Intel Details More Arc Graphics A-Series Hardware Specifications

[ezst036]

Let's not kid ourselves, Windows are first and foremost a gaming operating system. Without gaming, the whole world would have moved to GNU/Linux decades ago.

Nah. Microsoft's monopoly is perpetuated by the millions of cubicles you never see, but they're everywhere in those big glass buildings downtown.

Windows first and foremost is a vehicle for Microsoft Office. Without Microsoft Office, the whole world would have moved to GNU/Linux decades ago.

Gaming is important, I know full well that gaming is important, but that's not the boat anchor holding us back. The anchor is Office. That's the 8000lb gorilla in the room. Adobe's offerings are pretty important as well, but everything rests on Microsoft Office. I've never worked at a company that didn't have a widespread Microsoft Outlook email userbase. Microsoft offers very sweet deals to its corporate partners to ensure that they never give up on Outlook and Office for any competing email/office product.

You can get gaming on a Playstation. You cannot get the full-scale Microsoft Office on a Switch.

Everything rests on Microsoft Office.

[TemplarGR]

Nah. Microsoft's monopoly is perpetuated by the millions of cubicles you never see, but they're everywhere in those big glass buildings downtown.

Windows first and foremost is a vehicle for Microsoft Office. Without Microsoft Office, the whole world would have moved to GNU/Linux decades ago.

Gaming is important, I know full well that gaming is important, but that's not the boat anchor holding us back. The anchor is Office. That's the 8000lb gorilla in the room. Adobe's offerings are pretty important as well, but everything rests on Microsoft Office. I've never worked at a company that didn't have a widespread Microsoft Outlook email userbase. Microsoft offers very sweet deals to its corporate partners to ensure that they never give up on Outlook and Office for any competing email/office product.

You can get gaming on a Playstation. You cannot get the full-scale Microsoft Office on a Switch.

Everything rests on Microsoft Office.

No, office is a big fat nothing. The vast majority of pcs never use office. And the vast majority of people who do use office, could easily do their work with open alternatives, especially considering that if microsoft didn't exist, the open alternatives and even other commercial alternatives would have gotten far more development.

The reason ms office is used is mostly because most people are familiar with windows and that ecosystem, and people are familiar with that ecosystem because that is where they play their games, or played them as children. Also, microsoft ecosystem has better hardware compatibility for every kind of hardware, again, because most people use it, which leads to more familiarity, which leads to better software compatibility in general, which leads to ms office being the dominant choice...

Gaming is the most important thing. Office is irrelevant. 99% of the cubicles you mention could switch overnight to Libreoffice without much of a fuss.

[moriel5]

[TemplarGR;n1345007]Without gaming, the whole world would have moved to GNU/Linux decades ago.[/QUOTE]

Windows first and foremost is a vehicle for Microsoft Office. Without Microsoft, the whole world would have moved to GNU/Linux decades ago.

Actually, it heavily depends on where you are geographically, and what your needs are. Where I live, in part due to heavy cooperation between Microsoft and or government, until recently it was pretty much impossible to have a functioning business without it relying upon Microsoft's offerings, since proper standards was never, and still is not, a real concern to those in charge here (most of the pushback is from companies that were never directly owned by the government), as well as there being no office that works properly with RTL languages, especially when in the same document as LTR languages (Libreoffice is the farthest ahead in this regard, even better than Google Docs, however only on par with Microsoft Office 2007, where such issues, while less common (but still common enough), are catastrophic, to the point that the entire document has to be manually rewritten from scratch. And while in recent months I am starting to see people claiming that they have no need for an office suite, they generally return to me requesting Microsoft Office as soon as something (whether it be work or studies) requires them to use it, with those using alternatives (the are quite a few I convinced to move from OpenOffice to LibreOffice), constantly showing me problems with handling RTL text, regardless of the office suite (yes, this includes LibreOffice).

I actually have a friend who was afraid to switch over to Linux, because he mainly games, however after reading about Proton and Valve's efforts, he started preparing to test out the Linux field, and right the middle he needed to start using an Office suite (mainly for Word documents), and with my recommendation, since he did not wish to either pay for nor pirate Microsoft Office, he installed LibreOffice. After a few days, he called me back, and said that he just cannot work with LibreOffice, since it keeps messing up his documents, so he was forced to use Microsoft Office and never looked back.

Since my main OS is Linux, that obviously means that I am not using Microsoft Office on a regular basis (tried via W.I.N.E, however even the installers for any versions new enough for proper RTL compatibility (2013+, with 2016 having the least incompatibility issues) failed to properly run (known issue, I need to check whether anyone managed to fix this, since for some reason it was mailed as "low priority" back then)), so I naturally tested things out, with WPS office being the most comfortable, LibreOffice having the best compatibility, and OnlyOffice somehow being in the middle (how they manage to lower RTL compatibility, I have absolutely no idea), FreeOffice /Softmaker Office (yes, I tried the paid version on a trial as well) losing on all fronts (overwhelming GUI that is also very distracting and confusing, our local language completely throws it off (why in the world does a modern office suite render RTL text as LTR?), and the others ranging from "OnlyOffice" level to "FreeOffice" levels.

And in general, many corporations, and even non-profit organizations, here are pretty much tied down to Microsoft, whether it be due to Office (including Exchange Server), Windows Server (there are quite a few local software offerings that are Windows-only, with one of the largest, having it's developers going out of their way to break things if run on non-Windows platforms (as part of their bone-headed attempts at forcing people to use their software in one way, and one way only (requiring either a DVD-ROM or a flashdrive to be connected in order to user the software, even after installing it to the hard drive, using old and outdated Windows-only libraries, and even suing private individuals who found bugs that allowed them to use the software in a way that the developers did not envision) or certain Microsoft online services such as OneDrive and SharePoint, and yes, Skype and Teams.

Also, if you are willingly and knowingly paying for Internet censorship (yes, that is a real thing, and to a degree, I agree with that, although I believe that all of the currently widely-deployed solutions are broken by design, since censorship should not be at the cost of privacy, and should not damage free speech to the point it currently does), here in my country, almost all services are blocked, except of course, for almost anything Microsoft (and Google, to a far lesser degree).

[coder]

Obviously, gaming is a life or death situation for Microsoft, so they do everything in their power to make sure no alternative open API can exist for 3D graphics. Let's not kid ourselves,

That's not true. Apple will not allow their vendor-supplied drivers to support other APIs, like Vulkan. That's what it looks like, when you "do everything in your power" to shut out other APIs.

Microsoft doesn't do this, yet their driver qualification & signing program would give them the means to. They let vendors support whatever other APIs they want, but Microsoft simply wants nothing to do with it.

Game developers don't have any real incentives for using Vulkan, especially when Microsoft arrives with a bag of cash, so....

An industry insider told me Microsoft actually got very worried about Vulkan. It was gaining traction faster than DX12, initially. That's supposedly why they partnered with Nvidia to introduce ray tracing (via Microsoft DXR). And it seemed to work.

[coder]

No, office is a big fat nothing. The vast majority of pcs never use office. And the vast majority of people who do use office, could easily do their work with open alternatives,

Yeah, like I think there's a whole generation of folks who've used a lot more Google Docs than MS Office. They start companies and those companies go with Google or other options, not MS. Slowly, but surely, MS ages out of the workplace.

MS has been trying to counter with MS Office 365, but I think their pricing is probably too high to beat Google Docs at its own game.

[coder]

Wow, near the bottom of page 2 and not a comment about hardware specs, on an article pretty much only about them?

I'm surprised there's no A780. I wonder if Intel is saving this as a "surprise", for when their drivers are in better shape. It seems like either it'd be an overclocked A770 or maybe the 16 GB variant.

[Slartifartblast]

Poor old Intel, just as the ass falls out of the graphics card market they launch with underwhelming products. Could have gotten away with it at the height of Covid but not now.

[Michael_S]

I know this is off the topic of Intel GPUs, but with respect to Windows dominance, I think it's both Office and PC gaming, plus the education system.

My previous employer was the RELX group, which has 30k employees. The whole organization uses MS Office. My current job does not, but it's a tiny company - and we still have people that use it to interact with outside companies.

And when I was job hunting, dozens of potential employers asked for my resume in Word format. I wrote it in Libre office and exported it to Microsoft Word. Then I opened it in Word on my work laptop, and the formatting was completely broken. This was less than a year ago. The next time I job hunt, I'll get Office365 for a month and write my resume in Word in the browser.

Microsoft also makes Windows and Office available at big discounts to schools, as another way to lock people in. Google finally managed to start eating into that market with Chromebooks and Google Classroom.

PC gaming is the last piece. Nobody wants to miss a favorite game because of operating system. Windows gamers miss some console exclusives, but as far as I know every game on MacOS and Linux is also on Windows.

[Quackdoc]

well at the very least the cards look very sleek

[coder]

My previous employer ... has 30k employees. The whole organization uses MS Office. My current job does not, but it's a tiny company - and we still have people that use it to interact with outside companies.

Yeah, my previous job was a startup that used Thunderbird and Open Office, except for the "business" people (accounting, marketing, etc.), who had windows machines and MS Office.

My current employer is a Big Company, where the entire IT organization basically pretends Linux doesn't exist, even though most of our products are now Linux-based embedded devices or run on Linux-based cloud instances.

And when I was job hunting, dozens of potential employers asked for my resume in Word format.

Good to know. I last wrote mine in L^AT_EX and sent them a PDF, but that was a while ago.