Mark Dileo ("Hulk" on this forum) has taken an interesting view on CPUs in the coming year. Read his comments; curious to see where the community falls with regards to his position.
You are right about the possibility of AMD being taken out. That is one possible longterm drawback of Intel seizing the market fully. I shoud have mentioned that.
But before that would happen I think they would get bought out by some other big name. They've endured some really hard times, remember the $80 chips? They do have time to prepare for the coming war.
I'm sure that AMD will throw a DDR2 controller on their X2's & we'll see performance increase real soon for them.
Their roadmap indicates DDR2 with their Socket 940 offerings this summer, with a 10% boost from DDR2 for same clock speed (but these will also be ramped up).
"...several articles I've read indicate that for awhile at least, video editing and other content creation software will take a back seat to security with the removal of direct access to the hardware layer. One article hoped at least for audio the openal interface promoted by creative will help users get some efficiency back.
You *are* misunderstanding things, I'm afraid. My guess is that the articles you've read have been geared toward performance in games and game development - or - they are referring to the first distro of Longhorn versus what's available now in the 2nd.
From what I've read, Vista is designed to lean much more heavily on the GPU for rendering UI components - so the hooks for accessing the video card are built in to the OS at some level.
Also for audio, newly retooled protocols like WASAPI and Device Topology will allow access to hardware from user-mode-level interfaces. This means low latency out of the box to nearly any audio device with nearly bullet-proof stability. It may not help for rendering HALO3, but that's what XBOX360 is for...
Thanks Haynes. thats why I asked the question. And yes it was in reference to game stuff, which I thought also affected video/3d/audio creation stuff too.
I just want 64bit per channel color, 60 track 24/96 hardware based audio recording with zero latency, and 10' of 2:35 to 1 screen space to work with. And I want to render all of it at 100x faster than real time for either preview or final output including 3d and at least 256 layers of effects... That isn't too much to ask for is it?:)
Today I was doing some piano overdubs for a music video. 30 tracks of audio and 3 video streams. With a 655x480 preview window in "Preview" quality (playing 20fps) the piano player could overdub his parts while watching the edited video feed on the monitor. Without glitching the audio! I should mention that I was set up for zero latency monitoring but it also works with latency monitoring.