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If/when the bubble pops, manufacturers will find that they can't butter their bread like they could when the datacenter craze was booming. In a world that is paved by growth, companies aren't very good at shrinking.

It doesn't matter what consumers do or don't do -- we plebians are a tiny portion of their present market. We can buy the same GPUs from the same folks as before, or we can do something different, and it won't matter.

Whatever we do will be a rounding error in the jagged, gaping, infected hole where the AI market once was.

[TheAmazingRace]

This is an even-handed take. I still think consumers in general should vote with their wallets, even if all of them put together won't hold a candle to their datacenter customers. If nothing else, it can grant the competition more market share, and maybe AMD and Intel can invest more into Radeon and Arc, respectively. That can only be a good thing, since I'd love to see more broad support for FSR and XeSS technologies on games, and ROCm and oneAPI for compute.

[ssl-3]

Oh, for sure. It's often good to bet on the underdog in a competitive market -- it helps ensure that competition continues to exist.

When I sold PC hardware, I'd try to find the right fit for a customer's needs and pricepoint. Way back then, that often meant selling systems with relatively-inexpensive Cyrix or AMD CPUs and more RAM instead of systems with more-expensive Intel CPUs that had less RAM at any given price -- because those were good tradeoffs to make. By extension, I did a very small part to help foster competition.

But gamers drive the bulk of non-datacenter GPU sales and they don't necessarily act that way.

Having observed their behavior for decades, I feel confident in saying that they broadly promote whatever the top dog is today (whether they can afford to be in that club or not), and aren't shy about punching down on those who suggest a less-performant option regardless of its fitness for a particular purpose.

Or at least: The ones who behave this way sure do manage to be loud about it. (And in propaganda, loudness counts.)

I suspect they'll be fawning over nVidia for as long as nVidia keeps producing what is perceived to be the fastest thing, even if it is made from pure unobtanium.

[TheAmazingRace]

Now you have me getting misty eyed a bit! I remember when my dad had a Cyrix PC and later an AMD K6 II+ whitebox build. :)

At any rate, you do have a point. I can't argue that Nvidia has an inferior product; yet I just wish Nvidia wasn't abusing their position so much.

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The K6-2 was a trooper.

I had one of those for what seemed like an eternity.

At first, right out of the gate: I overclocked it from 300MHz to 350MHz just to see what would happen. It worked perfectly without further adjustment (and the next step did not), so I left it right there at 350MHz. For the price, at that time, it kept up great compared to what my peers had going on.

As the years ticked by and it was getting long in the tooth, it stayed around -- but it shifted roles.

I think the last thing it was doing for me was running a $25 SoundBlaster Live! 5.1's EMU10k1 DSP chip under Windows, using the kX audio drivers.

kX let a person use that DSP chip for what it was -- an audio-oriented DSP with some audio-centric IO. With kX, a person could drop basic DSP blocks into the GUI and wire them together arbitrarily, and also wire them into the real world.

I used it as a parametric EQ and active crossover for the stereo in my home office -- unless I was also using it as a bass preamp, in a different mode. Low-latency real-time software DSP was mostly a non-starter at that time, but these functions and routings were all done within the EMU10k1 and end-to-end latency was low enough to play a bass guitar through.

Of course: It still required a computer to run it, and I had a new family at that time and things like the electric bill were very important to me. So I underclocked and undervolted the K6-2 for passive cooling, booted Windows from a CompactFlash card (what spinning HDD?), and hacked the power supply fan to just-barely turn and rotate air over the heatsinks.

It went from a relatively high-cost past-performer to a rather silent low-power rig that I'd remote into over the LAN to wiggle DSP settings on that only had one moving part.

Neat chips, the K6-2 and EMU10k1 were.

Fun times.

(And to bring it all back 'round: We'd be in a different place right now if things like the K6-2 had been more popular than they were. I don't know if it'd be better or worse, but it'd sure be different.)

[TheAmazingRace]

Dude seriously this is such a nice story. I especially love how you used the EMU10k1 DSP in conjunction with your K6 system to its fullest potential. :D

Speaking of sound cards, I distinctly remember the Sound Blaster Audigy being the very last discrete sound card my dad obtained before we stuck with AC’97, and later the HDA codec audio solution on the motherboard.

I do vaguely recall the kX drivers you mentioned, but I’m pretty sure we stuck with whatever came stock from Creative Labs, for better or for worse. Also… that SB16 emulation under DOS for the Live! and Audigy series cards was not great, having been a carry over from the ENSONIQ days. The fact that I needed EMM386 to use it was a bit of a buzzkill.

On the K6-II+ system we had, we used an AWE64 Gold on the good ol’ ISA bus. Probably my favorite sound card of all time, followed by the Aureal Vortex 2.

[ssl-3]

Sound cards were cool. Kids these days with their approximately-perfect high-res DACs built into their $12 Apple headphone adapters don't know what it was like. ;)

My mom had a computer with a SoundBlaster 16. I carried that sound card across the room one day for whatever reason a kid does a thing like that, and it got zapped pretty bad with static. It still worked after that, but it learned the strangest new function: It became microphonic. You could shout into the sound card and hear it through the speakers.

But other than being microphonic, the noise wasn't unusual: Sound cards were noisy.

At one point around the turn of the century, I scored a YMF724-based card that featured an ADC stage that actually sounded good, and was quiet. I used this with a FreeBSD box along with a dedicated radio tuner to record some radio shows that I liked. That machine wasn't fast enough to encode decent MP3s in real-time, but it was quick enough to dump PCM audio through a FIFO and onto the hard drive without skipping a beat. MP3 encoding happened later -- asynchronously. It was all scheduled with cron jobs, and with NTP the start times were dead-nuts on. (Sometimes, there'd be 2 or 3 nice'd LAME processes stacked up and running at once. FreeBSD didn't care. It was also routing packets for the multi-link PPP dialup Internet connection at the house, rendering print jobs for a fickle Alps MD-1000 printer, and doing whatever else I tossed at it.)

I used 4front's OSS drivers to get there, which was amusing: IIRC, YMF724 support was an extra-cost item. And I was bothered by this because I'd already paid for it once, for Linux. I complained about that to nobody in particular on IRC, and some rando appeared, asked me what features I wanted for the FreeBSD driver, and they sent me a license file that just worked not two minutes later. "I know the hash they use," they said.

There's a few other memorable cards that I had at various points. I had a CT3670, which was an ISA SoundBlaster with an EMU 8k that had two 30-pin SIMM sockets on it for sample RAM.

There was the Zoltrix Nightingale, which was a CMI8738-based device that was $15 brand new (plus another $12 or something for the optional toslink breakout bracket). The analog bits sounded like crap and it had no bespoke synth or other wizardry, but it had bit-perfect digital IO and a pass-through mode that worked as an SCMS stripper. It was both a wonderful and very shitty sound card, notable mostly because of this contrast.

I've got an Audigy 2 ZS here. I think that may represent the pinnacle of the EMU10k1/10k2 era. (And I'm not an avid gear hoarder, so while I may elect to keep that around forever, it's also likely to be the very last sound card I'll ever own.)

And these days, of course, things are different -- but they're also the same. On my desk at home is a Biamp Tesira. It's a fairly serious rackmount DSP that's meant for conference rooms and convention centers and such, with a dozen balanced inputs and 8 balanced outputs, and this one also has Dante for networked audio. It's got a USB port on it that shows up in Linux as a 2-channel sound card. In practice, it just does the same things that I used the K6-2/EMU10k1/kX machine for: An active crossover, some EQ, and whatever weird DSP creations I feel like doodling up.

But it can do some neat stuff, like: This stereo doesn't have a loudness control, and I decided that it should have something like that. So I had the bot help write a Python script that watches the hardware volume control that I've attached and assigned, computes Fletcher-Munson/ISO 226 equal-loudness curves, and shoves the results into an EQ block in a fashion that is as real-time as the Tesira's rather slow IP control channel will allow.