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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Charles R who wrote (78490)	11/3/1999 2:03:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574889

Chuck, game consoles have always lagged behind PCs in terms of hardware. Look at the current Playstation right now, with its 33 MHz MIPS processor and 3D graphics engine which is equivalent to a Voodoo1. Yet even today, the hottest new games are being released on the Playstation, including Final Fantasy VIII, a game whose development budget rivals that of movies. The promise of PS2 is that Sony will add top-notch hardware to this business model. Hence, the bragging statements of "3X more powerful than Pentium III," whatever that means. If Sony commands a lot of mindshare even today with a console that's based on a 33 MHz processor, imagine what they can do when their hardware specs aren't so abysmal? And it doesn't matter whether low-end PCs like, say, Timna or Athlon-Select can meet or beat the PS2 specs in the future. We still have the fundamental problem of PCs, to quote Craig Barrett, "This stuff isn't user friendly!" (Thanks a lot, MicroShaft.) With PS and PS2, you can simply pop in a game and play straight off the bat. With a PC, you have to install the game, then pray to God that your drivers are compatible as you run the game for the first time. Low-end PCs, of course, have many advantages over the mutant-alien-blasting PS2. But I just don't forsee a huge exodus from the game console toward the low-end PC unless some fundamental problems with the latter are resolved. And knowing how slow the software guys can be, I won't be holding my breath. Tenchusatsu