so that they could recompile their code in a way that would be optimized for competitor's processors, too.
"They can not change the PCI-Express technology and are not allowed to release the successor to PCI-Express until 2015 - 2016 or unless all parties deem it necessary."
There was nothing remotely like that in Intel's settlement with AMD, either. Again, you're referring to Intel's settlement with the US government. Basically, Intel has to continue to use some version of PCI either for six years or until the industry moves to some other standard, whichever comes first. It could be any version of PCI or PCI Express, so this allows Intel to move to PCI Express 3.0 in a couple of years, or PCI Express 4.0 if there eventually is such a thing. This is something that was probably done to appease Nvidia, not AMD. AMD wouldn't mind seeing Intel chipsets drop the ability to add in discrete cards, as that would constitute Intel shooting themselves in the foot and make it so that anyone who wanted a video card had to buy an AMD processor and chipset to get it.
"AMD is allowed to lower prices to compete against Intel. Intel can not lower the price of their processor beyond a certain amount. This applies to selling processors under any conditions"
Intel can sell their processors for whatever price they want. If they want to sell their upcoming Core i7 2600K for $10 each to anyone who wants to buy one, they can. What they were doing that is illegal is to try to intimidate OEMs into not even offering AMD processors for sale. They'd charge one price to companies that sold both Intel and AMD processors, and another, lower price to companies that only sold Intel processors. They'd threaten not to sell companies any Intel processors at all when supply was tight. AMD was suing Intel over this, and Intel denies doing it. Intel promised not to do it in the future as part of their settlement with AMD. This was the main grievance that led to Intel agreeing to pay AMD $1.25 billion, rather than risking having to pay several times that if they lost in court.
"but are the ones suing all over the place to make the industry slow down so they can have time to release that innovation."
Not really. AMD was suing Intel, but that lawsuit is now settled. AMD isn't tremendously fond of lawsuits the way that, say, Rambus is. It's also worth noting that Intel was also suing AMD (which was also dropped in their settlement with AMD), and Nvidia is still suing Intel (though it's rumored that they've reached a settlement).
"Intel remains one of the few companies that not just has created almost every component to a motherboard"
Intel has made quite a few components. But I'm not aware of any Intel sound chip. Nor am I aware of Intel capacitors. There are a number of other such pieces that Intel doesn't make. I don't think Intel even manufacturers the motherboards that they put their own brand name on, though they presumably do at least design them.
I have tried both graphics card and I like ATI better because I have an AMD processor. My computer freezes when I use nVidia on my AMD setup but it works OK on the Intel setup. With the arrival of Cataclysm, which graphic card do you think will perform better?
First off (since i don't build systems for a living) this is much more what i think than what i know
I'm building a new system and am also wanting a new graph card, usually i would have gone straight for a nvidia but doing a bit of resaerch i can't find one good review of the fermi range and consistantly they get around 6/10 compared to an average 8/10 and above for the ati radeon. I think the reason for this is that the fermi is made to try and tap into the non-gamer more media oriented pc market and just went too far that way at its cost.
So if you are looking for a hardcore vid editing pc then nvidia is the way to go(and as already stated ati the way to go for a gming pc)
If you're like me and looking for a more general graphics card with an emphaisi on gaming things a a little more difficult. On a card to card basis ati beats nvidia every time as far as i can see. But if you take the support into account they come off about even. Ati a better card with worse support and nvidia a worse card with better support.
Having said that i think that the ati radeon represents a better investement as they may improve their support at no extra cost to you and may only look at buying a nvidia card if they regain some of the middle ground. Whereas if you go for a nvidia fermi then you are looking at maybe buying a new card no matter what. Unless you're only looking at a basic card in which case the nvidia 2xx are still a viable option.
I think you best bet is to state what mb and gfx card you have that are causing you trouble and see if anyone has a solution(either here or in a new post) and maybe state you budget for a new card and get some suggestions on what to look at and what to avoid.
Please don't speak on things you know nothing about. Ever.
Lol, as if you know what you are talking about. take your own advice bro!!
Who could have thought that WOW could bring super power like USA to its knees?
Originally posted by Arcken
To put it in a nutshell, our society is about to hit the fan, grades are dropping, obesity is going up,childhood the USA is going to lose its super power status before too long, but hey, as long as we have a cheap method to babysit our kids, all will be well no? Im picking on WoW btw because its the beast that made all of this possible
Comments
So was General Motors, not so long ago. It still didn't ultimately change the fact that they made products that the market didn't want to buy.
I'm also not sure what the point is here. The original claim (not by you, of course) was that Nvidia's greater market share made games "more optimized" for Nvidia, but vague claims of that nature are inconsequential to the fact that any way you slice it, ati cards are a better value that run games faster for a given price paid.
Nvidia's only response to this fact has been to bottom out prices to the point of not even making a profit, and even then, it doesn't do much for most of their lineup. After only competing with the HD 4000 series by selling their cards for far less than they were designed to be sold for (because $600 280s just didn't compete well with $300 4870s), they spent six months literally having no video cards of note while Ati swept up the market with Evergreen.
Once Fermi came out, it was overcomplicated, overconsuming, overheating, overpriced, and under-performing. It barely matched the performance per dollar of Evergreen counting just the cards, and fell way behind there when you added in the additional energy costs, and the added price of the beefy mcbeefy power supply that one needed to own just to run Fermi. To make matters worse, Nvidia completely lacked mainstream parts for the lower-priced segments, so they barely competed in the enthusiast market, and failed totally in the mainstream market. The GTX465 failed to solve that problem, proving to be even more underperforming and power hungry. Even in the enthusiast market, where people will pay anything for the fastest card, the 5970 outstrips the 480, so even the maximum performance at any cost types had no reason to buy Nvidia cards. Basically, the only people who did/do were/are the brand-loyalty types.
By the time Nvidia got a functional mainstream-level chip out, the GF104, Evergreen had had dominance over most of the market for the better part of a year, and Northern Islands came hot on its coat tails, and Barts became an instant no-contest winner over the slower, more expensive GF104. With the 6850 beating out the 460, and the 6870 beating the 470, Nvidia is only being competitive with the 460 by bottoming out prices to WAY below what that card is designed to be sold at (precluding any real profits). Even then, the lead of the 6850 over the 1GB 460, while not enormous, is easily bigger than the ~5% difference in price (presently it's about $190 vs $180), being an average of 10% faster in Guru3d's review (that's counting the Farcry 2 outlier), and being between 10% and 15% faster in most games tested (that's basically the median average of their tests).
Even the "great" GTX580 isn't likely going to compete with the 6900 series, because even if Cayman somehow isn't as fast (doubtful given the stellar performance of Barts), it doesn't need to be, so much as it just needs to be vastly cheaper for the performance it offers. Given the history between these two companies with AMD's last three generations of cards, I think that's a given.
In short, Nvidia is really not doing that well, and games certainly don't better on them (again, that wasn't your claim anyways, but it's what started this little sub-discussion). In fact, their market performance has been so bad over the past year, that they weren't even MAKING higher end video cards for much of Q4 2009 and Q1 2010. Since then their performance has been sub-mediocre. They can't survive off of G80 era dominance forever (and that really WAS the last time Nvidia was notably dominant).
This pretty much sums it up right here.
Don't start talking about AMD as though they are some stellar company.
1) AMD uses INTEL's FABs to make their processors and thanks to the litigation with Intel, Intel was forced into doing three things..
~They can not update their Assembly Language which is what Intel and AMD processors are made with.
~They can not change the PCI-Express technology and are not allowed to release the successor to PCI-Express until 2015 - 2016 or unless all parties deem it necessary.
~AMD is allowed to lower prices to compete against Intel. Intel can not lower the price of their processor beyond a certain amount. This applies to selling processors under any conditions (specially bulk conditions).
You can read all of this in the actual settlement documentation which is plastered on practically every major AMD fanboy site out there. The agreement also screws Nvidia heavily too.
AMD loves talking about innovation, but are the ones suing all over the place to make the industry slow down so they can have time to release that innovation. Once released Intel releases something that blows things away. It is the complete reversal to the Athlon 64 single-core that wiped out Intel in gaming when they competed against the Pentium 4.
If I was Intel I would say "Our Fabs, Our rules" but thanks to everyone elses inability and power to sue, Intel has to provide others their resources to remain competitive. Intel remains one of the few companies that not just has created almost every component to a motherboard (NB, SB, Motherboard, Processor, Video (which sucks), except memory AND also owns the factories/foundries. Now they also make Hard Drives. All they need to do is make System Memory and you could buy a 100% Intel System. The one company ahead of Intel in a full design of all motherboard core components and processors + memory is Via.
The REASON why I have to wait an extra year or two for new ground-breaking technology is thanks to all the lawsuits that protect others by limiting intel's research and technological releases. Thanks AMD, for screwing the majority in favor of supporting the minority at the EXPENSE of still using your main rival's fabs to produce your chips.
nvidia > ati
2 words sum it up
driver support
ati and nvidia both make some good cards and some god awfull bargain junk
but nvidia beats ati hands down on update and support on the software end, cant use your fancy card on that new game when catalyst hasnt been updated in months and the current versions dont work with game.
You've misrepresented everything about the settlement.
"1)" AMD could only produce their chips at AMD owned factories because of the strict interpretation of their old x86 license. The settlement does not force Intel to let AMD to use their fabs, it allows AMD to fab their chips where they please. Currently they have had to maintain a controlling stake in GlobalFoundries to meet the terms of the license that requires them to produce CPUs at a foundry owned by AMD. What this means in practice is that AMD will be able to further divest itself of GlobalFoundries even though their CPUs will still be made there. They will definitely not be made at Intel's superior fabrication plants.
"~They can not update their Assembly Language which is what Intel and AMD processors are made with."
Not sure what you're talking about here. I assume you mean they can not update the x86 instruction set. Which is a meaningless statement. Intel can't alter the x86 instruction set because then it wouldn't be x86. They can add extensions to it, and the settlement does not change this. The only thing dealing with this at all is that Intel is required to extend the x86 license VIA holds for another 5 years. AMD has a permanent x86 license. It says nothing about being unable to change x86, because Intel can't change it anyway or it would be broken.
"~They can not change the PCI-Express technology and are not allowed to release the successor to PCI-Express until 2015 - 2016 or unless all parties deem it necessary."
No, they just cannot discontinue the PCI-e technology, the only thing this does is force Intel to continue providing PCI-e slots on their motherboards for 5 years so they can't close their environment off and force people to use only Intel IGP's. Even if some new bus technology magically appeared, as long as PCI-e slots are still available on the board (like we have PCI and PCI-e slots on motherboards now and old motherboards had both PCI and ISA slots) they're fine. Furthermore, the successor to PCI-e 2.0 is PCI-e 3.0 anyway, which is still PCI-e technology - and there's no way we'll be past that within 5 years.
"~AMD is allowed to lower prices to compete against Intel. Intel can not lower the price of their processor beyond a certain amount. This applies to selling processors under any conditions (specially bulk conditions)."
This is an important anti-monopoly rule. A company with deep pockets can sell at a loss until they force their competition out of business. That is actually illegal for a company in Intel's position to do because of its anti-competitive nature. But the main purpose of this was to change the strong arming Intel was doing that brought about the lawsuit to begin with - selling at discount to wholesalers who bought only Intel, and punishing those that purchased any AMD. If they didn't do this in the settlement the government would've told them the same thing pretty soon anyway.
"All they need to do is make System Memory and you could buy a 100% Intel System. The one company ahead of Intel in a full design of all motherboard core components and processors + memory is Via."
Yeaaa.... guess that woulda been great back in the P4 days when Intel thought marketing > technology huh? Woulda been nice if AMD never had an x86 license so they couldn't introduce the x64 extensions we use now in all AMD and Intel cpu's? And how are you gonna game if Intel ditches video card slots since you only need their 100% Intel system IGP?
Closing off the ecosystem and letting Intel create 100% closed systems would stagnate innovation entirely and that's what most of this settlement is trying to prevent.
Shinami, your post is so wildly wrong that it's going to take a while to correct. Noquarter has already taken his stab at doing so, and I'll take mine.
"AMD uses INTEL's FABs to make their processors and thanks to the litigation with Intel"
No. The previous x86 license agreement between AMD and Intel required both companies to make x86 chips only at their own in-house fabs. Fabs are tremendously expensive, so AMD wanted to sell off their fabs, and partially did so. Intel sued AMD over this, and part of the new x86 license agreement is that either company can design chips and have them built at whatever fabs they want--provided that the fab is willing to build the chips.
Today, AMD uses Global Foundries for their chips on an SOI process, which is formerly AMD's fabs before they mostly sold them off to ATIC, which is owned by Abu Dhabi. AMD uses TSMC for their chips on a bulk silicon process. Among chips already launched, x86 processors are on an SOI process and video cards are on a bulk silicon process. Bobcat is going to be x86 on a bulk silicon process and fabbed at TSMC. Rumors say that AMD will move some of their GPU production to Global Foundries.
The reason AMD wanted to sell off their fabs is that it's tremendously expensive to bring new process nodes up, and AMD was losing money on their fabs because they didn't have enough volume to cover the costs of process node research. Selling off the fabs means that now Global Foundries can pay to bring up a process node once, and then sell capacity on that process node to dozens of different companies, effectively spreading the node research costs much wider.
Intel doesn't let anyone else fab chips at their own in-house fabs. Nor do they have to. There apparently was a recent agreement that Intel would allow some other company to fab something; presumably Intel doesn't regard them as a competitor.
Furthermore, even if Intel did allow AMD to build processors at Intel fabs, AMD probably wouldn't want to. They'd (rightly) expect Intel to sabotage their designs every step of the way.
"They can not update their Assembly Language which is what Intel and AMD processors are made with."
There was nothing remotely like that in the settlement between Intel and AMD. There was a separate settlement between Intel and some US government agency that you might be incorrectly referring to.
Intel makes their own C++ compiler. Compilers have to check what instructions a processor has available so that they only ask it to execute instructions that the processor can handle. Normally, a compiler can check a flag for the processor to tell the compiler which instructions it can handle. Rather than doing that, Intel was simply having its compiler disable certain instructions on AMD processors, even if the processor could handle them just fine. Thus, code compiled with Intel's C++ compiler would run artificially worse on AMD processors.
This is a dirty business practice, but it's not illegal. Unless, of course, you advertise your compiler as being optimized for everything, in which case, you're defrauding whoever buys your compiler. As part of the settlement, if Intel does this in the future, they have to basically give a warning label on their compiler about it, and let customers make a decision on whether they really want to use Intel's C++ compiler. Furthermore, Intel had to pay for past customers who objected and want to switch compilers to buy a competitor's compiler so that they could recompile their code in a way that would be optimized for competitor's processors, too.
"They can not change the PCI-Express technology and are not allowed to release the successor to PCI-Express until 2015 - 2016 or unless all parties deem it necessary."
There was nothing remotely like that in Intel's settlement with AMD, either. Again, you're referring to Intel's settlement with the US government. Basically, Intel has to continue to use some version of PCI either for six years or until the industry moves to some other standard, whichever comes first. It could be any version of PCI or PCI Express, so this allows Intel to move to PCI Express 3.0 in a couple of years, or PCI Express 4.0 if there eventually is such a thing. This is something that was probably done to appease Nvidia, not AMD. AMD wouldn't mind seeing Intel chipsets drop the ability to add in discrete cards, as that would constitute Intel shooting themselves in the foot and make it so that anyone who wanted a video card had to buy an AMD processor and chipset to get it.
"AMD is allowed to lower prices to compete against Intel. Intel can not lower the price of their processor beyond a certain amount. This applies to selling processors under any conditions"
Intel can sell their processors for whatever price they want. If they want to sell their upcoming Core i7 2600K for $10 each to anyone who wants to buy one, they can. What they were doing that is illegal is to try to intimidate OEMs into not even offering AMD processors for sale. They'd charge one price to companies that sold both Intel and AMD processors, and another, lower price to companies that only sold Intel processors. They'd threaten not to sell companies any Intel processors at all when supply was tight. AMD was suing Intel over this, and Intel denies doing it. Intel promised not to do it in the future as part of their settlement with AMD. This was the main grievance that led to Intel agreeing to pay AMD $1.25 billion, rather than risking having to pay several times that if they lost in court.
"but are the ones suing all over the place to make the industry slow down so they can have time to release that innovation."
Not really. AMD was suing Intel, but that lawsuit is now settled. AMD isn't tremendously fond of lawsuits the way that, say, Rambus is. It's also worth noting that Intel was also suing AMD (which was also dropped in their settlement with AMD), and Nvidia is still suing Intel (though it's rumored that they've reached a settlement).
"Intel remains one of the few companies that not just has created almost every component to a motherboard"
Intel has made quite a few components. But I'm not aware of any Intel sound chip. Nor am I aware of Intel capacitors. There are a number of other such pieces that Intel doesn't make. I don't think Intel even manufacturers the motherboards that they put their own brand name on, though they presumably do at least design them.
First off (since i don't build systems for a living) this is much more what i think than what i know
I'm building a new system and am also wanting a new graph card, usually i would have gone straight for a nvidia but doing a bit of resaerch i can't find one good review of the fermi range and consistantly they get around 6/10 compared to an average 8/10 and above for the ati radeon. I think the reason for this is that the fermi is made to try and tap into the non-gamer more media oriented pc market and just went too far that way at its cost.
So if you are looking for a hardcore vid editing pc then nvidia is the way to go(and as already stated ati the way to go for a gming pc)
If you're like me and looking for a more general graphics card with an emphaisi on gaming things a a little more difficult. On a card to card basis ati beats nvidia every time as far as i can see. But if you take the support into account they come off about even. Ati a better card with worse support and nvidia a worse card with better support.
Having said that i think that the ati radeon represents a better investement as they may improve their support at no extra cost to you and may only look at buying a nvidia card if they regain some of the middle ground. Whereas if you go for a nvidia fermi then you are looking at maybe buying a new card no matter what. Unless you're only looking at a basic card in which case the nvidia 2xx are still a viable option.
I think you best bet is to state what mb and gfx card you have that are causing you trouble and see if anyone has a solution(either here or in a new post) and maybe state you budget for a new card and get some suggestions on what to look at and what to avoid.
Lol, as if you know what you are talking about. take your own advice bro!!
Who could have thought that WOW could bring super power like USA to its knees?
Originally posted by Arcken
To put it in a nutshell, our society is about to hit the fan, grades are dropping, obesity is going up,childhood the USA is going to lose its super power status before too long, but hey, as long as we have a cheap method to babysit our kids, all will be well no?
Im picking on WoW btw because its the beast that made all of this possible