Random news and AMD seeks funds

[Quakindude]

Imation has aquired TDK in a move that's bound to make Imation an even larger storage media monster than it already is.

There's been a smallish update in the burgeoning battle, read - Class action lawsuit, to achieve better stability with NVidia drivers in Vista. Brian S at Nvidia (NZone) Forums has pulled his puppet out of the closet to regurgitate Nvidia's company manifesto of driver excuses and blame balancing. Look around those forums for comments from yours truly directed at the ever excuse ready, and easily flustered, Brian S.

Nvidia has released a new set of Vista Video Drivers with a revision number of 158.18, a jump from the 10x.xx series of drivers. Maybe this is a promising indicator since I've had no TDR (Timeout Detection and Recovery) errors since switching to them. Also, the ACPI issues seem to be better since the driver update. My computer no longer hangs trying to come out of sleep mode. The jury is still out on the gaming performance of these new drivers though.

I've stated in our forums here that I've had very bad luck with allowing Windows Vista to automatically update my video drivers. Sure, I'm an idiot for allowing Windows to control something so enthusiast oriented as video drivers, but when a company makes claims and builds in features to take care of your driver updates with ease, they damn sure need to make your performance better, or at a minimum, the same. Not kill your whole friggin OS install due to one driver download. The "Power Users" of the world, those who only know where the power button is for troubleshooting, shouldn't have this issue tacked on to the many already documented about Microsoft's less than stellar implementation of Vista.

AMD, expressing beyond the shadow of a doubt that Intel is putting the ass-whuppin of the decade on them, is asking investor's for $2.2B in additional funds to float the company. This coming hot on the heels of AMD's purchase of ATI for $5.4B last year and a reported $611 million in first quarter losses this year. The underdog may be heading for a dirt nap as postulated by our highly esteemed Paul Lilly. I was in total agreement with Paul on the topic, but was secretly hoping the deep down AMD fanboi in me would arise soon, stomping my shiny new E6600 into Intel's smarmy ass. However, smarmy-ness aside, Intel is battling with their eyes on the green-checkered flag and AMD won't just take themselves down. Like a drowning victim, I expect AMD will vehemently latch onto ATI's revenues to help float their primary mission of CPU manufacturing, leading to hardscrabble times for the well known graphics giant ATI. Perhaps someone will bail AMD out before ATI suffers too badly though. In the interest of lower prices and market diversity, I hope that if AMD does go down, someone plucks ATI from the ashes. AMD would be a Phoenix though. Rising from the crater that may or not be created by its crashing, AMD is too deeply rooted in the CPU manufacturing world to disappear altogether.


There's my thoughts after catching up on a few things today. I'll try to get more caught up as the days go by and I get used to being exhausted 24/7.

[screwballl]

wow, another beer or two and that would have been almost understandable

My take is that AMD has something under wraps that will kick them into overdrive and make our precious E6600 look like a Pentium2 (we can hope).


As for Vista, well I have previously stated that power users need to stick with XP for another year or two.

[gvblake22]

Originally Posted by screwballl

My take is that AMD has something under wraps that will kick them into overdrive and make our precious E6600 look like a Pentium2 (we can hope).

I don't know man, I have a feeling if AMD had something to good behind the curtain, they would say so. the fact that they are so tight-lipped about Barcelona/K10 kindof worries me. I feel like I remember there being a fair number of ES chips floating around when the first Athlon 64 X2 dual core chips were being developed. But no such thing seems to exist for K10, which makes me thing it isn't going to be anything earth shattering. Most likely better than current AM2 chips, and maybe even better than Core 2's in some ways. But if K10 was capable of pounding the Core 2 Duo's into the ground, then I think we would have seen some leakage of chips and/or benchmarks by now.

Originally Posted by screwballl

As for Vista, well I have previously stated that power users need to stick with XP for another year or two.

Agreed.

[Jokerswild]

The future holds a single company as Intel gobbles up EA, asus and crucial to go along with nvidia in their quest for world dominance.

[Lead Head]

Originally Posted by gvblake22

I don't know man, I have a feeling if AMD had something to good behind the curtain, they would say so. the fact that they are so tight-lipped about Barcelona/K10 kindof worries me. I feel like I remember there being a fair number of ES chips floating around when the first Athlon 64 X2 dual core chips were being developed. But no such thing seems to exist for K10, which makes me thing it isn't going to be anything earth shattering. Most likely better than current AM2 chips, and maybe even better than Core 2's in some ways. But if K10 was capable of pounding the Core 2 Duo's into the ground, then I think we would have seen some leakage of chips and/or benchmarks by now.


Agreed.

Don't forget that the X2 was based on the proven A64 architecture, and people already had a taste of what they were getting with Dual Opteron rigs and such. But no one has any idea on K10. How much info did AMD leak about k8 before it came out?

[wtcnbrwndo4u]

Ehh, I really like Vista: it doesn't lock up like my XP does... I wish I didn't f' up my install from that repartition.

I'm way too lazy to get it back on. Haha. I'll do it when I grab that new hard drive.