It probably won't hurt across-the-board performance, so even titles you've played 'til now may benefit. Give the new Amnesia a try - if my Macbook Air's Intel HD 5000 can push it along at 1440x900, you may have luck at 720p on the HD 3000.

By that metric AMD doesn't "make" its chips either. Nor do many companies, even if the IP is firmly theirs and the designs were entirely in-house. That's a strange, argumentative kind of quibbling.

Ergh. Looks like Intel's managed to close the gap with Bulldozer in that stronghold through sheer clock ramping. You got me - I hadn't looked at Haswell benchmarks much.

Technology and economies of scale have come a very, very long way from the 3DO. From what I've seen and heard I wouldn't bet against it, and I'd certainly place better odds on it than the 3DO.

Man, that Doom port sucked.

First: yes, it's clearly a joke. How can you copy something done ten years earlier? :P

Second, Apple does make their own ARM CPUs these days. They build and design licensed ARM CPUs for their iOS devices these days, which includes AppleTV, iPhones, iPads, and iPods, but for their Mac / OS X business they are still 100% Intel. Their latest design is starting to turn some heads.

The misleading thing about benchmarks is that they're generally prebaked - there's no chance for "surprise" physics interactions or various pipeline-stalling things that tended to trip up the Pentium 4. From personal experience I'll tell you that my old 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 generally didn't do as well as my Athlon XP 2400+ in Doom 3, Bioshock, or Unreal Tournament 3. The latter two should have been poster children for the Netburst chip by comparison. Also, the Pentium D 820 was a 2.8 GHz chip: it was the miserably hot 130W TDP 840 that ran at 3.2 GHz. But you're correct on the other counts - the higher IPC and integrated memory controller were both HUGE advantages over a latency-crippled, deeply pipelined architecture. The Pentium D was itself a flailing, mostly failed response to the surge in mindshare the Athlon 64 X2 created until the Core architecture could be prepared.

And in AMD64 MMX (along with 3DNow!) is officially deprecated in favor of the SSE instructions. Like a twisting of the knife.

It depends an awful lot on the workload, though. For gaming it's one-sided in Intel's favor to the tune of around 2/3 more work done per clock on average (sometimes more), but for video encoding with x264 the sheer core count makes it better than competitive with Intel unless you're willing to pay noticeably more. It's a behemoth for virtual machines, it plays video games well enough, and for scientific computation I really haven't found myself wanting. Granted, I'm an edge case...

Before, as best I recall. It went something like Geocities -> LiveJournal -> Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebook, not counting the various Diarylands, Xangas, and other strains of internet funk that bloomed and withered on the sides like little fungus gardens.

The answer's simple: Facebook wants their interface to be gobbledygook because that means you're spending more time on the site, and having to mentally filter relevant content from the ads they want you to see. By the logic of someone creating an attractive nuisance, interfering with this kind of product makes a perverse sense because it's making the product better for users but worse for Facebook's actual customers - advertisers and marketers.

In BeOS R5 you could drag 'n' drop audio tracks from a CD (and with a decent drive you could do it quite quickly), but I don't remember CDDB integration. Still pretty handy for huge batch LAME encoding jobs, though.

What would YOU say if you'd been through what he has? Who can say if he's sincere? This is just another part of the dog and pony show. Keep fighting.

I like Slackware too, but what's wrong with quiche? It's the beautiful marriage of an omelette and a pie.

Blu-ray's variable, but video bitrate alone will sometimes jump over 36 Mbit/sec. Audio's also variable - Blu-ray supports everything from 0.1 Mbit Dolby Mono all the way up to 7+ Mbit lossless 24-bit PCM. Worst-case scenario you could expect something pushing 50 Mbit/second, which is definitely not within range of the typical American's broadband connection. 4K will be impressive, but assuming a linear doubling (as HEVC will be twice as efficient, but have to deal with four times the video data)... yep, your math checks out. There's also the problem of product segmentation between different streaming video providers and studio bickering, lapsing of rights, seasonal variability, &c. Until and unless that gets sorted out, I'm buying physical copies of my favorite movies.

...is that sometimes I have kinda weird but harmless taste in porn, and spend too much time on Slashdot and Reddit. Horrors.