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Getting ready for the change

GDC has come and gone and we’re cleaning our cold weather gear getting ready to change for CeBIT. We’ve been to several analyst’s conferences, all tightly locked down with NDAs about the changes coming, so tightly protected that we can’t even tell you who they were with let alone any of the details about FusionPhenom, Larrabee, or G100. Oops. CES ...

Robert Dow

GDC has come and gone and we’re cleaning our cold weather gear getting ready to change for CeBIT.

We’ve been to several analyst’s conferences, all tightly locked down with NDAs about the changes coming, so tightly protected that we can’t even tell you who they were with let alone any of the details about FusionPhenom, Larrabee, or G100. Oops.

CES is a faint and happily forgotten memory, and looming in the future is NAB, Interop, and E3. Some things don’t seem to change.

ORNL’s JAGUAR (Courtesy of ORNL)

The GPU market crossed over the astounding 100 million unit shipment level last quarter, and now it looks like it could cross back under with the scheduled recession. The good thing about the information age is you never have to be surprised. We know when hurricanes will hit, when the there will be an economic turn down, when the housing market will go bust. We can plan and prepare, and, if necessary, react. As a species, we’re mostly good at reacting, that planning part is difficult, it requires us to make changes, and I was just getting comfortable in these old socks and my Comdex 96 sweatshirt.

And now, we have to deal with pesky S3 insisting it’s in the GPU market, and Motorola insisting it’s not in the phone market, and Apple insisting it is going to stay in the video editing market, and Intel saying it’s going to be (back?) in the handheld market, while ARM is insisting it’s not in the Open Handset association, it’s just that big android that keeps following them around. These are changes, and even if we were warned about some of them, that doesn’t mean we have to like them or accept them. I’m sorry Moto, you just get back in the razor market, now’s not the time to be shaving things off. And S3, you go back to lab and do more R&D, we’ll let you know when it’s time to come out. As for you Intel, you’re like a cat, always on the wrong side of a door, now either come in and stay or stay out. Always wanting to change things.

One thing that isn’t changing is the increasing abundance of computer processing power at affordable prices, and the subsequent swallowing of them by interesting new applications. One of the best examples of that came out of GDC from a lab in Japan that found a way to push sand around in a computer—boy does that sand soak up cycles.

Talk about soaking up cycles, some folks just ignore help when its offered them and they just persist in their foolish ways. Take those German fools at Crytek who aren’t smart like EA, Sega, or Activision. They think they can be successful selling a state-of-the-art program that requires top end computer equipment—dumb Germans, they’ll never change.

ORNL’s JAGUAR (Courtesy of ORNL)

Hah, maybe they could use some of the laid off workers from the smart publishers to help them box up the next million copies of Crysis they’re going to sell.

One thing for certain is that Toshiba will never change its commitment to HD DVD. With Microsoft, HP, and NEC behind them, not to mention Warner Brothers and others, you can just forget all those nasty political-campaign style rumors about…wait a minute, someone is handing me a slip of paper. Ah huh, OK. As I was saying, FINALLY, Toshiba has seen the blue light and will change its marketing efforts away from HD DVD.

And speaking of change we heard at GDC that the new Duke Nukem Forever is, oh never mind, you’ve heard that already. OK, how about that Microsoft is going to open up the code on…heard that too huh? I guess not everything changes.