Posts by ZeroGravitas 5 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jul 2009
Paying 120 grand for a hi-fi system and then playing a record that was probably recorded for £100 - back in the days when all that bought you was a few hours in a recording studio with the acoustics (and probably atmosphere) of a public toilet... that's my kind of guy !!
My copy was bought second hand so the audio quality never even even reached the heady heights it would have had when newly pressed, still loved it to bits though.
Yes I recall that the very early machines (of which I had one) contained the OS on EPROMs (which have a transparant window in the top, to enable UV erasing) and there were both expensive and re-usable, which is why they wanted them back.
I'm pretty sure that I paid something like £1200 for my A310 (including the Acorn branded monitor) and was somewhat taken aback to arrive home one day and find that the courier had left the boxes piled up on the doorstep (and I wasn't living in a very salubrious area!). Luckily no harm done and I was blown away by the speed and the graphics - there really was nothing comparable at the time for the home user.
I went on to upgrade to the RiscPC before finally turning to the "Dark Side" of a Windows PC late in the 486 era, primarily because it had better games. Still miss the speed of boot and simple "rightness" of the engineering (software and hardware) those old RiscOs machines.
AMD currently has a slightly larger market share than Nvidia for desktop/laptop graphics doesn't it? So is Intel / NVidia "the lion's share of the market"? Just as likely to be Intel / AMD I'd have thought... unless I'm missing the point and you're talking about something other than graphics.
Agree with the basic issue you raise though - the nuances of the dominant cpu (Intel) are far more likely to get an optimised code path compared to carrying out a major re-write to support a radical improvement (AMD) but with a smaller installed base. AMD need to make it very easy for developers to get a decent advantage from this new hardware.
Go and try World of Tanks (although there are only a few weeks left for the open beta now).
I let my WoW sub lapse because I've been playing back-to-back team deathmatches (there are 15 tanks per team) every evening for the last few months. Very, very addictive.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
