Little over a week ago, Tim Sweeney’s quote of “PC’s are good for anything, just not games” was taken out of context and rapidly spread across the ‘net as a doomsayer for PC gaming. Sweeney was in fact slamming Intel for pushing its low-quality graphics hardware in mainstream OEM computers the typical non-geek customer would find at Best Buy, Target, or the Empire of Evil itself, Walmart.
Today, Alex St. John, a former programmer of DirectX, makes the counter-point that, in fact, consoles as we know them today, are dead. This is Darren’s cue to pull a McConaughey and do some naked bongo-dancing — PC’s are saved and the evil consoles are dead! 
St. John makes the exact same two points as Sweeney in his interview: Intel (and Microsoft) are to blame for the lousy performance or outright inability for the mainstream PC’s to game, and that we’ll soon be seeing a unification of GPU’s and CPU’s, eliminating the need for a software graphics API such as DirectX or OpenGL. Both Sweeney and St. John are very excited about the near future as both AMD and Intel are actively pursuing this very unification.
Likely, AMD’s acquisition of ATI will only aid them with their cause; Intel, on the other hand, needs to step up to the plate and develop a competitive GPU. My question: what becomes of Nvidia? They’re already doing the GPU and motherboard chipsets; will they take the initiative and produce their own line of CPU’s as well, with integrated GPU’s? Will they be acquired by Intel? Perhaps just license their GPU’s to Intel for unification with Intel’s CPU? Actually that might be a good idea — perhaps that way we could get AMD CPU’s but with Nvidia graphics rather than ATI… yummy!
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