Chris Hook Leaves AMD, Radeon Technology Group

[PaulAlcorn]

Chris Hook, AMD's Sr. Director of Global Product Marketing, has announced that he is leaving the company after 17 years that began with ATI.

Chris Hook Leaves AMD, Radeon Technology Group : Read more

 

[KidHorn]

Best of luck to him. in 2001, 320x240 wasn't considered high res. When I got my first programming job in 1991, I had a 640x480 monitor. Which was standard at the time.

 

[Martell1977]

So I guess he is the one we can blame for the massive overblown hype created about so many of their products over the years? I know fanboys didn't help, but AMD marketing has overhyped their products(bulldozer) while failing on other aspects, like name recognition. From my experience, many people think AMD CPU's are a cheap knock-off of Intel's. Intel has made themselves a household name, AMD has not.

 

[marcelo_vidal]

maybe he try'n to say phosphor monitor Best res back 1980 lol

 

[bit_user]

320x240 was considered ‘high res’

Yeah, this is nonsense. He must mean 640x480, which is pretty much where hardware-accelerated 3D started out, in the mid/late 1990's.

320x240 @ 256 colors was first possible on the original VGA board introduced by IBM in the late 1980's. 320x200 or 320x240 (popularized by Oculus' Michael Abrash) was a popular resolution for software-rendered games in the early/mid 1990's.

It's a good thing this guy was marketing. Because such a mistake from such a senior engineer would be pretty worrisome.

 

[kinggremlin]

AMD's offices hadn't splurged for a color television by 2001? Where did they even find a black and white TV post 2000? Has AMD ever had money?

 

[kinggremlin]

Best of luck to him. in 2001, 320x240 wasn't considered high res. When I got my first programming job in 1991, I had a 640x480 monitor. Which was standard at the time.

Yea, no idea where he is getting that from. Original Voodoo released in 96 was great at 640x480. Voodoo2 in 98 did 800x600 and sli did 1024x768 well.

 

[bit_user]

AMD's offices hadn't splurged for a color television by 2001? Where did they even find a black and white TV post 2000? Has AMD ever had money?

The tech offices I've worked in haven't generally had TVs (except for video conferencing setups that weren't connected to cable or antenna).

Where we've rec rooms, they've featured pool tables, ping pong, and foosball tables. Active stuff that people would want to do after sitting for hours.

On 9/11, the news sites were so hammered that cnn.com just had a stripped down page. Definitely no streaming video, on that day (not that there were many news clips on the net, back then).

BTW, I'm guessing the black & white TV was just something someone brought in from home. Now, it is a bit surprising they didn't have anything better with which to test their All-In-Wonder cards, but I guess that stuff wouldn't have been in a rec room. As those things had tuners, they should've had both cable TV and antennas for testing, somewhere in the office.

 

[derekullo]

The pina-colada in his hand and the sand on the beach don't care what high-res was in 1988 😛

In all fairness, maybe he just blocked out all the bad pixelized memories.

 

[boanerges57]

He seems really confused about what life was like in the late 90s and early 00s

In 2001 I had a 1600x1200 19" benq tube monitor

In 1998 I had a 1280x1024 17" SGI tube monitor (a tweaked sony trinitron)

Has he actually been there longer? he seems to be remembering the late 80s/early 90s

 

[bit_user]

The pina-colada in his hand and the sand on the beach don't care what high-res was in 1988 😛

In all fairness, maybe he just blocked out all the bad pixelized memories.

There is an old quip about marketing: "two drink minimum."

 

[bit_user]

He seems really confused about what life was like in the late 90s and early 00s

In 2001 I had a 1600x1200 19" benq tube monitor

In 1998 I had a 1280x1024 17" SGI tube monitor (a tweaked sony trinitron)

Has he actually been there longer? he seems to be remembering the late 80s/early 90s

If we give him the benefit of the doubt, then we should assume he was talking about gaming resolutions. I had a XGA (1024x768) card + monitor in about 1991, but that doesn't mean I could play any games at that resolution.

They used to say the best CRT monitors for text & CAD were monochrome, since they had no shadow mask. Sun made some nice black & white 1280x1024 monitors, back in the 80's. Probably at least 21" and like 100 pounds. I briefly had one with an old Sun 3 workstation I saved from the dumpster, but I didn't have a clue what to do with it.

 

[cryoburner]

If we give him the benefit of the doubt, then we should assume he was talking about gaming resolutions. I had a XGA (1024x768) card + monitor in about 1991, but that doesn't mean I could play any games at that resolution.

According to the article, he was only there for 17 years though, which would have been around 2001. In 2001, you could even play many games on a system with Intel integrated graphics at a resolution of 800x600 or higher. I can't image many people were gaming at 320x240 at the time, let alone considering it "high res". 640x480 would have probably been the bare minimum anyone would want to play PC games at, and even that would have been considered "low res" for PC games at the time.

 

[bit_user]

If we give him the benefit of the doubt, then we should assume he was talking about gaming resolutions. I had a XGA (1024x768) card + monitor in about 1991, but that doesn't mean I could play any games at that resolution.

According to the article, he was only there for 17 years though, which would have been around 2001. In 2001, you could even play many games on a system with Intel integrated graphics at a resolution of 800x600 or higher. I can't image many people were gaming at 320x240 at the time, let alone considering it "high res". 640x480 would have probably been the bare minimum anyone would want to play PC games at, and even that would have been considered "low res" for PC games at the time.

Right. You have to go back in the thread for context, here. I was just replying to the point about 1600x1200 being fairly common, in the late 90's - that he was obviously talking about resolutions at which 3D graphics acceleration was being used, because SVGA and even XGA were fairly common well before that.

His exact words were laughable. No one debates that. The question is merely how far off the mark was he, which depends on which you think he was talking about 3D resolutions or not.