There is a huge gulf between the quality of PC games and tablet games due to the massive performance/storage differences, even in the realm of integrated graphics.

That said, most modern PC games can be played on HD 4000 at 720p low/med settings. I know this because I play them on my HTPC with frame rates are at around the 30-50 fps mark. They play even better on AMD Trinity/Richland/Kaveri.

The problem with Kabini et-al is they castrated the GPU to just 128 shaders and 8 texels per-clock, compared to 384/512 shaders and 24/32 texels/clock for the bigger boys. They also castrated performance with a single memory channel. This results in performance comparable to HD 3000 on the desktop, but Beema has even lower performance thanks to the thermal constraints. HD 3000 was entry-level 3.5 years back when it was first released, but games have moved-on since then, and that level of performance is no-longer enough.

AMD decided they did not want this part to compete with their other offerings, and that's why the memory bandwidth and GPU power are castrated. And that's the reason this product's target is unclear - it's overpowered for your average tablet game, and not beefy enough for real PC games. And again, the power consumption is a concern.

For an "AMAZING" product like this is supposed to be, those are some awfully curated results right there. The product is only compared with a Core i3 (outdated Ivy Bridge) when it's actually going to win the test, and there's a plethora of multi-threaded tests that nobody on earth actually uses to put AMD's quad-core in the best light. Also, there are NO BATTERY LIFE TESTS to speak of, just "trust us" quoted TDP figures, and no pricing information.

And while it is MUCH faster at games than Bay Trail, it's not fast enough to play ANY modern games, even on the lowest setting possible. This leaves it firmly parked somewhere between tablet and ultraportable processing capabilities, so there's the question about product positioning.

Call me back when AMD is willing to let reviewers just have at it. If your product does not suck, then it does not need to be coddled.

I agree that you have to start at the bottom and build a community if you want to build a solid following. Big name titles mean people will stop in, and forget the place even exists once the video is done playing. I know I did that for years with anything aside from Youtube.

Not only are they aiming at the wrong end of the spectrum here , the non-exclusive video hosting means that nobody will bother linking to their copy versus the Youtube version. They're both free to watch, but Youtube has the advantage of name and platform support. Why would you make your blog or Facebook post of a video *less accessible* to your readers when Youtube is more widely available as a native app on cheaper mobile devices?

It's too small a city to be widely diversified in terms of tech providers, so whenever a bubble or recession hits, the city takes a dive. There's nothing else within commuting distance with similar tech options (Dallas and Houston are too far, and San Antonio is mostly medical).

I grew up in Austin in the 80s and 90s and watched things first-hand: first there was the mid 80s (1985-86) semiconductor bust (component makers were out-competed by Japan). Fifteen years later there was the Dot Com crash (gutted Dell, as well as dozens of smaller web startups headquartered in the city). Every time the market bust, it was 2+ years before jobs reappeared, making it a dangerous place to call home.

If you want to live there, go on ahead - just make a nestegg your first priority (and take the cost of that into account when you are pricing out the city).

Except this time there's no chance they will be prosecuted, so they're fine.

First, we're not in the same situation as the 1990s. Netscape was vulnerable because they had been lucky to have a serviceable product in the right place at the right time. But Netscape wanted to be MORE, so in a very short space of time they added Email, News, HTML Editor, Conference, and Calendar and re-branded the thing Communicator. These added bloat and instability, making them an easy target for the speedy and stable IE 5.0. Microsoft proved they had the better engineers and management and leveraged the tie-in to make the industry upend itself, and that's why they were taken to court.

Today Google has 66% of the market, and is not losing share to Bing - Bing is simply eating away at the other search engines. So Bing, even 10 years form now, is unlikely to gain more than 33% of the market, meaning a massive upending is nowhere in sight. That means Google has more to worry about from any court action.

Also, every other competitor plays the lock-in game! Google insists you use their tools/services if you want access to the Play store, Youtube and regular OS updates. Amazon locks Prime streaming to Fire devices. Microsoft and Amazon are facing an uphill battle supporting their own forks of Android because of this: they have to improve the value of their own services in any way they can.

Yes, but is it significant? I thought the screen was the limiting factor, and the help file for that just says "reduce the backlight brightness".

Yes it is, if you were paying attention Intel's Haswell managed to increase "light use" battery life (spends most of the time idle) by 50% just by reducing the idle power drawn by the processor and platform.

If the processor had that much battery life impact when doing NOTHING, you can imagine it's of major importance to keep it idle as much as humanly possible.

My HighPower N300 Gigabit DD-WRT has been completely stable to the point that I forget it's there. And if it wasn't, as the name implies I could fix any issues by upgrading to DD-WRT (this is a supported and warrantied mode).

This has been a fantastic experience, and it just makes we wonder why people persist in buying Linksys just for their name. Everyone has known for years that they are utter shit, but they keep buying the things!

Valve is entirely run by Jagermonsters?

Suddenly Valve Time makes perfect sense!

The decision long ago to not support a default ai means you are at the mercy of the community. This means that each ai available (you have to download them sight-unseen if you want to play single player) ranges in quality from crap to passable. Each one was lovely crafted until their creator got bored, so you can imagine that many of them don't support later added features like load/save, which are essential to long-running games.

The ais are also typically balanced to blow you out of the water in temperate medium difficulty but then fall when you go north/south and up the difficulty. For years NoCAB has been the ONLY ai to even come close in exotic locals, and development on that beauty has been dead since 2009.

Every year I download and try out.the latest ai versions and am disappointed. Then I play a round with NoCAB for old times sake and forget about it for another year.

I believe you two are talking about different sorts of noise.

I believe GP was referring to SIGNAL noise on the USB line playing havoc with his RS-232 adapter. It does not mean that the laptop FAN is loud. It's also not certain that you would have issues with normal USB devices, give what a corner case RS-232 adapters are.

It's intended to reduce EMI induced on other devices, not listen in on your conversations :D

In the bad old days of Betamax, if your local video store did not have what you wanted, you didn't get it. And shelf space was at a premium, so if a movie was carried at all, it was more likely to be VHS.

Today Apple's digital distribution of content solves that problem. They've proven that they can make a massive profit off a small segment of the market, and that their customer base is loyal enough to keep on trucking (much like loyal Betamax users only switched due to lack of content).

So yes, while it's an accurate connection between iOS and Betamax on the surface, it's a completely different world today. Apple will command a smaller-and-smaller share of the mobile market, but it will reach a certain percentage and stay there.

A transmitter with an eight mile range would be extremely easy to detect.

I have to disagree with this. You could hide in the noise if you used Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum. It's not perfect at preventing direction finding, but it's very hard for your average enthusiast to track.

Well a 486 with a larger cache pretty much WAS the Pentium I dude.

Not quite.

The Pentium had dual integer pipes (with some limitations), and a fully-pipelined FPU unit with full hardware support for FP add/mult/div. Double the bus width (to help feed the thirsty FPU and dual int pipes). Branch prediction (4 state). Really, the larger, better-architected cache were on the low-order of importance.

The 486 had just one fully-pipelined integer unit, and a limited NON-PIPLEINED FPU. The FPU hardware was cut-down compared to the 80387 it replaced (due to limitations imposed by the desired die size). This was more than made up for by the removal of the communication overhead between the two chips (15+ cycles on 386/387), and higher clock speeds. So overall performance increased over the 80387, but it was absolutely DESTROYED by the Pentium FPU.

It's not a "nice:" tablet, it's a cut-rate excuse to get Tegra 4 in the news. If they had properly outfitted this thing, it would be the same price as the Nexus 7 2013 model (and exactly the same performance, which a shittier screen).

Any tablet that ships in this day-and-age with just 1GB of ram is not "nice." You just try and load more than 4 tabs in your web browser before running out of ram. And while benchmarks don't tend to care about memory capacity, it will certainly make a difference in games (which is the primary focus of this SoC).