Cool but I would buy before Vista ships if you plan to buy soon. I would not want to own Vista for the first six months. Just based on the fact that I worked at Microsoft for 5 years.

I had thought that there would be a strong law of diminishing returns after two cores, but apparently not. This article says the quad-core chip is 70-80% faster than dual-core for video encoding.

"Just based on the fact that I worked at Microsoft for 5 years."

It only took you five years to screw up Microsoft? I'm impressed! :)

"It only took you five years to screw up Microsoft? I'm impressed! :)"

To be fair, he probably had some help.

Wonder how that translate for H.264 AVC encoding?

Well, first they would start logging rendering times in msX (milliseconds), then usX (microseconds), and eventually everyone would adapt the 'under a blink of an eye' (ube) standard we'd all come to love and expect.

"It only took you five years to screw up Microsoft? I'm impressed! :)"

WOW I had no idea that I was so all powerful, better not mess with me ;)

It was toasted when I got there and when I left. When you re-org not just a chart but the offices people work in every six to twelve months all hope is lost for progess imnho. I have the world of respect for Bob Herbold and when he bailed the writing was on the wall.

wow, a 300+ Gightz processor.....

That would up the Magic Bullet preview to almost a blistering 15 frames per second......awesome !

this is the same company that predicted 10ghz p4 chips, then they got stuck at 3-3.5 ghz for 3 years and could do no better.

besides, 80 cores would cost you about $8000 for slower clocked versions and it's just never going to happen. Somebody at Intel needs to stop smoking crack.

When you re-org not just a chart but the offices people work in every six to twelve months all hope is lost for progess imnho.
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That should be chiselled in stone and mounted on the walls of companies I've worked for.

Bob.

"To be fair, he probably had some help."

I worked there for 13 years and personally created far more bugs than any 5 year newbie could have. :-)

But he is right. Vista is a really disappointing release. It's half the OS it was supposed to be. So much was cut out. It's basically still XP with a few decent but hardly needed enhancements. The "better security" part is true, but was implemented so poorly that you have to click OK three times to open or change almost any thing. Benchmarks show that XP performs on par with Vista in every way. There is zero performance benefit in upgrading to Vista. Even 64-bit XP is the same as 64-bit Vista for the most part...

80-cores in 5 years is a joke. Intel will move to 45 nm soon and that will allow decent TDP for 8 cores by 2008.16 to 32 cores in 5 years is believable in theory, but unlikely in my opinion. The roadmap always slides year after year as profits are usually improved by delaying innovation to some extent.

Do people even care about promises which project so far into the future? I always thought the future was the present's most efficient dump. Isn't that why Nostradamus kept things vague and distant? It seems to work for most people, personally and professionally. Isn't that why you avoid mentioning the future if you have the possibility of accountability? Isn't that why President's say things like "in 20 years we want (insert something good that makes them look like they're doing it)"?

I love empty promises, they get me excited, and misdirected, and make me want to purchase lesser equivalents NOW!

So, in a sense, Quryous is telling us to buy now. To RUSH, if you will. That makes his final comments that much more fitting.

"I worked there for 13 years and personally created far more bugs than any 5 year newbie could have."

Peter and Konrad, I would love to have you two insiders elaborate just a little on why you think Vista has gone off track. Is it simply the stranglehold of bureaucracy in that gi-normous company? Or is it due to the complexities of backward compatibility? Or is it a corporation that has grown fat and lazy (the woeful lack of progress with Internet Explorer versions suggests a degree of this)? I would enjoy hearing your thoughts about this.

Just think of all the new motherboards and ram chips and OS's we will have to buy everytime we "doublegraded".

JJK

"Is it simply the stranglehold of bureaucracy in that gi-normous company?"

Yes.

And accountability was 100% non-existent when I left recently.

Oh and with everyone aging, the internal view of technology is still very 90's feeling. This is seen in even the latest new product releases. Only a small percentage are current with latest Internet trends and technical skills. But their good ideas get swallowed by the bureaucracy.

Now that I work for the much younger competition, I can honestly say that msft is has made itself just another IBM. Slow, big, but will still make some ok products that we will probably have to use. But nothing exciting.

I used to really like 98se, but finally bailed to XP a few years back, and it's true: XP is very stable compared to 98se.

Recently I migrated to XPsp1. I feel now I am sitting in the best of all possible worlds, since I have a stable OS and yet one that has been tweaked a bit to fix the bugs that got away when first released.

I see no reason to go to sp2, and I especially see no reason to go to Vista. Still, there will be that unrelenting pressure to do so one day. For one thing, all new PCs will come with Vista, making it the dominant standard at some point (2 years? 5 years?). For another thing, the time may come when programs such as Vegas will insist on a Vista platform. For example, earlier versions of Vegas could run on 98se, but not the currrent version.

My hope is that XP will be considered "good enough" to keep it on the compatibility list for the next decade or so. That may just turn out to be the case. I also hope that PC vendors start selling more PCs with no OS preloaded. It's so easy to migrate the whole OS/apps/data package from one platform to another--I've already done it a half-dozen times.

EDIT: Regarding the corporate shuffle: I used to joke with my wife about the goings-on at HP back over the past 20-odd years that she worked there in sales. Every couple of years or so, management would completely revamp the hierarchy, compensation plan, and focus. After a decade or so the long-term employees would begin to see how today's plan was just like the plan 4 iterations ago. I guess they do this to shake off the deadwood, much like random mutations in a species keeps the species fit for a changing environment.