WHAT DO YOU get when you cross Apple, Siemens and Sisvel with the German police at CeBIT? Raids of course, with lots of police, lawyers, and people stripping booths clean of everything electronic.
WHAT DO YOU do when there is a major international trade show, and you can't even supply all your partners with upcoming parts? You threaten them, which is exactly what Nvidia did for its upcoming GTX480 at CeBIT.
WHO WOULD’VE BELIEVED that Nvidia was willing create an exclusive card with one of its partners that would only go on sale in a single country. Well, it’s true and we have sourced proof from the exclusive online retailer that will be selling these very rare cards.
NVIDIA HAS BEEN hinting about the performance of its upcoming GTX480 cards, and several of our moles got a lot of hands on time with a few cards recently. If you are waiting for killer results from the 'puppy', prepare for severe disappointment.
IT IS THAT TIME of year again, Nvidia's quarterly conference call for the financial set. Since the company gets pouty every time we try to ask it questions, we decided to publish an open list of questions for you, the people they have far less disdain for than SemiAccurate, to ask directly.
WITH ANOTHER LAUNCH of the Nvidia GT300 Fermi GF100 GTX480 upon us, it is time for an update on the status of that wayward part. Production parts have been coming back from TSMC for several weeks now, and the outlook for them is grim.
PROTEX 3.0, available in triple pack or singles. Oh, sorry. We were thinking about something quite different. Asus is apparently touting its latest mainboards under the Protex 3.0 banner, although we cannot help but think about condoms rather than motherboards, given a name like that.
IF INTEL'S NEXT generation chip does indeed slip into 2011 as some rumors suggest, there is a very good reason for it. Intel works in strange and mysterious ways, and uses more Feng Shui than anyone would expect.
IT LOOKS LIKE it's time for dueling product videos once again, with ATI and Nvidia both releasing their own 'viral' videos. ATI's is about upgrading to a DX11 card and Nvidia's is about the birth of Fermi GF10.
IF YOU ARE sick and tired of slogging along with your wimpy 4-core Nehalem laptop, Ace Computer has a solution for you, the 8-core Xeon 5500 (Beckton) based Ace Raptor 5 Server Workstation AC-Raptor55V. Yes, some insane company just put an Intel 8-core Becton server chip in a laptop, let's hear it for wretched excess.
WINDOWS MOBILE 6.5 has been getting a bad rap lately, mainly because it is an awful OS with bloated requirements and no upside for the pain. However at CES, Sony-Ericsson showed us why Windows Mobile 6.5 is best for mobile phones.
IT LOOKS LIKE Nvidia's mighty mobile business is hitting the skids, and it is going back to competing on price again, begging for deals and renaming the G92 again. The problem is seen with the release of the renamed 3xxM mobile GPUs, and how these are messaged.
NVIDIA'S RENAMING SCAM has another name to add to the list. The G215 is now called the GTS360M. Consumers aren't warned that they are getting old tech with a new name, but Nvidia will proudly tell you that it is 120 more of something than the GT240 that was in desktop form, and the S and M are added bonuses.
IT LOOKS LIKE we were right about Fermi being too big, too hot, and too late, Nvidia just castrated it to 448SPs. Even at that, it is a 225 Watt part, slipping into the future.
REMEMBER THE TRIUMPHANT WIN for Fermi at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory that Nvidia heavily touted at its GDC conference keynote? The supercomputer project was just killed for power reasons. Fermi power reasons. Whoops.
SEVERAL CANADIAN ARTISTS have formed a group to sue the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) and the four major music labels EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner for copyright infringment.
Expensive niche standard on an expensive niche standard
ATI IS GETTING on board the Blu-ray Stereoscopic 3D train before it even exists. Lets hear it for an expensive and mostly useless standard that adds on to a expensive and mostly useless standard known for customer abuse.
NVIDIA IS RENAMING parts once again. Now the 200 series is the 300 series, just like we told you months ago. Nvidia has no new parts and no chance of coming up with any soon, so all it can do is unethically try to snow consumers.
THE BIG CONTENT MAFIAA just lost another round in the war on consumer rights, and they lost badly. The Pirate Bay won again, ironically by doing exactly what the MAFIAA wanted.
Ugly details revealed, it just keeps getting worse
IT LOOKS LIKE the brown stuff has hit the rotating blades in the ongoing Intel vs AMD antitrust lawsuits. New York's Attorney General Andrew Cuomo just filed suit against Intel for all sorts of nasty things.
IT LOOKS LIKE Fermi A2 silicon has finally taped out, so the timetables are a little firmer once again. There is no chance of a real launch in 2009, making the chip a shining example of Nvidia's engineering mire.
ONE OF THE highlights of October in Taipei is not the odd Typhoon, but IDF in Taipei. We crashed it last year, and it was a lot of fun, so we did it again this year.
NVIDIA IS KILLING the GTX260, GTX275, and GTX285 with the GTX295 almost assured to follow as it abandons the high and mid range graphics card market. Due to a massive series of engineering failures, nearly all of the company's product line is financially under water, and mismanagement seems to be killing the company.
THERE WAS a sight at IDF today, right there in the far back corner of the showroom floor, that proved that heck just got slightly chillier. DAAMIT has a booth at IDF.
HOW DO YOU SAY irony in corporate-speak? How about AT&T selling a service that it can't show, demonstrate or debug properly in its stores because its IT department only lets its staff use Internet Explorer.
DEFCON, THE 'HACKERCON', part of the security conference activities in Las Vegas this week, seems to not have suffered too badly from the economy. Thousands of people - computer professionals, government security folks, frat boys looking to learn to pick locks, and various other flavors of geeks have shown up at the Riviera for Defcon 17.
IN A BLAST from the past, a hacker named Dead Addict dragged out a bunch of his memorabilia from Defcon 1. It pulled into focus exactly how far the show has come in the 16 years since that first gathering.
WHAT HAPPENS IF you do something really stupid at Defcon, or even in greater Las Vegas? You get arrested, which is precisely why Jim Rennie gave a talk titled, "So You Got Arrested at Defcon....".
THE VOICES IN our head that talk to us and tell us the secrets of the industry are now saying that Nvidia is going to cut one of their most prominent people. It is going to be a sad day when he goes, working with this man was never boring.
AFTER LITERALLY YEARS of silence, the new Monkey Island game is out. Yes, mere weeks after revealing it's existence at E3, you can now get the first episode from Telltale games.
IN ORDER TO GAIN access to the Chinese market, US companies have co-operated in one way or another with government requests to restrict freedom of access to the Internet. Why are those companies pushing back now because of China's new Green Dam web filter?
IT LOOKS LIKE the killer attack lawyers are circling the big OEMs, the scent of payola in the air. If you have been following the whole battery life tiff in the news, you will not be surprised that the affair is about to become a class action.
JUST WHEN YOU thought PC OEMs couldn't get any dumber, HP reaffirms that the bottom has yet to be reached with their new Pavilion PC. How any OEM could be this abjectly stupid is beyond me, but they managed to take a PC that aspires to mediocrity and make it worse.
ACCORDING TO THE always accurate chip news site, AmmoLand, ATI is launching a line of ammunition. No, not the DX11 missiles heading at Nvidia in October, but real bang bang stuff.
THERE IS NOTHING new under the sun when it comes to USB memory sticks in odd looking cases, but every once in a while some company does something silly that grabs your attention. This time it was Supertalent and their terracotta warriors.