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In reply to pope's actual question: PC gamers are flooding towards consoles anyways. If AMD went bankrupt, Intel would be split and competition would again start up (as we have covered in all the other lordpope topics). I see no point in going any further on the subject.

PC gaming and AMD do not go hand in hand. Even if AMD were to fall (Given that they seriously wouldn't, with the Barcelona and R600 coming out, which should give Intel a run for their money) I seriously doubt that PC gaming would fall. There is still a viable market in gaming. AMD/ATI know what their doing and will be in the game for a very, very long time. Even though they might fall some day, a company such as Microsoft, (Lord Forbid) Nvidia, or IBM could possibly by the rights to AMD/ATI's graphics processors technology and the X86 Architecture that that they have/

The consoles have graphic chips which are made by the , you guessed it, big name graphics companies. That measn if the computer gaming market stagnates, so will the console market.

But, really, if the graphics market were to stagnate, then a $500 card would be something of a piece of junk, yet much more future-proof than a $500 card today. Imagine if you could own a cuttingedge card for 3 years without needing to upgrade.

Actually, if there were no more advances in hardware, the advances would come from the software end.

Windows Prystine 6500 anyone? Only 80MB including office! Starts in .2 seconds!

Microsoft will just buy AMD if it gets into trouble 8)

*Gates opens his wallet*
I've only got 20Billion in cash, will that be enough?

Huh??

I would like understand why you think that the fate of PC gaming and AMD's fate are linked. Please explain.

I would like understand why you think that the fate of PC gaming and AMD's fate are linked. Please explain. Agreed,the PC worlds bastard child AMD will probably survive,and continue to be #2.

Yeah...

Have you ever heard that MS doesn't consider google to be a serious competitor? I read this in red hearing somewhere. They consider IBM to me their real competitor. IBM is a much larger corporation than MS, though it doesn't have the same cash flow.

If AMD went belly up, maybe IBM would buy AMD, they are in the chip business, or maybe MS will buy AMD to imitate IBM.

I think a major flaw with the downloading music/games logic is that the companies that create the products would simply be buying them if they couldn't get it otherwise. I think a majority of people would just deal without. But on the other hand, it is their intellectual property and they have the right to call out anyone who violates it.

This is why I like Valve's steam so much, because it pretty much puts an end to piracy. If you notice, a lot of games that come out on steam are no where near the regular retail price of other games on the shelves at stores. Not only can they not be pirated, the developers of the games do not have to go through a publisher and make their money a lot faster which in turn could lead to better development of games.

Anyways back on topic.

I think of the Intel/AMD war as a boxing match. For years Intel repeatedly laid the smack down on AMD until the Athlon came out. AMD for the past 4 or so years (until the release of the core2 duo) beat the living piss out of Intel. Now Intel sacked up, came back in and is now winning the match.

The only stipulation is, that there is no round limit, and both companies will fight until the other one is completely knocked out. The good news is that does not look reasonable for either side anytime soon.

best post If I were gates Id do that in a split second.

Then I would build fabs and hire engineers.And then I would take my share of the market,,,rip it right out of intels greedy paws,turn the price war around and put so much heat on intel ,blue steam would come from their ears.

Sounds nice, but could we survive having to download all the weekly patches required to keep the hardware running and hackers out of it?

But it's in no-one's interest to knock the other one out! The existence of AMD is the best way for Intel to avoid unnecessary scrutinisation of its operations. This isn't a conspiracy theory or anything; merely a point about incentives. If Intel did succeed in knocking AMD out of business, then some Intel executives' heads will roll. The aim is to get the opponent staggering around the ring, not really throwing any effective punches. So long as the 'match' is still on, no one's going to be looking in Intel's boxing shorts to see if they've stashed any carrots in there...

Think the metaphor might have run away with me there. You get the point, though.

best post If I were gates Id do that in a split second.

Then I would build fabs and hire engineers.And then I would take my share of the market,,,rip it right out of intels greedy paws,turn the price war around and put so much heat on intel ,blue steam would come from their ears.

some times you feel like you are herding goats.

I cant help but like pope mostly;But his threads are maniacal.

Sounds interesting, but it is highly unlikely the SEC would allow MS the OS monopoly to buy a CPU company. That has the makings of an even bigger monopoly all over it because MS would write OS code to optimize their architecture running Intel out of business.

best post If I were gates Id do that in a split second.

Then I would build fabs and hire engineers.And then I would take my share of the market,,,rip it right out of intels greedy paws,turn the price war around and put so much heat on intel ,blue steam would come from their ears.

some times you feel like you are herding goats.

I cant help but like pope mostly;But his threads are maniacal.

it wouldn't be that easy...after all, Intel has big pockets too, and well, if MS bought out AMD, I think IBM would change it's position on technology exchange with AMD without even giving a 2nd thought...

The metaphor was fine. Good post.

I will just go back to my pentium 2 400Mhz, play starcraft, half life, red alert, unreal tournament, ahh the good ole days..

On a slightly different note, both my son and myself have been dissapointed in a lot of the games produced in the past couple years. To some extent, we feel that PC gaming is failing anyway. Too many games come out in less then beta form. I mean, the first thing that happens when we buy a game is to start loading all the patches we can find, and then sometimes find so many bugs that we loose interest and go find something else to do. And then there are the games in which the bugs never get fixed. Starcraft, etc were pretty playable out of the box. Wish there had been a Starcraft 3, similar to Warcraft 3. Though Warcraft 3 had a few things we didn't like, we thought it was fairly good overall. And, after all, Starcraft: Broodwars set a stage for a next episode, one that never got made.

I know this post was on the first page and all, and starcraft is probably...hopefully unrelated to this topic, but didn't blizzard start making a starcraft 2? I saw pics of a RTS game with zoom functions and 3d units. That was a while ago though, did they stop making it?

Methinks a little research wouldn't go amiss...

I believe it was called Starcraft 3, similar to the Warcraft 3 idea, but there were problems in the company and the plug got pulled on the project. Wish they had pursued it, as it probably would have sold great. Think of the lines of people for the Burning Crusade and you should get the idea. Unfortunately, whoever owns Blizzard now doesn't think that way, or at least doesn't understand it.