Posts by kevin

AMD three-core Phenoms to ship March 2008?

The only difference...

..is that those chips are downgraded to existing production part lines. i.e. a P4 that gets downgraded to a Celeron or a Conroe that gets knocked down from an E6700 2.6Ghz to say an entry level E2140 1.6Ghz. AMD is creating an entirely new line of unplanned chips based on duds.

This is a huge set back in terms of marketing and PR. Everyone who pays attention to the CPU market (read OEMs, since Dell and the like are the real customers here) knows this move is 100% because AMD is having terrible fab problems with 65nm, and you're going to have to convince those people (again OEMs) that these tri's can be sold to Joe Sixpack. Can they take garbage and polish it shiny enough to fool the laymen? Only time will tell, but I'm not going to be holding my breath.

They could downgrade the "tricores" to dualies and probably make just as much money, even though they'd sell at lower prices, simply because you don't have to spend the money to basically create a new niche market in such a short time frame.

They're not going to make good margins on these chips, heck I'd be sursprised if they break even after all the advertising and sales pitches that are going to have to be made just to get OEMs to buy in and then convince Joe sixpack to buy one, and if Intel jumps into the marketing fray with ads bashing these gimped quads, then they're really going to be loosing money. If I was Intel's marketing department, I'd be pretty damn excited about rubbing AMD's face deeper in the mud over th next 4-6 months.

Nice Simon

The art is apparently not completely lost, LOL. Seriouly, though this is the big flag of defeat being waived by AMD. Not only do they have enough bad yield chips from quads to justify supplying an entire new line of crappy CPUs, but they're planing on this continuing thru 45nm?!?! What is their development team thinking? FIX THE PROBLEM THAT'S CAUSING THE APPARENTLY ATROCIOUS YEILDS. Don't try and pawn your broken crap on consumers.

I can't wait till carmakers start selling 4 and 6 cylinder engines with a dead cylinder as 3 and 5 cylinder models. I really hope that Intel lines up a nice ad campaign poking fun at this tragic path AMD is on. When people were telling them make lemonade from lemons 6 months ago this is not what they had in mind as the solution...

Analysts ecstatic over AMD's $226m loss in Q3

Forced Intel to slash prices???

Arthur what are you on, because you need to start sharing with the whole class... AMD has never forced Intel to slash prices, Intel did that to bury AMD further in the hole they've been digging. Intel posted $1.86 BILLION in profits, up over 40% despite dropping prices. AMD is not hurting Intel's (or Intel's investors) bottom line one bit. No one at Intel is crying because they didn't break the $2B mark for the QUARTER.

AMD is about to get pounded into the ground with 45nm Quads coming out at speeds that will put delayed 65nm AMD chips to shame. Intel is ramping up to 32nm fabs with working samples already made, while AMD can't even make full batches of quads on 65nm, hence the tricore debacle that will only hurt AMD in the long run.

AMD has to start making full batches of 65's at higher speeds just to stay afloat the next year. Tricores need to not happen for them. If they get caught in the Tri market ony two possible outcomes exist:

1) They can't make good 65nm quads even at the current low clock speeds, which means they have problems that will need to be fixed before 32nm can even be considered, putting them even farther behind Intel

OR

2) They fix 65nm and get great quad yeilds, but have customers they promised Tris to, which mean sabotaging a good quad to make a tri and thus selling a great expensive quad chip at a crappy cheap tricore price.

Record labels to ditch CD singles for USB Flash drives

If it was cheaper maybe...

I can understand when CDs first came out there was a premium since it was a new technology, but USB sticks are NOT new and are dirt cheap so there's no way in hell people are going to fork over more for them.

Plus it's not like you can plug a usb stick into your home/car stereo yet so you're gonna have to burn it to a cd or port it over to an mp3 player anyway.

Maybe they should try something new if they want to increase sales, like charging what the ONE song is really worth at release, say $2. I mean, that's still too much, but at least REASONABLE.

FTC fines three men $330,000 for pushing spyware

Wow..

So by this logic I should be able to rob a bank and only have to give back a portion of what I stole if I get caught? Who is writing these crappy laws???

EU online gambling firms demand $100 bil in WTO dispute

Rooting for Antigua

As an American I hope Antigua can really stick it to us on this one. I'm getting a little tired of our government kicking around the little guy. Hopefully in November we'll see the WTO suspend the copyright and patent laws for Antigua. That's pretty much the only way that real change is going to happen. Not to mention I'd love to see the guys at the RIAA and MPAA crap their pants when a ruling like that comes down. It's a win-win situation for Antigua and US consumers. We'll get music and movies for what they really should cost and Antigua gets its economy back :-)

You better believe that once $1-$5 CDs and DVDs start hitting the markets the RIAA and MPAA will force the US to repeal it's online gambling laws. So while we'll lose the cheap CD and DVDs after a short spat, we'll get back the ability to play poker online again so we won't need the crappy movies/pop music to satisfy our boredom anymore.

AT&T turns screws on iPhone unlocker

I thought..

.. that the iPhone was supposed to be this do it all, give consumers what they've been wanting on their portable devices product. At least that's what you are told in every iPhone advertisement. How ironic that now people are realizing that it doesn't do everything they want, and when they try to find ways to make it their own, the company that supposedly prides itself as a icon of fostering individuality would stomp the customer down and tell them "You'll use it the way I want you to." You don't keep customers with this kind of mentality.

I also don't see how any company could be sued for providing mods like this. This is not the same ground as stealing copyrights or DeCSS. You're not Isn't it a bit like a car company trying to sue a non OEM parts supplier? You bought the phone, so you own it. I would imagine chipping a phone to make it do something different would fall under the same proctection as chipping a car ECU. It may void your warranty but it certainly isn't illegal.

The Return of iTuneski

The real problem..

..is that record companies are finding themselves less and less necessary in today's world, but fighting tooth and nail to maintain their strangle hold. We live in a time where anyone can record and post an MP3 or other format online and sell direct to the customer almost instantly.

Studio recording equipment is relatively cheap to buy or rent and you don't need to produce a physical album in high volumes. Yes there's CDs, but face fact, in another 10 years you'll look at a music CD like we now all look at records and cassettes. Our kids are not going to be carrying around CDs.

At some point more people are going to realize that record labels are just a bloated middle man stealing all the profits from the artist. If you subtract the huge percentage the record label is keeping for itself music becomes much, much cheaper.

Google will carpet YouTube with 'overlay' ads

5 times more aggrevated?

Don't people who make these statstics realize that most people are only clicking on those @#$%$# ads by accident trying to find out how to turn them off. Somehow I doubt those ads are generating five times more sales for their customers. What's most aggrevating is the ad usually covers up whatever was important about the movie clip.