OT: New PC

[Fyron]

Santiago said:
"As a side note I seen an article talking about the new AMD triple core "Phenom" processor. Usually they're Dual or now Quad cores."

It's all about market segmentation and increasing die yields. Consider that the Xbox 360 has a 3-core processor (for improved die yields); any game codeveloped for it and the PC will probably benefit from the 3rd core of a quad core CPU, but not at all from the 4th core. Some gamers might be interested in the performance gains, but not interested in the full price premium of quad core. Offering an option between dual core and quad core will probably net AMD more profits, due to such consumers willing to spend a little extra, but not a lot.

Then, consider that plenty of quad core CPUs are scrap due to random silicon die issues. Every new CPU (and other chips) starts out with really low die yields, which improve over time as manufacturing techniques are refined. Plenty of those processors can still function if the issues cripple one core, but not 3 others (simply burn the paths connecting the bad core, alter a bit of EEPROM, and voila!). Why not try to sell them as a 3-core CPU instead of throwing them away? Not a bad way to pad the bottom line, if you ask me.

GuyOfDoom said:
"It was my understanding that DX10 was a unique feature of Vista that wouldn't have worked on previous versions of Windows."

DX 10 was engineered around the new kernel driver architecture, but there is nothing in DX 10 that couldn't be done with the older XP model. There is nothing technically preventing MS from back-porting DX 10 to XP; it would just be fairly time consuming and expensive to do it, and marketing decided it would be better to make it Vista-exclusive.