Oh, my. AMD is buying out ATI. This may not be directly x64 related, folks, but it will definitely have a huge impact on x64 hardware. Currently, the most popular chipsets for AMD boards are from ATI’s main competitor – Nvidia. I suspect they’ll be shifting their focus to Intel CPUs now, though I find it hard to believe that they’ll completely abandon AMD - they’ve made a lot of money on AMD systems over the last few years. And is Intel likely to want to use ATI chipsets on their own (and their reference) motherboards? Not very likely.
My real problem, however, is trying to figure out how this is going to benefit either company. I’ve seen enough mega-mergers in the computer world to know that this will have a major effect on the productivity of both companies in the short term. And this at a time when AMD is back to playing catchup with Intel? It just doesn’t make sense.
Charlie.
My thanks to Darrell Gorter once again. He posted a link today to a really useful KB article on the Microsoft site: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;889654. Now it's true, the article doesn't give you a single "twice RAM" or other simple answer. But it does give you all the information you need to make an intelligent, performance enhancing, decision.
Charlie.
DailyTech - AMD Dual-Core Optimization Utility Available.
This should help some of you who’ve reported problems with VMs and dual-core Athlons, for one.
Charlie.
Creative Labs has released a new SoundBlaster X-Fi Driver including one that supports x64. There are a number of fixes in it, so if you've been having any problems with your X-Fi, I'd grab this one.
Charlie.
Ah, new blog skins available thanks to Susan. Had to try a different look. We’ll see what the comments are and what I think after a while with this one. If we don’t like it, we’ll go back to FoggyBottom.
Update: We're back to the old look. The other one didn't grow on me.