When you’re sitting there in a couple years, coveting that £1,000 mid-range graphics card masquerading as a top-end GPU and another overly expensive quad-core CPU, there’s only one company to blame. And that company is AMD.

Essentially you can put every tech problem in the world at AMD’s feet.

Because you wont be coveting an AMD CPU; those two acronyms wont be strapped together in a few years time. No, CPU will become so synonymous with Intel that you wont even have to call it an ‘Intel CPU.’ There will be no other desktop option.

Without serious competition from the likes of the Texan silicon herdsmen of AMD Intel will be your only choice.

Think I’m being reactionary? Damn right.

Because of the absolute failure of the Bulldozer architecture – and there can be no possible way AMD can honestly say it has been anything but – Intel can sit back on its huge pile of cash and keep churning out barely iterative releases of chips.

One of Laird’s favourite flavour combinations at the moment has been Intel and sandbagging.

Essentially Intel doesn’t really have to push itself to really squeeze out genuinely impressive technology because there’s nothing pushing them to such lengths.

The geriatric console generation has stalled games to the extent that any CPU of the last 2-3 years is good enough for any game on the market, and AMD has screwed the pooch so hard on the CPU side that the Bulldozer chips are sitting in the corners of IT warehouses across the land nursing sore behinds.

Things moved pretty fast when the Netburst architecture flopped onto the market. Intel went on the search for cores to hit back at a suddenly competitive AMD and we quickly moved from single to dual to quad core CPUs in a trice.

It’s taken it a lot longer to move onto six as AMD’s competitive nature has significantly waned.

Indeed we’ve only actually got six cores on the silly server segment of the desktop market – the full-fat Nehalem and Sandy Bridge E platforms.

Well, we’ve actually got eight core CPUs capable of being dropped into desktop motherboards, but Intel isn’t going to actually bother selling them for sensible money as it simply doesn’t need to.

AMD is also responsible for the rise and rise of graphics card prices too.

Back in the HD 4000 series (hmm, where have I heard that name re-used recently?) of AMD GPUs it was all about relatively cheap, efficient chips and using CrossFire tech to create the top-end cards of a generation.

It was a laudable stance and would have benefited all if it hadn’t only lasted that single generation.

It then found a gap in the DirectX 11 market big enough to drive its HD 5000 series truck through and flog its new cards for stupid money with that trend continuing through the HD 6000 and peaking with the HD 7000s.

Sadly performance hasn’t quite matched the rising cash demands and so Nvidia has recently been able to release a mid-range card which beats AMD’s best and badge it up as a GTX 680 so it can charge us all top-end prices.

A pox on your house, AMD.

And don’t think it’s just a PC problem either. Don’t come crying to us when the ‘next-gen’ consoles are nothing but two-year-old, second-tier AMD PCs at launch…

If you enjoy watching the rants of angry peops take a look at the Steam forums for F1 2010 and you’ll get a taste of how angry gamers can get when their pre-purchased, pre-loaded game doesn’t actually appear on the day of release.

We’re getting on for 700 ranty posts so far and still no response from Steam about the snafu. Andy Gray from Codies has tweeted about the problem this morning.

“For those asking about Steam – again we are on it. Should have been live at midnight, currently waiting for answers”

Although it’s probably just an unhappy accident it’s still angering PC gamers who feel they are being punished for trying to be early adopters and helping to support the PC games industry by actually buying legitimate copies they’re not allowed to play yet.

One angry poster has been riled by his buddy sending him videos of his PS3 sessions on F1 2010 having pre-ordered a boxed copy and receiving it a day early through the medium of the postal system.

The fact that the illegal torrenters have been having a whale of a time for a couple days already because they chose a dodgy way to get it, while the honest have been left behind.

Shame Steam, what you got to say for yourselves?

***UPDATE***

At least one F1 owner has had a response from Steam to their complaints ticket:

“F1 2010 – Unable to unlock game

We are working this morning to fix the issue with F1 2010. We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused over the past several hours and will do everything we can to fix it quickly.”

So, as was predicted by some of the angry folk in the huge thread about this, Valve is claiming ‘issue’s with the game, not just a general screw up.

*****UPDATE 2*****

It’s now unlocked!

So now we’re just waiting for the Steam files to decrypt…

Such is this digital download life…