Quote:
Originally Posted by
Dark_Slayer 
I may be incorrect, but I remember AMD being first with x64 architecture and the CPU+GPU architecture. Unfortunately the x64 architecture was irrelevant at the time of the AMD 64 and by the time the major OSs caught up Intel produced a more refined x64 offering, so first to cross the finish line didn't necessarily win the market.
The manufacturing technology difference that Zon2020 pointed out would be the elephant in the room as far as I'm concerned. Intel doubles down in this area, which is why they
always win the power consumption vs performance in floating point arithmetic. There on a rich getting richer path as far as I'm concerned which should lead AMD down the mobile SOC path. NVIDIA has also been fierce on this front hammering hard with their Tegra line. They laughed all the way to the bank with Xbox and PS3 revenue. To think that they'll be beaten out in the next gen console wars is really just a guess at this point. Apple went against NVIDIA with one single generation of Macbook Pros, and as of today Apple has switched back and will be using the NVIDIA 650M in their new line of laptops.
This logic kills me, and it should be of note that a
lot of console emulators receive nearly 0 benefit from a dedicated gpu. (I would like to say a majority, but I don't feel like doing the research) Check your emulators of choice for their utilization, but for my favorites for PS and N64 the coding for emulation relies
90% on the processor. Typically it's only standard games that utilize dGPUs while emulators rely heavily on your cpu, but I do speak primarily from my own console emulation interests
You are right about x64, AMD has introduced some fairly radical stuff, the architecture on bulldozer using modules instead of cores is fairly revolutionary, where they fail is they are too forward thinking and don't focus on the here and now, when they introduce things the market isn't there or it isn't fully supported, by the time it is intel have rolled out with a better version.
I don't know about emulators being more cpu dependent, I only just installed one and haven't spent much time with it. here are no emulators I'm aware of that are more advanced than the wii, so I'd have thought most current cpus should be able to run all of them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Zon2020
Win at what? Llano was "better" too, but the advantage was meaningless. As you said, both do 1080P video just fine, and yet with both in order to game you needed to buy a discrete video card. The likelihood is that, just as with Llano, Trinity will still be inadequate for real gaming, and so you'll still have to buy a discrete video card. Sounds like a pyrrhic victory to me. The laptop benchmarks are basically meaningless for real gaming.
A $90 i3 is more than almost everybody needs. So what. Does that mean that you should overpay for what you're getting? As I said, if you like paying more money for less performance, the Thuban is great, not to mention that it sucks power, pumps out heat, and lacks an integrated GPU, so go for it. I fail to see how "yeah, but it does what most people need" makes any difference when you could have gotten even more real performance for less money. In my book, paying more for less is a bad deal.
At this point I'm just going to stop arguing with you. You are able to game with Llano, it worked great on laptops. Before llano you couldn't game on a budget $400 laptop. Now you can, trinity improves that even further. Same with desktop, we are talking budget computers that have enough juice to game with, not at ultra settings, but the people buying them aren't dropping $400 on a video card, they're dropping $400 on a whole computer. APU has its place, deny it if you want, I don't care, buy Intel if you want, I don't care. I'm glad you are happy with your i5 or your i3 or whatever.
