The Angry Phenom: Part 2

[Guest element]

I welcome any advances in On board GPU. Leads to less problems with the other 85% of people. like A_G said. All they want is to play crap games on their crap. Leave them be I say.

 

Also it allows people like us to have viable slow boxes that may actually play crap like dawn of war, the new Age Of empires and Counter strike or BF. All ways handy when your mint 99000XTX Platinum rig decides to take a dump on your OS.

[HarryTaco]

Face it most people want a computer thats as easy and simple and maitenance free as your proverbial toaster. They dont want to know about the CPU,GPU, Ram, Integrated Sound or Video Card. They want to push a button, get a picture like TV, and have a Shirt eatin grin playin Redneck Football Country Rockstar. When their computer starts crashing and running SLOW they want to call Geek Squad to come to the rescue, do a registry clean and a Defrag and get them up and running for the next year at $50 bux a pop. Or Heaven send their neighborly shadetree computer expert so spend a couple hours making things right again for the price of a pizza and a few beers.

Intel knew this long ago, Microsoft knows it, Dells knows it. So why shouldnt AMD cash in on the great 'Merican computer cash cow as well. God knows they can use the money.

Pretty soon it will be a crime to open the side of your computer case and monkey around with it as u will no longer OWN your computer, just lease for two years and trade in on the next latest greatest you can afford.

[Angry_Games]

Rant suggests there's something wrong about it. So what exactly is wrong with AMD of 2007 and beyond:

 

- taking risks even Intel isn't ready to do?

- thinking outside the box?

- trying to do too much new stuff simultaneously?

- is it wrong to move ahead in making a complete AMD computer solution possible beyond the usual integrated GPU stuff?

- at last making concrete steps in giving the open-source drivers development momentum?

- making human mistakes?

 

I'm not challenging anything you write Angry_Games and I'm not saying that AMD is doing great in all aspects, I'm simply interested in grasping why some few enthusiast like us should be upset. Even though being one I tend to not give a toss anymore about whether the "classical hardware enthusiast" is fed with new toys or not; the classical scenario gets less interesting and other forms of computing more interesting.

 

A bigger challenge I see is for software to catch up and effectively make use of new possibilities. Computing today is a mix of stone-age thinking and brave new inventions.

lol I think you misunderstand what I'm saying this thread. Rant doesn't always mean I'm going to take someone to task for doing some dumbass things (usually, but not always).

 

My rant isn't directed AT AMD (this is where I think you misunderstand).

 

My rant is direct AT YOU, the enthusiast who has spent the better part of 3+ months . and moaning about how AMD "dropped the ball" and let "evil Intel do better", blah blah blah.

 

(and not YOU kim specifically, don't misunderstand that part lol, more at YOU as in ALL COMPUTER DORKS WHO THINK AMD SHOULD CONTINUE TO CATER TO THEM PERSONALLY INSTEAD OF CATERING TO THE 85% MASSES WHO ARE THE ONES WHO ACTUALLY DRIVE THIS INDUSTRY FORWARD BY CONTINUING TO PURCHASE IN MASS QUANTITIES ALLOWING COMPANIES LIKE AMD TO CATER SLIGHTLY TO ENTHUSIASTS LIKE US WITH SPECIAL/ODD PARTS THAT ARE FOR US "TOP DOGS")

 

*ahem*

 

lol

 

a lot of us here have finally begun to understand reality (as I see it by the posts in this and the original Phenom thread). This is a good thing.

 

Go to a place like XS however and the entire place is nearly burned to the ground from enthusiast rioting about AMD "dropping the ball".

[momoceio]

The only thing I'm upset with AMD about is that they shipped processors that they new were faulty...other then that I like the route they are going and I thought the idea of having powerful on-board graphics was a cool idea. I don't know if they are still working on it but weren't they trying to get a total integrated solution where you would have the GPU right on the mobo?

 

Maybe you should title your rants as "The Happy Phenom" or "The Angry Phenom" based on whether or not you're ripping the subject a new one..lol

 

[KimTjik]

Oh, I see! LOL I'm slow sometimes! Sorry for that A_G.

 

It seems like we have a similar opinion. XS is just one of probably hundreds of sites experiencing the same. Even if we would exclude the natural benefit of actually selling what the masses will buy, it's also a pity to see how locked up some are in their thinking. It's like you should as a natural law replicate the same thing perpetually, and never break lose from a previously working concept. When I see comments like "Phenom sucks, it's nothing more than a modified X2" I'm starting to doubt that I'm visiting the right forum.

 

Some seem to have a closer relationship to their hardware brands than to their families! The paradox though - and this is what's really difficult for me to understand - is that the same guys tend to not be the slightest interested in tech anyway, besides staring at benchmarks.

 

Which manufacturer will be the first to dump the old BIOS dinosaur? That's something I'm still waiting on, and it seems to take forever.

[pattobw]

lol

 

Go to a place like XS however and the entire place is nearly burned to the ground from enthusiast rioting about AMD "dropping the ball".

 

You are completely right about this one. You can't even read through a single Phenom thread without two or three people jumping in and saying "core 2 is better", even after the everyone acknowledges that it is better according to most benchmarks. I sometimes think the only . life some of these guys have is when they jerk off to their Intel Inside sticker.

 

If you take the time to read through the threads, you will notice that the phenom is slowly getting better and better as the bioses get better, whoa :eek: big suprise. As to the two people above who commented about AMD releasing a defective chip, I find it very fascinating that not a single review site or any of the many users on XS (who are pounding the crap out of these chips in testing) experienced the TLB lockup. Some have had crashes which they initially blamed on the TLB bug, but eventually it was shown to be a either a bios or Vista problem. This shows how rare this bug is for desktop users.

 

The main problem with Phenom is it doesn't overclock as well, and as Angry Games has stated numerous times, 99% of the computer buyers don't overclock anyway.

 

Let's face it. You have a phenom X4 overclocked to 3000 MHz or Intel Q6600 overclocked to 3600-3800 Mhz. How often are you keeping 4 cores 100% loaded 24 hours a day? Not very often, even for an engineer like myself.

 

Look at how well the new ATI cards are doing: 80-85% of the performance of the high end Nvidia card and 25-30% cheaper. The mass market is where the money is to be made.

[Praz]

Let's face it. You have a phenom X4 overclocked to 3000 MHz or Intel Q6600 overclocked to 3600-3800 Mhz. How often are you keeping 4 cores 100% loaded 24 hours a day? Not very often, even for an engineer like myself.

We are all look forward to the day that an over-the-counter retail Phenom will actually be capable of that speed.

[lucky1]

Face it most people want a computer thats as easy and simple and maitenance free as your proverbial toaster. They dont want to know about the CPU,GPU, Ram, Integrated Sound or Video Card. They want to push a button, get a picture like TV, and have a Shirt eatin grin playin Redneck Football Country Rockstar. When their computer starts crashing and running SLOW they want to call Geek Squad to come to the rescue, do a registry clean and a Defrag and get them up and running for the next year at $50 bux a pop. Or Heaven send their neighborly shadetree computer expert so spend a couple hours making things right again for the price of a pizza and a few beers.

Intel knew this long ago, Microsoft knows it, Dells knows it. So why shouldnt AMD cash in on the great 'Merican computer cash cow as well. God knows they can use the money.

Pretty soon it will be a crime to open the side of your computer case and monkey around with it as u will no longer OWN your computer, just lease for two years and trade in on the next latest greatest you can afford.

 

This is true, I realize that as an enthusiast I recognize certain flaws in products that the average consumer would not see nor would they even care about. This is also why companies like emachines stay in business, or why wal-mart is able to sell through cheap computers (like those linux systems pre-installed with Ubuntu - and this does not speak poorly of Ubuntu).

 

AMD should strive to target this market, but at the same time AMD needs the server market (high performance, low power consumption) because these are the sales that generate the most revenue. The enthusiast market is a byproduct of advances targeted towards the server market, but it still generates high revenue turnover, because AMD can price these processors high. The margins aren't as high when you're targeting price conscious consumers.

[Guest element]

That's why we have Opterons for server. Semprons for the masses.