This week's Schadenfreude: Techno Babble

The computer industry is one of my favorite places to pick sides in a fight. Consequently, it is a prime source of schadenfreude. Over the years, I've accumulated a small list of "good guys" that I root for and "bad guys" that I pull against. Some of my winners are people that continually lead the the charge to bring innovative products to market (VIA, AMD, Apple). In many cases, being a "good guy" simply means that you are a company that managed to nail a superior product at a competitive price (ATi). While it's true that some of my "bad guys" just managed to dominate their segment of the market with a crappy, overpriced product (Intel), I do reserve a small reserve of contempt exclusively for the deceitful (NVidia) and the maliciously predatory (Microsoft).

So, let's kick off this week's poetic justice:

AMD

Anyone remember the K6-3? No? I'm sure that AMD tries not to either. Why would they, after all, for the first time in the CPU market, not only has a non-Intel company managed to ship a superior product, but they are doing so in competitive numbers. Here are AMD's Q3/Q4 shipping numbers for it's K8 generation of processors, thanks to Hard|OCP:

Q3: FX - 12,000; 754-pin - 970,000; 939-pin - 250,000
Q4: FX - 14,000; 754-pin - 900,000; 939-pin - 530,000

How is this schadenfreude? Compare those numbers to the measly 100,000 Itaniums that Intel looks to ship for 2004. No wonder HP is dropping the CPU from its lineup. As if this wasn't good enough, AMD actually out shipped Intel in the retail desktop space for the second time in 2004.

VIA and AMD

I hear some of you saying, "Not so fast there, Andy. PCI Express is still an Intel-only motherboard feature." OK, it's true that, up til now, if you wanted 64-bit processing and a PCI Express graphics card, you couldn't have both. It was a choice between an AMD CPU or an Intel compatible mobo... up til now that is. In fact, thanks to some sharp eyes, it's come to light that Abit has a socket 939 mobo with PCI Express ready to go, as soon as VIA can ship them some K8T890 chipsets. I know what I'm stuffing in my Christmas computer this year... an Athlon 64 and a PCI express video card.

Microsoft

Remember how the geeks in your life have been telling you that you couldn't get a virus from looking at naked pictures on the internet? We lied. Well, at least, we lied to you if you wanted to do it on Internet Explorer. The code to a malicious exploit that allows a code to execute based on a flaw in the way Internet Explorer and Office decode jpegs has gotten out. You need to hit Microsoft's website and start patching immediately... immediately after you download and install Mozilla Firefox, anyway. Better start using Thunderbird in place of Outlook and PC602 Suite instead of Office, just to be safe. They're all free and won't get your machine more infected than a sailor on shoreleave in the poor part of Thailand.

Mozilla

This one's not really schadenfreude, unless you consider it a kick in the teeth to Microsoft's browser monopoly. Mozilla Firefox 1.0PR has passed it's millionth download in under 100 hours of availability. Not only that, it has climbed from 4% of the browser market in Jan 2003 to 16.6% in Sept 2004. Somewhere, Richard Stallman is laughing so hard he needs emergency oxygen.

Honestly, all this good news is enough to remind me of the heady days when the Mac beat Intel to the 200MHz mark, or when AMD shattered 1 GHz with a shipping part. I'm sorry to see NVidia besting ATi on Doom3 performance, but it'll probably mean that next summer's Radeons will truly hit with a vengence. At the end of the day, that's what it's all about. Competition forces the real innovations to the top.