All computer companies are in cahoots with each other! There is no competition!

All computer companies are in cahoots with each other! There is no competition!

AMD will and always be behind Intel when it comes to CPU. AMD and Nvidia are always the graphic competitor. Intel will always be behind in graphics.

Every electronics are BS. All micro SD or SD cards are always release as the same size. Not a single company ever goes beyond the other when it releases based on capacity. Samsung got 64 GB, the rest is 64 GB. SanDisk goes 128 GB, rest goes 128 GB. Have anyone notices this trend? You never see a company race to have the bigger hard drives capacity. Even memory cards, etc. All the Super Computers are controlled by the Gov and gov only. The Public never allowed such things unless your an internet company.

a reply to: makemap

Yeah I remember when there used to be maybe 6-10 HD manufacturers then they were all consolidated. I've heard that there are really only 2 makers now and all the brands are just labels stuck on them but they come from the same "manufacturer". IDK if that is true or not, but it kind of seems like this. I think the other hardware is basically the same thing as well.

Look at cars. Why do most cars have basically the same engines, transmissions, brakes, suspension. Sure there are different slight flavors of them, each brand having a little tweek, but they are all basically the same. Nothing really stands out except the electric cars which are only different in engine/transmission.

There used to be a lot of different engine designs. Look on YT and there are some really "odd"/interesting designs. some have some awesome advantages but also have downsides. I think it all goes to reductionism and we get stuck with a few choices, often not the best ones, possibly the ones that make the most money for the companies. Maybe there are super efficient engines that don't break down? That wouldn't be good for engine manufacturers or gas/oil companies so we get stuck with gas hogs that wear out and break down. Are you telling me that we can't design a car that makes use of more than 20% of the energy in fuel!!!? F that! Sure we can. you think we can't make a car that doesn't need rebuild at 100K? Yup, sure can, but that would put a lot of people out of business.

look back at the old RISC processors that blew the doors off of pentium's. Where did that go and why didn't that take off. I'm betting that is what many of the government computers use that do all the data analysis and profiling for the NSA, NRO, CIA, etc, that or quantum computers..

Mushrooms, kept in dark, fed #.

And don't get me started on internet access!

It feels like a race to the bottom.

originally posted by: makemap
All computer companies are in cahoots with each other! There is no competition!

AMD will and always be behind Intel when it comes to CPU. AMD and Nvidia are always the graphic competitor. Intel will always be behind in graphics.

Every electronics are BS. All micro SD or SD cards are always release as the same size. Not a single company ever goes beyond the other when it releases based on capacity. Samsung got 64 GB, the rest is 64 GB. SanDisk goes 128 GB, rest goes 128 GB. Have anyone notices this trend? You never see a company race to have the bigger hard drives capacity. Even memory cards, etc. All the Super Computers are controlled by the Gov and gov only. The Public never allowed such things unless your an internet company.

You're missing one huge factor.

Moore's Law: The number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years.

It's based on the technology we have to advance tomorrow's technology. There are no leaps and bounds.


Intel will always 'seemingly' be ahead of AMD but you will always be able to overclock AMD's to surpass Intel's processor. I don't disagree that it's done on purpose in this manner. I'm sure there are serious price fixing but I don't think that the technology is being purposely placed alongside the competitors. Until you get more companies in the mix of making processors for PCs, it's pretty much going to be like this. Their technology is a bit different from one another but the basic concept and layout is pretty much the same.

By the way, I need to add.... You can't compare processors by their "speed" or their clock. There are too many variables. Intel has not and will not always been ahead of AMD. AMD used to be the big boy on the block once upon a time. I don't know who's who anymore as far as who's got better. To me they're pretty much all the same. There is only so much out there that will use the top of the line hardware anyways. Most of your games will be throttled back so you don't have an unfair advantage over other players. This is done on purpose. The ONLY software I have on my system that uses anywhere close to what my puter can do is my 'Paint Shop Pro'.... And that's pretty much just taxing my memory. CPU wise... Not even close. Video card wise... Yeah not so much.



The same is true with memory/SD/USB etc.... Moore's Law. You have way more competitors here so prices will flux quite a bit and often. But then... You get what you pay for.

I think you're missing the fact that technology is improving so drastically fast that what we have today is going to be essentially obsolete in just a few years. People only started using iPhones like 10 years ago.
This was my first cell phone that I had as a teenager, and I thought it was cool that it actually had a screen. Modern cell phones today are actually portable touch-screen computers that can also make phone calls.


I think the reason for what you're talking about with companies releasing the same technology as one another is because it isn't necessarily a good business decision to release the absolute best technology you can currently come up with and produce. Let's say you figured out how to create, for example, a 2TB SD card. Ok, great, no other company on the market is able to produce one yet, so you figure you'll release it and sit back while raking in the profits. Well, now every one of your competitors just bought and reverse-engineered it so they can figure out the tech and create their own. The problem you now face is if one of those competitors figure out how to improve it before you, you're no longer the top dog in the market. I'm pretty sure companies such as Intel or AMD routinely withhold their best tech for that very reason - so they can continue working on it in secret and try to maintain the upper hand in case a competitor releases something new and way better than what's currently on the market.

a reply to: makemap

Some of this is boils down to the "rule of three" that can be seen in just about any mature market. Other things you mention sound like they have more to do with the fact that some components are only manufactured in a very very small number of plants.

AMD and Intel CPUs are different technologies.
I personally use AMD CPUs and Nvidia graphics
Once upon a time , IBM was responsible for 90+% of all new technology in computers . Most devices were either IBM or developed by IBM
No new technology ? Where are you at ?
AMD - Ryzen Threadripper CPUs
Intel - CPU "mesh" technology ( soon coming to PCs I hope)
NVMe M.2 SSDs
USB 3.2
Graphics cards - Vulkan Technology and faster and more GPUs/card
The above is a very small representation of new technology

a reply to: DigginFoTroof

look back at the old RISC processors that blew the doors off of pentium's. Where did that go and why didn't that take off. I'm betting that is what many of the government computers use that do all the data analysis and profiling for the NSA, NRO, CIA, etc, that or quantum computers..

RISC - Reduced Instruction Set - Still around and VERY popular across the board with mainframes . That technology is still around in a major way,
Of course RISC was faster. For it's use companies do not need MMX technology nor the full instruction set of an Intel or AMD x86/x64 architecture . No game playing for them.
Then they went cell (think cores/threads)....now you are talking 1000x the computing speed
Quantum chips are way in the future . 30 - 50 years at least.

All computer companies are in cahoots with each other! There is no competition!

Ya think companies "hate" each other ?
Instead of "cahoots" substitute the term "cooperates" . Then you will have it.

I thought you were going to discuss computer companies instead of various pieces of a built computer.

Would have agreed with that premise since if you buy a smilarly specced laptop, prices are very similar (at the high end with the latest technology). It would seem to me a big retailer, like Dell, should be somewhat cheaper than say Origin or Falcon Northwest since Dell would purchase way larger amounts of CPUs, GPUs, SSDs, and memory. Doesn’t seem to work that way.

Others have covered why companies use same level technology. I think the question is the potential collusion to keep high end, similarly specced, complete computer prices almost identical across the board.

The moment you mention mainframes that pretty much gave away the fact that you are into transaction based stuff and normally we're into "legacy" sort of things and when you can afford a new mainframe you are minted shall we say.

Mainframes work at a totally diferent mind set than 'normal' computers, having spent many a year on them they are basically designed to process whatever is slapped at them as fast as possible but its normally boring crap like your bank accounts etc.

originally posted by: Lab4Us
I thought you were going to discuss computer companies instead of various pieces of a built computer.

Would have agreed with that premise since if you buy a smilarly specced laptop, prices are very similar (at the high end with the latest technology). It would seem to me a big retailer, like Dell, should be somewhat cheaper than say Origin or Falcon Northwest since Dell would purchase way larger amounts of CPUs, GPUs, SSDs, and memory. Doesn’t seem to work that way.

Others have covered why companies use same level technology. I think the question is the potential collusion to keep high end, similarly specced, complete computer prices almost identical across the board.

Dell systems are crap for one. 2, they use a different memory chip designed specifically for dell computers.

If you build your own rig, you'll come out WAY cheaper. Most start up companies (like alienware used to be) will try to keep their prices comparable. Depending on what you want.

Computer company prices are very different. Often times their sources for components are not.


Too many variables involved - is why dell wouldn't be cheaper. I think they're worth the junk that's in them. They're not very good as anything but clients and low ended servers.

originally posted by: Maxatoria
The moment you mention mainframes that pretty much gave away the fact that you are into transaction based stuff and normally we're into "legacy" sort of things and when you can afford a new mainframe you are minted shall we say.

Mainframes work at a totally diferent mind set than 'normal' computers, having spent many a year on them they are basically designed to process whatever is slapped at them as fast as possible but its normally boring crap like your bank accounts etc.

Yeah , I already explained RISC.

There's also the problem that if you release a system with 256 Terabytes of storage, there might not be the battery power or even the CPU's that could handle that amount of address space.

We had that problem back in the 1970's. First 8-bit CPU's had 16 bits of addresss space, so a maximum of 64K memory. First problem was that memory was so expensive, very few could afford it. Second problem was that even if you could afford that amount of memory, it would take up the size of a modern GPU. Eventually those problems were solved, and now the problem was that developers wanted more than 64K of memory, so new techniques like memory banking were implemented so that only 16K of a huge 128K could be seen through a small 32K window. This is used today for memory mapping hardware into the memory space of a CPU. Eventually CPU's went to 32-bit address spaces and then 64-bit. Even now it depends on the motherboard vendor on the maximum amount of memory available. It might be 16, 32 or 64 Gigabytes or even more if it is a server motherboard.

AMD has actually gained market share and took Intel by surprise with Ryzen/Ryzen+ and the threadripper line. Which is why Intel had to launch Kaby lake/Coffee lake refresh so soon, and introduced the I9 series. Notice how the 8700k is now a 6 core/12 thread cpu when, traditionally, the I7 x700 series was a 4 core/8 thread cpu. AMD was winning the core/thread per $ battle. Still kind of are.

AMD still lags behind in single threaded performance, but we *may* see that gap close even more with Ryzen 2.


AMD does need to figure out wth to do about their video cards and the crypto craze though. They are decent cards, don't get me wrong, but if you've already bought into the 10 series Nvidia cards, there isn't much reason to switch due to availability and Vega being a bit of a let down.

a reply to: DigginFoTroof


I've never thought about it, since I don't deal as much with hardware anymore, but like the only drives I hear about anymore are Maxtor and Seagate. There was half a dozen or more back in the day that I had used.

Anyone remember the Quantum Bigfoot drives? It was a internal HDD with the "footprint" (no pun intended) of a 5 1/4" bay, as opposed to the 3.5" standard of that day. Ahhh, the memories....(again, no pun intended)

a reply to: Gothmog

Given the software is probably decades old and recompiling stuff can lead to all sorts of problems as the old 'if it aint broke dont fix it' so there probably can end up with multiple levels of emulation.

You normally pay for what performance you want in mips and you can use an ICL 39 series mainframe to run a 1900 series system from the 1960/70's which itself can emulate a LEO system environment from the 1950's

But anyway back to the main track....

The cost of improving the tech is always going up so theres less companies able to make their own tech, the main problem is the rise of the lawyers and thus it can take years to sort out the legal battle and by then the tech itself is obsolete.