Replies to post #8365 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[UpNDown]

wbmw, re AMD's 64-bit strategy

The flaw in your logic is that there is no 64-bit market

The flaw in your argument is that Microsoft is scared that Linux will dominate the AMD64 market. Microsoft absolutely must bring out competitive product, or risk losing a substantial portion of their market. Witness the European cities that are going Linux. Microsoft is not too big to be cut down to size by a Linux competitor that would be able to run rings around it, given a 64-bit vs. 32-bit advantage.

[yourbankruptcy]

wbmw, I recall a very recent interview with a big game developer (was he from UT or Doom?), who said that 64-bit video rendering will become the absolutely "must" in nearest future, maybe even this year.

Sure, he was talking about graphics chips that must be 64-bit now. But this is the processor that will manage the huge arrays of 64-bit matrices in the memory.

Moreover, AFAIK the graphics card only render the 3D picture on the screen. It can't compute by itself what objects are visible and what not. It can't model the objects. I'm not sure, but I think the scene rotations are performed completely in cpu.

So that stuff is ready to be migrated all over to 64-bit, but this is just Intel, which is holding this process. Once A64 grabs at least 10% of the market, the 64-bit will be routinely introduced in all new games. So, starting from 6 months from now, A64 will beat comparable Prescotts in all modern gaming benchmarks, maybe except the very top sup-$600 model.

[Haddock]

The flaw in your logic is that there is no 64-bit market. AMD has to create one by making the software available and having systems to sell. A big question is how well they can market this, given that many apps don't seem to get a performance boost from the 64-bit instructions.

How about by concentrating ont he apps that do get a performance boost. Or is that too obvious?

(Of course for those apps that don't, and they seem to be in the minority, people can run the 32 bit version, but perhaps I already mentioned that).