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Friday, March 19, 2010
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Comments
by: Theo Valich on 5/4/2009
Well, funny to hear somebody mentioning DFI... the trumph card that actually killed of Abit was the horoscope-driven decision of Abit's CEO to send Scott and Vivian to "one year paid vacation", just not to work for the competition. that short-sightedness saw Scott and Vivian merging with Coco and a brilliant bond between three seasoned marketeers an an engineer of Oskar's fame and LANParty was born. This moved one relatively unknown player in the retail space [but a decently sized OEM] and DFI became the overclocking legend. LANParty was actually an idea of a certain marketing lady... she ended up in Corsair US and now in ASUS.

All in all, everytime I read about some enthusiastic move that changed the course of the industry, I remember all of the fascinating people I had the opportunity to meet and even become friends with. In this industry, we do tend to put accent on machines too much, but the fact of the matter is that every machine, every component is a product of love'n'labor by numerous unsung heroes in various R&D departments.

Ah, a trip down the memory lane... still remember my first system, a gateway workstation with Pentium 100MHz and 128MB of PC66 SDRAM memory... memory was priced as the CPU itself... darn, I am old... ;)
by: MB on 5/2/2009
The mobile barton (with the unlocked multiplier using nforce2) was the first computer I built myself, and it does bring back fond memories of before everything was locked down, and Hector cashed in all of AMD's karma chips. Those were great days, even little stuff like the cpu pin mods. The astute mentioning of the mobile barton in this article is indeed a GREAT example of why people love(d) AMD.

In my opinion, it's these things (not counting the old FSB jumpers) that started and grew the market for enthusiasts, which has increasingly trickled down to the mainstream.

I wonder where DFI would be without the original Nforce2 LP2 or Infinity. That 3.3v in-BIOS (or more with pot tuning on the power supply) really helped with the ol' BH-5! I think people remember these things; innovation through freedom with your hardware. That, and that Oskar Wu is the man with the plan.

With the invent of things like unlockable cores and cache, it really does feel like the glory days have returned: Phenom II is in the same relative place to Core2 that the misc K7s were to P4; less powerful, less expensive, but greater flexibility to tinker with. Sure, you might not get an extra core, but the possibility is limited by the hardware; not marketing. The new things like independent core clocks are nice too, as they give you the ability to find your weakest link while maximizing the strongest one, allowing you to getting the most possible out of YOUR chunk of silicon.
All in all, it makes you feel like you got what you paid for, and I think that's all that people ask.

For a company like AMD, 'the little guy' in the market place, this connection with their customers is crucial; they are not Intel, and they will likely never be Intel. The loyalty to them stems from those products like the K7; a loyalty that diminished quickly after AMD jacked prices up on the first X2's until Intel caught up through Conroe. AMD sold out it's core audience for the money it could make on it's temporary technological superiority; a bitter memory that almost surpasses how great the k7 was.

I hope now that AMD has regained it's 'engineer-like' attitude towards the consumer use of their chips, something that really does synergize with ATi (remember those countless BIOS mods to higher-end chips, and now software voltage adjustments?) that they keep it this way. They will not survive by trying to be another Intel.

This "Open Hardware" as well as the "open standards" stance they take with their products (Openness to Crossfire on chipsets other than their own since the beginning, OpenCL use versus something like proprietary like cuda/physX)is what makes AMD special, and not just number 2 in their respective markets. Stronger technology PLUS this attitude is what makes them have a possibility for market share growth. They must not abandon it when or if they succeed on the pure tech lead again, or risk what happened last time they betrayed the loyalists AND lost the technology lead - almost going bankrupt. Only next time, odds are they wouldn't survive.

The world doesn't need another Intel, nor does it need the closed mindset of nvidia.

God save AMD. Great to have them back.
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March 20, 2010, 20:00 UTC

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