AMD writing down the ~$3.2 billion goodwill assumed in ATi purchase

On Sun, 16 Dec 2007 10:12:28 -0500, Xocyll
wrote:

I thought MDK one wouldn't run except on a pentium?

You are indeed right. It was MDK and it needed a P90 minimum to run. I
never played it even though I still own the copy that I bought way
back when I learn that lesson the hard way.

It wasn't an overdrive chip though. It was a proper CPU in it's own
right. I do remember the Overdrive chips though and knew a few people
that bought them and regretted it.

I also remember lusting after a "blisteringly fast" P200 system and
not being able to afford it. I think my first Pentium beyond the
200mhz mark was a 233MHZ MMX system. That was actually rather good and
lasted me several years. I played POD on it until my eyes were red
raw.

The next major jump for me was a PII 400MHZ complete with a supposedly
breathtakingly fast 32MB RagePro AGP card complimented by 2 x Voodoo 2
cards utilising SLI.

I remember being all excited because one of the free games I got with
it was "G-Police" which was supposed to be a game optimised for AGP.
It also had "Incoming" which was heralded as being the same new
fangled thing. It was also the first PC that I owned that had a DVD
ROM drive with it.

Those were the days. Back then 400MHZ was way more power than anything
could utilise. For about a whole week anyway.

--
Rob

serious snippage

|
| It's Intel for me at the moment though. They seem to offer the best
| performance to cost ratio. I've had an ATi graphics card for the last
| 3 years but at the moment it looks like Nvidia is going to supply my
| first ever DX-10 card.
|
| I really hope that AMD's acquisition of ATi doesn't turn out for the
| worse. We need them to keep the market place competitive. I don't have
| any have any allegiance to any vendor, I just want whatever delivers
| the best performance for the kind of money that I can afford. The idea
| of a competitive market place seems to be completely lost on the
| "fanboy" types that enjoy gloating when a rival vendor runs into
| trouble.
|

Don't count ATi out yet on the DX-10 front, particularly if you are looking
at low- to mid-range cards... I've been hearing great things about their
new HD 3850, which comes with an HD decoder, Shader 4.1 and DX-10.1 support
(which the 8800GT lacks)... And draws quite a bit less power than the HD
2900 (from what I understand, haven't seen the actual numbers on this yet).
Drawing less power is a trend I'd love to see, I'm tired of seeing cards
that are just throwing gobs of power to the GPU and basically requiring you
to rewire your house with heavier circuits just to be able to run the power
supplies needed to drive your new "cutting edge" gaming rig... In these
days of smaller cheaper lighter faster with being "green" so important, it's
so funny watching the video card companies throw "green" out the window.

Anyhow, I've always been an nVidia user, and for serious bleeding-edge
graphics power, they still can't seem to be beat... But it looks like ATi
is at least getting out of the starting gate, let's hope they keep improving
and keep nVidia on their toes. AMD could use the revenue :-)

CoinSpin

On Mon, 17 Dec 2007 09:03:55 -0500, "CoinSpin"
wrote:

slightly serious snippage

Anyhow, I've always been an nVidia user, and for serious bleeding-edge
graphics power, they still can't seem to be beat... But it looks like ATi
is at least getting out of the starting gate, let's hope they keep improving
and keep nVidia on their toes. AMD could use the revenue :-)

Thanks for the tip about the next offering from ATi. Maybe it's not a
done deal for me yet after all.

--
Rob