Posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Graphics Chips Reshape the Battlefield
Wall Street Journal
The companies are jockeying to push their products beyond PCs to multimedia phones, handheld computers, game consoles and TV sets. “It’s a battle royal,” says Shane Rau, an analyst at market-research company IDC.
The fight is intensifying because of changes in PC usage. Microprocessors, which manage general-purpose calculating functions, help determine how fast a computer runs many kinds of software. But people are increasingly using computers for pastimes such as playing digital videos and games that simulate three-dimensional landscapes, which rely more on graphics chips than microprocessors. Windows Vista, Microsoft Corp.’s current operating system, also runs noticeably better with more-powerful graphics chips.
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