Luminoir

OSX v Windows
Avid vs FCP
Wii vs Xbox 360 vs PS3
HD-DVD vs Bluray
AMD vs Intel
ATI vs nVidia
FireWire vs USB
Betamax vs VHS

Is there anything that polarizes opinion more these black and white arguments?

I will not pretend to be an expert on all of the topics above, many of them are difficult to grasp, if I do make any misrepresentations or errors, I do apologize and invite people more knowledgeable on the topics to correct me.

What’s interesting is that while most people do recognize that the superior technology doesn’t always win (as with Betamax), the arguments tend to circle around just that, partially because, as people interested in technology, they have a bias towards data that is verifiable, irrefutable and accurate.

This ignores the external factors which are arguably even more influential in the outcome than the sheer technological specifications.

Again, my recollection of these events are hazy and while I have done some research to substantiate this post, I honestly don’t have the time to fact check it completely, and the inaccuracies if they exist, do not affect the conclusions I have drawn. This is an opinion piece, not a dissertation.

You may draw completely contrary conclusions as is your right and feel free to disagree with me. It would be my pleasure to discuss further with you in the comments.

Case study 1: AMD Athlon vs Intel Pentium 3

Context
In 1999, AMD and Intel went head to head in the processor wars. Prior to this, AMD’s K5 line of processors had been rightly written off as word-processor also-rans together with Cyrix (remember them?). The K6 series closed the gap, but the K7 series is where it gets really interesting.

Who had the better technology?
With the launch of the Athlon, AMD leapfrogged into the computer processor performance lead for the first time.

Processor clock speed was the key marketing number of that era. AMD’s new K7 series, named Athlon, was equal to Intel in that regard, but their dual front side bus with DDR technology (Double Data Rate, not the dancing game) 180 nanometer  Process & 3D Now! Floating Point Unit meant that an AMD Athlon clocked at 600MHz (don’t laugh, this was 1999) would outperform an Intel processor clocked at the same speed, by performing more instructions per clock.

If you think of 600MHz as a clock that ticks 600,000 times a second, it is easy to see how a small lead in instructions per clock amplified by the clockspeed can translate into significant performance gains.

Intel at that point, were having problems transitioning to the 180 nanometer process, were experiencing material shortages and fell behind in the performance stakes.

The Athlon Thunderbird series was also popular for it’s overclocking abilities, matching the ‘overclockability’ of the venerable Mendocino Celeron 300A, and could be overclocked by connecting the L1 bridges of the chip by shading a conductive path with a graphite pencil, much easier than fiddling with jumpers with the Celeron.

Overclocking takes advantage of the fact that most processors are physically capable of performing at higher clockspeeds than they are specified at. As manufacturing processes improve, yields are so high that often the budget segment processors come from the same manufacturing batch as the mid range processors. They are then underclocked to cater to the low/budget market segment.

How did they lose?
Marketing. Consumers were conditioned by Intel’s marketing that the performance of a processor was defined by its clockspeed, which was true for a time. However, when AMD overhauled this by offering superior performance at equal clockspeed, they failed to educate the market of this.

Worse, they tried to represent their superior performance on Intel’s terms. For their XP series, they would name their processor clocked at 1600mHz the Athlon XP 1900+, to represent that it should be regarded as an equal to Intel’s processor at 1900MHz.

There are 2 problems with this. First, why allow name your products based on your rival’s nomenclature and lend credence to the idea that MHz means everything when that misconception hurts your product?

Secondly, any layman with a smidgen of diligence who sees 1900+ instead of 1900MHz on a retail box will wonder what the “real MHz” is, because that’s the number the consumer has been told to look for by the market leader. If you know nothing of the technology and see something labelled 1900+, and upon closer inspection see it is actually 1600MHz, how do you feel?

Cheated.
Would you ever trust a company that made you feel cheated?

AMD retained decent marketshare during that period, mostly buoyed by embarrassingly geeky kids like myself looking to get the most bang for buck for our gaming systems, but really, they should have been capitalizing on their temporary technological superiority, and consolidating that position. Unfortunately for everyone but Intel, they did not.

What happened in the end?
Intel correctly targeted the growing mobile segment and were first to market with the Core Duo with Centrino. Low power consumption, not performance was the new black. Intel’s significant lead in the mobile market coincided with an unprecedented boom in demand for mobile computing, cementing their position as market leaders.

Now, as the larger company, Intel can afford to take risks with their design approaches and directions, which gives them higher odds at making a breakthrough in technology. These are risks AMD can no longer afford to take. In poker terms, they’re short stacked on their way to being blinded out, while waiting for the nuts to double up.

That also allows Intel the resources, if they wish, to wage price wars which make no economic sense in the short term, but pay off in the long term if they put AMD out of business, gifting them what would effectively be a monopoly for the computer processor market.

Worse still, AMD’s acquisition of ATI, means it they go out of business, 2 monopolies will be created, Intel benefiting in the processor space and nVidia in the graphic card market.

Next Techwar.
Firewire vs USB.

Editing professionals swear by firewire. In the early years of USB, firewire was an oasis of constant throughput, as any drive with a USB interface was spat at as devil incarnate and loathesome paperweight.
Is USB still that bad? What about USB3? e-SATA? Gigabit? We’ve seen the future and it’s one where banks won’t loan us the money to buy Fibre Channel.