I don't think that lesson is wrong. I was involved with the semiconductor industry at the time, and that's how it looked from the inside (and it still does in r

I don't think that lesson is wrong. I was involved with the semiconductor industry at the time, and that's how it looked from the inside (and it still does in retrospect). AMD/ATI in 2011 was still focused on graphics, ignoring the GPGPU revolution (as it was still called back then). In many ways they still haven't managed to turn around. > On (C), my impression was that bank switching and PAE were poorly supported by Windows at the desktop level. Which essentially made it a non-starter for the primary computer market at the time. I remember that while PAE was clunky, it did enable (say) running multiple processes on 8-core machines and giving each its own 2GB of memory; It was definitely poor compared to the real thing (AMD64 at the time), but like EMS, XMS and similar "extended memory" systems of the late '80s before it, it was good enough to stop people from moving to a decent architecture (e.g. Motorola 680x0) if it didn't provide backward compatibility.