Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Consoling the PC.

Given a choice between PC and a console, I would definitely go for the PC (first). I can do all sorts of things with a PC than I could with a console, I would say. But I may say something different with the XBox 2 and PS3 in the horizon.

I won't go into the spec details of them black and white boxes. It's old news. To convert to the console religion would, of course, require there be support for all of the applications I run and will buy in the future. I am not sure how good the Linux in the xbox1 ran, but that's the kind of thing that will move cell processors into the PC world, I think. But I don't see myself converting, so why bother.

Recently, I did convert to another's camp following my recent purchase of an AMD based system. The base I left was Intel and the target base is, ofcoure, AMD. Here's an article that would convert a few of the intelites.
But CPU fanboyisms apart, one must choose one's processor according to one's need. The Big question in any bewildered CPU shopper's mind is this: AMD or Intel?

After more than a week of continuous research on AMD and Intel CPU and motherboard reviews and forum posts, I found out what to choose. It is simple: If you want your computer to render 3D scenes, encode videos and compile code faster, then go for Intel. Rather, if you want to do number crunching work and play games, go for AMD. I had decided to go for Intel, obviously. But there are catches abound ofcourse. One main thing involves Bill. AMD costs a lot lesser than Intel's similarly rated processors. So I had to change my decision in favour of AMD after a seriously non-technical point broke Intel.

Coming back to the topic, I was kind a amused to look at what's happenning with consoles and PC. I mean, the first gaming consoles were made out of Atari's and other architectures. Later on, PCs were being used for general purpose computing. PCs were more powerful than consoles. Later, PS and XBOX adopted the PC architecture. But consoles were using triflingly (but adequately) powerful PC components. But now consoles are using cell processors which are much more powerful than PC. Now if Matrix has taught us anything, the counter-part (PC) must gain as much power as consoles have :) So will we see the PC migrating to cell processors to maintain the "Equilibrium"? Will we see the PC do a console and overtake it in terms of perf?

I think the guys at Intel can be trusted to hold good their precious Moore's law, atleast out of desperation.