Re: AMD Buys ATI: The return of "custom chips" in computers.

That was the weakness with "Custom Chips". They couldn't evolve
in the same generation of machine. What you was all you would ever
have.
With AMD's announced plans to buy Graphics giant ATI, I see the
possibility of a return of this eveulationary chain that we previously
thought was extinct, or at least relegated to wireless portable

Sorry, you're way off base here. Every chip in a modern PC is a
"custom" chip in the sense that it is an ASSP.

The only semantic difference between the VIC-II and a modern nVidia or
ATI graphics chip is that nVidia and ATI _only_ sell graphics chips,
and they sell them to _anyone_. Commodore only made the VIC-II for
their own consumption. If they had been selling to a wider market, they
would have faced competition, which would have forced them to keep
engineering better video solutions. Selling to a captive market does
not encourage innovation.

The difference between an ASIC and an ASSP is a marketing one, not a
technological one.

I'll also point out the PC is designed as an open architecture. It
will not migrate to a closed architecture. Apple tried that and
gradually gave up the idea; everything in a Mac these days (except the
software) is COTS.

If you're referring to the fact that people sat down and did
cycle-optimized stuff on the VIC+6510 combination, squeezing out
performance features the designers never envisaged, those days are long
gone. Modern CPU architectures are simply not deterministic enough to
hack this way. Moreover, because of the whole open architecture thing,
you simply can't rely on anything as a constant - so there's no
baseline from which you can hack. The only closed systems that use
these chips are devices like game consoles. Even on those systems, you
don't whack the hardware directly, you go through APIs - because the
console mfr wants version 4 hardware to run software that was written
for version 3 hardware.

.

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