Title says it all. But here's a thousand more words just to say it more elaborately. Everything from Sega is way more fun as a retro gamer to collect for than any other game company. It's true, and if you don't already agree, or if you do and you just need to hear someone else corroborate your opinion, then here's why:
What do retro game collectors like to collect? Whatever's plentiful, pretty much. The more obscure or notable, the better. What did Sega produce all of its life? Tons of shit. Consoles, add-ons, accessories, games... Just a buttload of everything they could think of, all of it interesting in some way.
Sega embraced the cutting edge. This started with the arcades, particularly in the late 80s with games like Hang-On and Out Run, which not only used state-of-the-art sprite-scaling hardware but featured super-sized cabinet systems with ridable vehicles that moved and interacted with the game. Later when it came to 3D, they scaled multi-million dollar aerospace simulator parts down to consumer-level arcade systems, and eventually the Sega Saturn. They were among the first fully-featured 3D consumer graphics in the industry. Unquestionably Sega was always on the cusp of innovation.
When it came to the console market, this meant they were always trying to one-up their competition. The first Sega console to make it outside of Japan, the Sega Master System, featured a number of add-ons, including one that allowed for 3D active-shudder technology on CRT-based TVs, something only just now being reintroduced. In Japan, the Master System was suped-up with the 3D feature built in, and easily upgraded sound that allowed for sophisticated MIDI sequences more akin to the Genesis than its 8-bit brethren. All model one Sega Master systems regardless of region had access to a secondary game media in the form of ROM cards. These were very similar in appearance to TurboGraphix-16's HuCards that would appear a few years later.
The Genesis is of course the most infamous for add-ons and accessories. Most variants of the system are fully back-compatible with Sega Master System games, but in an odd decision, the cartridge slot won't fit them. You had to buy the Power Base Converter, which didn't work on model two Genesis systems; or the UK-exclusive Master System Converter II, which did work on the model two, but couldn't play Sega Cards, only cartridges.
Then there were the two most famous add-ons for the system, which this time pushed its capabilities forward. The Sega CD add-on wasn't the first time a game console could use CDs, but it was close to it. Despite adding a second processor and more memory, games were only slightly enhanced from vanilla Genesis games, with the only real innovation being some very limited FMV playback. It was considered during its development to expand the on-screen color capability of the system, but it was decided the additional cost (an estimated $50) would impair its success (see FAQ). Had this been included, it might have rendered the 32x add-on completely pointless.
The 32x was pretty much pointless anyway, with only 30-something games released for it and a lifespan of basically one year. It used some of the hardware that would later be put in the Saturn, but with extremely limited memory. It was intended to transition customers to the new platform and keep the Genesis going. Instead customers just ignored it and waited for the next generation, in many cases skipping over Sega entirely once news circulated of the PlayStation and Nintendo 64.
Then there were all the different hardware revisions. In NA, the Master System saw two major revisions, which in addition to the converters on the Genesis and Game Gear gives collectors four options for playing Master System cartridges.
The Genesis was particularly ridiculous. It saw three major revisions in NA (four if you count the officially licensed Firecore clone console), plus the CDX model which also played Sega CD games. Then there was the portable Nomad, and the JVC X'Eye, a licensed third-party Genesis console with the Sega CD hardware implemented. On top of that there was the Pioneer Laseractive System with modules called PACs that allowed for videogames, one of which played Genesis games (with CD games playable on the main system's disc tray). So for the most hardcore collectors out there, you could have up to eight official ways of playing Genesis cartridges. This is of course excluding unofficial retro consoles that use emulation hardware.
All these add-ons and revisions often cost consumers hundreds of dollars, but today almost all of them can be had fairly inexpensively. Few other companies provide so much hardware and sub-libraries of games, and tons of obscure stuff for totally accessible prices is a total win for collectors.
Then there's the Sega Saturn, an under-appreciated console that can be had for a really low price these days. It has several diamonds in the rough within its library, though granted many were available on the PlayStation or PC. The Dreamcast got a little more love from consumers, but it can be had for just as cheaply, and its game library is even better.
It's ironic that the thing that ultimately killed Sega, pouring tons of R&D and production/marketing money into an ill-fated train of excessive hardware introductions is the thing that makes them the most fun and interesting for collectors. There's possibly more demand for their defunct products now, when they're cheap, than there ever was when they were new. They're fun to talk about, they're fun to show people, and they're fun to research and buy.
My favorite is the Sega CDX, an extremely compact Genesis variant intended to be part home console, part portable Discman wannabe. It's hard to imagine how they thought there'd be demand for such a thing, especially coupled with its $400 asking price, but now it's a hot ticket item for collectors. It fits in almost any space, works with virtually everything made for the Genesis, and is an incredibly slick piece of hardware even by today's standards. Clone systems can barely compete with its convenience. It's a little on the pricier side than most Sega hardware, but at $150-170, it's a respectable deal, and a damn fine addition to a retro enthusiast's shelf.
Best part of it all is finding and appreciating all the stuff you never knew existed from Sega. The Sega CD actually has a number of great titles hidden amongst the FMV-ridden trash. Even the 32x has great ports of After Burner and Space Harrier, not to mention original titles like Knuckles Kaotix, Kolibri, and Tempo. Discovering these games and enjoying them helps you appreciate all the things Sega had to offer, without the stigma that consumers had during the 90s. In terms of diversity, value, and potential fun, no other game company comes close. It just took almost twenty years for people to see it.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Looking ahead at the Vita
It's 2012, and as of today, the PlayStation Vita is only two weeks away. New games are continuously being announced for it, like Unit 13 and Mortal Kombat. Games are up for sale on PSN, Taco Bell is doing a promotion for giving away the system, and the early bundles are getting ready to ship out a week early to impatient pre-orderers. Hype is mounting for the new handheld that could, and it's taking on a lot more followers as it grows.
The Vita is not without its challenges. Heavy on the minds of Sony and the most hardcore industry followers is the abysmal sales in Japan following a single week of decent launch numbers. Like the 3DS before it, many take it as a bad omen with far-reaching implications. Calling it dead before it's had a chance at long-term success might seem dumb to most, but there a handful of folks with a mentality of absolutes, and a whole news industry that makes that sort of speculative sensationalism their business. Of course, some said the same things about the PSP, but somewhere out there it eventually felt out a place for a foothold, and rose to phenomenal success in an isolated, but no less fervent niche. It's always better late than never.
The 3DS took some maneuvering to negotiate its current success, and it wasn't without its scuff marks. Some might say the $80 price drop tarnished its brand, and injured gamers' trust in Nintendo. But while it might have seemed desperate and a little dirty, it did the deed, combined with some key must-haves that were shoved out the doors in time for the Yuletide season. It's in a position now of repeating some of its predecessor's early success, and that's nothing to wrinkle your nose at.
But is that what it's going to take for Sony to see similar results with the Vita? The $250 price point may seem like a good deal for the hardware sandwiched between those touch panels, but it comes with an asterisk at the end pointing to some nasty hidden costs that diminish its value for most people. Sony looks to be hoping their pockets will feel a little fuller if they can get consumers to pay for arbitrarily-priced memory cards specially suited to their device, at not-so-cutting-edge storage capacities. How many games can you fit in 8GB? If we're talking current-gen caliber HD titles, probably not a whole lot.
Estimates put the cost of the actual parts at around $160 (this includes 3G), meaning Sony has a little wiggle room to play with the price -- a lot more than they usually get with their hardware. Supposedly Nintendo went from an even wider margin, down to a loss on each system sold after its infamous rollback, and though it may actually have more cash in reserve for such losses than Sony, it could mean that something in the realm of a $50 drop off of the base model wouldn't be out of the question, especially if speculation regarding the limited future of the 3G model turns out to be true. Sony may be better off discontinuing the more expensive SKU rather than dropping its price if it doesn't sell very well, and that will simplify the buying process for consumers and put the Vita in an overall more attractive position.
The big question is whether or not such a move will be necessary once we finally find out how the rest of the world takes to the new system. Most will argue that the launch library has more western appeal than Japanese appeal, and the same may go for the system itself, where flashy HD graphics may not be a big deal to a population still celebrating the virtues of the PSP. Sony had little choice releasing the Vita when they did, but for Japan, any time would have been too early with Sony's first portable still reigning supreme. It may be in their best interest to push the Vita more heavily in foreign countries and let Japan bask in the glow of cheap, outdated hardware for a while longer.
If I was a betting man I'd say the Vita will do extremely well out of the gate, which isn't exactly a controversial prediction to make. With a larger population, and a better suited audience, that initial sales week will look a great deal better than Japan's did, and the fall-off won't be nearly as drastic. Supposing Sony can keep the fire burning with some good releases at a consistent clip, I see the Vita as being the polar opposite of the PSP: a success elsewhere in the world while slow-to-start in the land of the rising Godzilla. While I'm sure Sony's hometown holds a special place in their heart, I don't think they'll mind such an outcome, since in the end, Europe and North America pull in the big bucks, not Japan. If down the road Japan eventually drops the PSP for its younger brother, they'll be fine with that too, but in a surprising twist the 3DS may prove to be even more competition there. These things seem to be decided by the release of one super-mega game, and Sony definitely does not carry any certainty in that regard.
The question is, does simply being new give the 3DS the legs to last the marathon of this generation, or will its technical similarities with PSP eventually catch up with it and leave the Vita the only true contender? The Wii proved past conventions wrong, and may well inform the future for Nintendo's handheld, especially since the portable arena is seldom a market driven by hardware superiority. Personally, the Vita is everything I could ever hope for in a handheld, and while the 3DS has some great games already, and a hopeful future, its somewhat lackluster presence in my gaming schedule feels like it may be more of an omen for its future than any sales charts can tell. It may very well be that the greater part of the gamer market will feel the same way, once all the Mario games have come and gone and they crave something new to play. That didn't matter in the end for the Wii, but then its sales as of late haven't been so hot, have they?
The Vita is not without its challenges. Heavy on the minds of Sony and the most hardcore industry followers is the abysmal sales in Japan following a single week of decent launch numbers. Like the 3DS before it, many take it as a bad omen with far-reaching implications. Calling it dead before it's had a chance at long-term success might seem dumb to most, but there a handful of folks with a mentality of absolutes, and a whole news industry that makes that sort of speculative sensationalism their business. Of course, some said the same things about the PSP, but somewhere out there it eventually felt out a place for a foothold, and rose to phenomenal success in an isolated, but no less fervent niche. It's always better late than never.
The 3DS took some maneuvering to negotiate its current success, and it wasn't without its scuff marks. Some might say the $80 price drop tarnished its brand, and injured gamers' trust in Nintendo. But while it might have seemed desperate and a little dirty, it did the deed, combined with some key must-haves that were shoved out the doors in time for the Yuletide season. It's in a position now of repeating some of its predecessor's early success, and that's nothing to wrinkle your nose at.
But is that what it's going to take for Sony to see similar results with the Vita? The $250 price point may seem like a good deal for the hardware sandwiched between those touch panels, but it comes with an asterisk at the end pointing to some nasty hidden costs that diminish its value for most people. Sony looks to be hoping their pockets will feel a little fuller if they can get consumers to pay for arbitrarily-priced memory cards specially suited to their device, at not-so-cutting-edge storage capacities. How many games can you fit in 8GB? If we're talking current-gen caliber HD titles, probably not a whole lot.
Estimates put the cost of the actual parts at around $160 (this includes 3G), meaning Sony has a little wiggle room to play with the price -- a lot more than they usually get with their hardware. Supposedly Nintendo went from an even wider margin, down to a loss on each system sold after its infamous rollback, and though it may actually have more cash in reserve for such losses than Sony, it could mean that something in the realm of a $50 drop off of the base model wouldn't be out of the question, especially if speculation regarding the limited future of the 3G model turns out to be true. Sony may be better off discontinuing the more expensive SKU rather than dropping its price if it doesn't sell very well, and that will simplify the buying process for consumers and put the Vita in an overall more attractive position.
The big question is whether or not such a move will be necessary once we finally find out how the rest of the world takes to the new system. Most will argue that the launch library has more western appeal than Japanese appeal, and the same may go for the system itself, where flashy HD graphics may not be a big deal to a population still celebrating the virtues of the PSP. Sony had little choice releasing the Vita when they did, but for Japan, any time would have been too early with Sony's first portable still reigning supreme. It may be in their best interest to push the Vita more heavily in foreign countries and let Japan bask in the glow of cheap, outdated hardware for a while longer.
If I was a betting man I'd say the Vita will do extremely well out of the gate, which isn't exactly a controversial prediction to make. With a larger population, and a better suited audience, that initial sales week will look a great deal better than Japan's did, and the fall-off won't be nearly as drastic. Supposing Sony can keep the fire burning with some good releases at a consistent clip, I see the Vita as being the polar opposite of the PSP: a success elsewhere in the world while slow-to-start in the land of the rising Godzilla. While I'm sure Sony's hometown holds a special place in their heart, I don't think they'll mind such an outcome, since in the end, Europe and North America pull in the big bucks, not Japan. If down the road Japan eventually drops the PSP for its younger brother, they'll be fine with that too, but in a surprising twist the 3DS may prove to be even more competition there. These things seem to be decided by the release of one super-mega game, and Sony definitely does not carry any certainty in that regard.
The question is, does simply being new give the 3DS the legs to last the marathon of this generation, or will its technical similarities with PSP eventually catch up with it and leave the Vita the only true contender? The Wii proved past conventions wrong, and may well inform the future for Nintendo's handheld, especially since the portable arena is seldom a market driven by hardware superiority. Personally, the Vita is everything I could ever hope for in a handheld, and while the 3DS has some great games already, and a hopeful future, its somewhat lackluster presence in my gaming schedule feels like it may be more of an omen for its future than any sales charts can tell. It may very well be that the greater part of the gamer market will feel the same way, once all the Mario games have come and gone and they crave something new to play. That didn't matter in the end for the Wii, but then its sales as of late haven't been so hot, have they?
Friday, November 11, 2011
AMD's Nervous Breakdown
So Bulldozer bombed. The biggest change in CPU architecture for AMD since the K7, and their one true hope for finally making up the miles worth of lost ground towards Intel in the processor performance race. Up in smoke.
Oh, it's a disappointment alright. On paper -- and granted, I'm not a whiz at processor architectures -- it sounded pretty darn good. Sure two threads had to share a single FP unit inside one of its modules, but it could do 256-bit vector operations. General consensus is that the design of the chip, from a high level, was sound. But it hinged on something very important: clockspeed. It was a beefier engine, and it needed more cycles to keep it fed, and the end product was simply starved of those. Unless you were following all the leaked benchmarks and performance indicators leading up to its launch, you were shocked. The world was shocked.
It seems like Rory Read was shocked too. Announced as AMD's new CEO in August of this year, he's recently put into effect mass layoffs in excess of 10% of the company's workforce mere weeks after the first Bulldozer processors debuted. Rumors are circulating on what this might mean for AMD's future goals. Rory has issued an internal memo stating that this is the start of a new strategy for AMD, which many journalists and analyst believe means a shift in focus towards mobile markets, and an emphasis on embedded solutions.
As AnandTech stated, among the many employees let go during the operation was Carrell Killebrew, the Director of Product Planning for AMD's GPU division. Anand points out that this move is peculiar for one supposedly based on cost savings, and indicates a differing of philosophies between Carrell and the company.
Oh, it's a disappointment alright. On paper -- and granted, I'm not a whiz at processor architectures -- it sounded pretty darn good. Sure two threads had to share a single FP unit inside one of its modules, but it could do 256-bit vector operations. General consensus is that the design of the chip, from a high level, was sound. But it hinged on something very important: clockspeed. It was a beefier engine, and it needed more cycles to keep it fed, and the end product was simply starved of those. Unless you were following all the leaked benchmarks and performance indicators leading up to its launch, you were shocked. The world was shocked.
It seems like Rory Read was shocked too. Announced as AMD's new CEO in August of this year, he's recently put into effect mass layoffs in excess of 10% of the company's workforce mere weeks after the first Bulldozer processors debuted. Rumors are circulating on what this might mean for AMD's future goals. Rory has issued an internal memo stating that this is the start of a new strategy for AMD, which many journalists and analyst believe means a shift in focus towards mobile markets, and an emphasis on embedded solutions.
As AnandTech stated, among the many employees let go during the operation was Carrell Killebrew, the Director of Product Planning for AMD's GPU division. Anand points out that this move is peculiar for one supposedly based on cost savings, and indicates a differing of philosophies between Carrell and the company.
"When reducing workforce to cut costs, you don't go
after your product planners - unless their vision and your vision don't
line up. [...] Carrell's vision saw the continued growth of the high-end
GPU."
So suddenly this sounds like AMD may in fact be leaving the highend GPU market, especially since, as XbitLabs reported Jon Peddie as saying, "AMD was far from fat. And they were making a profit. I don't see any need for such a huge cutback."
And if they're leaving the highend GPU market, and actually moving more towards the mobile market, one could speculate that they might abandon the enthusiast market entirely, including CPUs. But we'll leave that one alone for now.
Needless to say, this brings with it a about a thousand different questions pertaining to the consequences of such a decision. The vast majority of the innovations in the GPU market are driven by tough competition, as well as API advances brought about by Microsoft and Khro-...well no, just Microsoft. Without that competition, there won't be any hard push to improve the quality experience for end users (and professionals for that matter). Most large companies aren't at their best without heavy competition, and the result might be similar to what we saw with the sound card market, where innovation gave way to incremental improvements that had little to do with real R&D and more to do with bloated software packages and marketing. The GPU market on the PC is largely a two-horse race, and without that second horse, the other one is free to trod along at its own pace, and unfortunately that means inflated prices.
Of course, without any real advances in real-time rendering technology, developers don't have much incentive to keep pushing the boundaries either. That might have the side effect of allowing them to take better advantage of the hardware that's already available, but it also means we might be close to the end of what we'll see computers capable of in games. This could also mean the end of future console generations without a significantly more powerful GPU to build around.
There's no question that graphics has hit a point of diminishing returns already. With so much investment required to make any truly noticeable changes to visual fidelity, it was an eventuality that we might see the highend GPU market collapse. That's why NVIDIA has started investing so heavily into the mobile market as a windfall for when that happens. Instead of trying to pack more transistors into massive chips as process sizes shrink, we might see those advances used to squeeze today's cutting-edge graphics into smaller packages. Computing in general has been shrinking since its inception, and there's no doubt that devices like tablets and smartphones are the future for the majority of people's computing needs. That means not only providing all the features found on full desktops, but running them at a comparable level.
More mobilization means more consolidation of devices too. Hardware that once required it's own box to house, like DVRs or even game consoles, might find itself crammed inside TVs. It's the age of convenience, after all, and the easier it is to access the things you want, the more likely consumers will eat it up. If the vast majority of what you want to do can be done on a tablet or your TV directly, why buy another device that does only a subsection of those things?
AMD wants to ride this wave, and to do so it's going to need to focus more on its Bobcat architecture, and possibly something even smaller. It can wait for manufacturing processes to continue to scale its existing cores, but what if they were to go a different route? Would AMD rely exclusively on x86, where it's almost always had at a disadvantage to Intel, or turn to ARM instead, and hope to gain a leg-up in efficiency compared to Intel's Atom processors? ARM has the advantage of allowing licensees to either use ARM-designed processors, or to just take their instruction set and put it to use in a unique architecture. It might be to AMD's advantage to broaden their portfolio with ARM technologies and pick up where Intel failed in that regard.
In the meantime, what's going to happen to desktops or even laptop computers? As time goes by, the big hulking desktop tower looks increasingly obsolete sitting next to all the slim computers flourishing in the market. Laptops have made great strides to catch up, already capable of doing almost everything high-performance desktops can. According to Jon Peddie research, discreet GPUs are still holding steady in sales in recent years, but as the PC market continues to grow, GPUs sales aren't growing with it. Integrated graphics, however, is growing fast, and quickly taking over laptops with the introduction of AMD's Fusion and Intel's latest HD graphics processors. On the same die and with the same cutting-edge transistors as those composing CPUs, integrated GPUs are free to take off in performance, leaving low-end GPUs utterly obsolete and more mainstream chips straining to keep apace. It seems like only a matter of time before having a graphics card in any form is rendered unnecessary.
Still, one questions the reasoning behind leaving the enthusiast graphics market when AMD has been doing so well in it. Certainly their prowess in the ultra-mobile field is, to say the least, unproven, and when taking on a new venture, it's probably a good idea to have a back-up plan. So why fire your GPU product planner? AMD still has the Southern Islands family set to debut soon, and probably has a generation after that well in-place already, but in 2014, what comes then?
At this point it's not hard to imagine what would happen if they really did exit the performance GPU market, and if the sales of discreet GPUs doesn't dramatically fall by 2014, perhaps they hope to be the ones to make that happen. We won't know AMD's plans concretely until early next year at their Financial Analyst Day event, and I'm sure consumers, and most of all stockholders will be eagerly listening to whatever method might be behind the looming madness that seems to be on the horizon. But if things materialize the way they appear to be, this could be one of the biggest changes to the PC market landscape in decades. Of course, I've been saying that a lot lately...
And if they're leaving the highend GPU market, and actually moving more towards the mobile market, one could speculate that they might abandon the enthusiast market entirely, including CPUs. But we'll leave that one alone for now.
Needless to say, this brings with it a about a thousand different questions pertaining to the consequences of such a decision. The vast majority of the innovations in the GPU market are driven by tough competition, as well as API advances brought about by Microsoft and Khro-...well no, just Microsoft. Without that competition, there won't be any hard push to improve the quality experience for end users (and professionals for that matter). Most large companies aren't at their best without heavy competition, and the result might be similar to what we saw with the sound card market, where innovation gave way to incremental improvements that had little to do with real R&D and more to do with bloated software packages and marketing. The GPU market on the PC is largely a two-horse race, and without that second horse, the other one is free to trod along at its own pace, and unfortunately that means inflated prices.
Of course, without any real advances in real-time rendering technology, developers don't have much incentive to keep pushing the boundaries either. That might have the side effect of allowing them to take better advantage of the hardware that's already available, but it also means we might be close to the end of what we'll see computers capable of in games. This could also mean the end of future console generations without a significantly more powerful GPU to build around.
There's no question that graphics has hit a point of diminishing returns already. With so much investment required to make any truly noticeable changes to visual fidelity, it was an eventuality that we might see the highend GPU market collapse. That's why NVIDIA has started investing so heavily into the mobile market as a windfall for when that happens. Instead of trying to pack more transistors into massive chips as process sizes shrink, we might see those advances used to squeeze today's cutting-edge graphics into smaller packages. Computing in general has been shrinking since its inception, and there's no doubt that devices like tablets and smartphones are the future for the majority of people's computing needs. That means not only providing all the features found on full desktops, but running them at a comparable level.
More mobilization means more consolidation of devices too. Hardware that once required it's own box to house, like DVRs or even game consoles, might find itself crammed inside TVs. It's the age of convenience, after all, and the easier it is to access the things you want, the more likely consumers will eat it up. If the vast majority of what you want to do can be done on a tablet or your TV directly, why buy another device that does only a subsection of those things?
AMD wants to ride this wave, and to do so it's going to need to focus more on its Bobcat architecture, and possibly something even smaller. It can wait for manufacturing processes to continue to scale its existing cores, but what if they were to go a different route? Would AMD rely exclusively on x86, where it's almost always had at a disadvantage to Intel, or turn to ARM instead, and hope to gain a leg-up in efficiency compared to Intel's Atom processors? ARM has the advantage of allowing licensees to either use ARM-designed processors, or to just take their instruction set and put it to use in a unique architecture. It might be to AMD's advantage to broaden their portfolio with ARM technologies and pick up where Intel failed in that regard.
In the meantime, what's going to happen to desktops or even laptop computers? As time goes by, the big hulking desktop tower looks increasingly obsolete sitting next to all the slim computers flourishing in the market. Laptops have made great strides to catch up, already capable of doing almost everything high-performance desktops can. According to Jon Peddie research, discreet GPUs are still holding steady in sales in recent years, but as the PC market continues to grow, GPUs sales aren't growing with it. Integrated graphics, however, is growing fast, and quickly taking over laptops with the introduction of AMD's Fusion and Intel's latest HD graphics processors. On the same die and with the same cutting-edge transistors as those composing CPUs, integrated GPUs are free to take off in performance, leaving low-end GPUs utterly obsolete and more mainstream chips straining to keep apace. It seems like only a matter of time before having a graphics card in any form is rendered unnecessary.
Still, one questions the reasoning behind leaving the enthusiast graphics market when AMD has been doing so well in it. Certainly their prowess in the ultra-mobile field is, to say the least, unproven, and when taking on a new venture, it's probably a good idea to have a back-up plan. So why fire your GPU product planner? AMD still has the Southern Islands family set to debut soon, and probably has a generation after that well in-place already, but in 2014, what comes then?
At this point it's not hard to imagine what would happen if they really did exit the performance GPU market, and if the sales of discreet GPUs doesn't dramatically fall by 2014, perhaps they hope to be the ones to make that happen. We won't know AMD's plans concretely until early next year at their Financial Analyst Day event, and I'm sure consumers, and most of all stockholders will be eagerly listening to whatever method might be behind the looming madness that seems to be on the horizon. But if things materialize the way they appear to be, this could be one of the biggest changes to the PC market landscape in decades. Of course, I've been saying that a lot lately...
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