PC Perspective Podcast #405 – 06/23/2016
Join us this week as we discuss an AMD RX 480 hands-on, 32-core Zen rumors, the ASUS/MSI VBIOS scandal and more!
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This episode of the PC Perspective Podcast is sponsored by Kaspersky Labs!
Hosts: Ryan Shrout, Allyn Malventano, Jeremy Hellstrom, and Josh Walrath
Program length: 1:33:07
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Week in Review:
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This episode is sponsored by Kaspersky Labs!
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News items of interest:
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Hardware/Software Picks of the Week
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Jeremy: Sound BlasterX G5
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Closing/outro
You dare to put an AMD card
You dare to put an AMD card on your desk for your podcast? YOU GODDAMN PAID AMD SHILLS!!!
</sarcasm> by the way
The precision required to
The precision required to make good optics with a low f-ratio makes manufacture of lenses crazy expensive, since you have at least 4 surfaces (and usually 8 or more)and two or more different types of glass (usually crown and flint.)
The surfaces have to be crazy accurate (to 1/4 the wavelength of light)and the spacing has to have equally high tolerances, or else you won’t have:
1.) proper achromatic focus. (would you like a blue fringe or red fringe with your photo?)
2.) proper flat focal plane of the projected image. (would you like the center in focus, or the edges?)
In the end, humans are required to do the fine tuning and culling of high end lenses to give you that perfect low-light image, with all the extra expense that involves. To cheap out on tolerances, the optics have to have a high f-ratio, and/or long focal length. You can get better image quality with a cheap lens, if you use a high (f-8 or higher) f-stop, but you’ll run into exposure-length problems in lower-light situations…
Sorry, I went into a bit of a rant there over that “how hard can lens making be?” thing. 😉
Why is it that the only AMD
Why is it that the only AMD GPUs offered in any of the laptops for sale at MicroCenter in Boston are only GCN 1.0/”First Gen” based. Where are the GCN 1.1/”Second Gen” and GCN 1.2/”Third Gen” offerings!
Hopefully this will change with Polaris GCN 1.3/”fourth Gen” based laptop SKUs, but damn MicroCenter/Boston why only laptops with GCN 1.0/”First Gen” graphics in laptops! Surely there are some older model laptops that have some more relatively up to date GCN based discrete mobile AMD GPU offerings. Even with all the re-branding going on with discrete mobile GPUs over the years one would think that there would be some older model(New/unsold)laptop offerings at MicroCenter with some AMD GCN 1.1, or 1.2 based laptop mobile discrete GPU SKUs in them.
But really, what is AMD’s total discrete mobile/laptop SKU market share, is it that bad with only GCN 1.0 products being the in the majority of laptop SKUs that use AMD’s mobile GPUs at some retailers.
I like to shop for laptops based on the previous year’s technology, because I can get great deals at low cost. And usually the older year’s models have plenty of power, provided I can get a quad core i7 based laptop SKU that uses at least an Ivy bridge/Haswell level of i7 SOC.
Remember during the early/mid
Remember during the early/mid 2000’s when Intel was paying OEM PC manufacturers billions of dollars in either rebates or straight-up cash to bribe or bully them into either not using AMD products at all or only using the slowest AMD products in severely limited numbers?
I have absolutely nothing to base it on but suspicion, but I think things like that are still being done by Intel and Nvidia, and the phenomenon you’re observing in your comment is evidence of it.
Similar to how the very few laptop/notebook manufacturers who even bothered to use AMD Carrizo parts deliberately kneecapped them with single-channel memory, and then priced them to compete with i5 and i7 systems on dual-channel memory.