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By : Jon Peddie (Nov 2008)
Game consoles, especially the vaunted Wii, have captured the imagination of game developers, pundits, and the channel. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you console games and consoles are a way, like WAY bigger market than that lowly PC gaming market. Hmmm, always be cautious of the common wisdom.
By : Jon Peddie (Oct 2008)
Apple began in 1976 with the 6502 processor and, in 1984, moved to the 68000 with the introduction of the Mac. The company introduced the new computer with an amazing video that played off 1984—that commercial cast the tone and course for the company for the next 34 years. In 1994, Apple partnered with IBM on the PowerPC CPUs and stayed with IBM till 2005 when Steve Jobs officially announced that Apple would begin producing Intel-based Macintosh computers beginning in 2006.
By : Jon Peddie (Oct 2008)
In 1999, the Internet bubble began. Most people knew it was a bubble, laughed at the silliness of most of the deals, but a greed factor and feeding frenzy, fear of missing the boat and being left outside took over logic. Three years later the stock market crashed (relative to the run up in 1999) and didn’t get back to the pre-bubble level until near the end of 2003. Today, the market is below the pre-bubble mark (9,300) effectively wiping out 10 years of growth, despite the tumultuous swings in between.
By : Jon Peddie (Sep 2008)
Well, I’m still waiting for the share price of my dot-com companies to come back up to the purchase price so I can sell them and put the money back in my retirement fund. I’m not really in the market right now for the newest old best great thing. I’m not convinced the practicality gap has been crossed. One of the reasons I’m taking that position is the abundance of solutions. There are five choices of glasses. That’s three too many. We can have two types, one for movies and one for PC and TV, but not five. Before 3D is the defacto entertainment standard, it first has to get some—standards that is. It also has to overcome the chicken-egg thing of installed base of the necessary technology vs. the content. And then there’s that content issue. One of the things that killed, well I guess it didn’t kill it, but at least severely wounded 3D back in the 1950s was the awful content. And, with the exception of some of the IMAX stuff, it has remained awful, poking things out at the audience, no story, and then the ultimate eye fatigue and disorientation. One of the most recent movies the studios are raving about, Journey to the Center of the Earth, is so bad it’s amazing it got released.
By : Jon Peddie (Sep 2008)
We now have four offerings for the consumer space of multi-core chips, which are euphemistically called processors. That is just a taste of how confusing this is all going to be, especially when the market spin is added. For example, AMD’s four core chip called Barcelona is called A processor, as is Intel’s i7 Nehalem. But those “Cores” are in fact full-function multi-stage out-of-order 64-bit double-precision floating-point processors. So the term “processor” has come to mean chip, and the tem core has come to mean processor…a rose by any other name. It doesn’t really matter what we call these things as long as we all call them the same thing and share a common understanding of their definition.
By : Jon Peddie (Sep 2008)
Having been dazzled by four days of dancing delightful pixels in LA at Siggraph, I then took a shower and went to San Francisco to continue the consumption of pixels and information at IDF. Another shower and then off to Palo Alto for pixels and cores, lots of both (burp). Skipping the shower, I rushed to join the rest of the JPR team at the inaugural Nvision conference in San Jose—a three-week smorgasbord of west coast pixelarity.
By : Jon Peddie (Sep 2008)
You’ve all heard me say, “The more you can see, the more you can do.” It’s Peddie’s Second Law. I have four screens on my desk; I think you’ve all seen the pictures. There’s one to left of my laptop, one to right, and above it. The screens are 20-inch 1680 x 1050. I use a track ball to mouse around (doctor’s orders). And I spend too much time spinning that little ball getting from the far left screen to far right or elsewhere.
By : Jon Peddie (Aug 2008)
The mechanical loom developed by Joseph Marie Jacquard between 1801 and 1805, which used holes punched in pasteboard, was the beginning of the digital age. Were it not for that machine, we’d still be calculating using gears and analog representations. One can only imagine (and what a fun mind experiment it is) the kinds of automated writing machines we might have if we were stuck in analog land.
By : Jon Peddie (Jul 2008)
Nvidia should take a month off. Boy, for as long as I’ve known the company, which is actually before it was a company, I have never seen such a torrent of bad news and bad breaks at one time.
By : Jon Peddie (Jul 2008)
With the introduction of ATI’s and Nvidia’s new AIBs, and the lack of a really killer app, other than perhaps Crysis and/or FSX, we really can’t see much difference in the products anymore.
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