ONE QUESTION THAT a lot of the financial set are asking has to do with Nvidia and mobile. While the company is effectively out of mobile for 2010, there was at least one GTX480 based laptop at CeBIT.
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.
THE RUMORS AND bits about Intel's next generation core, Sandy Bridge, are starting to come out here and there, but several big chunks have still not been outed. Here are a few of them.
THERE ARE A lot of curious things coming out of TSMC lately, and they all seem to center around dodging real questions. The problem is yields on their 40nm process, but TSMC will not address half of the reported problems publicly.
ALTHOUGH WE’LL HAVE to wait a little while longer for AMD’s new Magny-Cours based Opteron 6100 series processors to turn up in servers and in retail, European pricing for these 8-core and 12 core processors has turned up ahead of the launch.
WE DON'T KNOW how accurate these first listings of GeForce GTX480 and GTX470 cards are, but SabrePC has listed cards from both XFX and PNY on its website for pre-order. The total lack of details makes us wonder if this is just a drive to get people to its website, or if it’s indeed the real thing.
AMD APPEARS TO BE getting ready to unveil a couple of additions to its range of ATI Radeon HD 5000-series cards over the next few weeks. Although the Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity6 has already been demoed, the Radeon HD 5830 is likely to end up very high on a lot of people’s wish list if the price is right.
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.
ISSCC 2010 Fine details abound but overviews lacking
AMD IS FINALLY starting to talk about its Fusion CPUs, specifically the first one called Llano. The bad news is that it is not saying very much, but there are some interesting bits that leaked out at ISSCC 2010 in San Francisco.
DON’T EXPECT ANYTHING new from Intel this year in terms of desktop chipsets, at least not the way Intel’s current roadmap is planned. We’re going to have to make do with what’s on offer for the rest of 2010, despite some “missing features” in all three of Intel’s latest chipsets. What’s worse is that there’s not much to look forward to next year either, if our sources are correct.
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.
A LOT OF people were disappointed by Apple’s last product announcement, as only a single product was unveiled. However, it seems like those that were waiting for new desktop machines from Apple might not have to wait that much longer, because the rumour mill is suggesting mid-March for some new Mac Pro action.
THERE HAS BEEN a lot of talk recently about ATI's 'Grey Screen of Death' and almost all of it is hysterically overblown. Let's take a look at the problem in a bit more detail.
ONE THING YOU hopefully learn very quickly in the IT business is that you shouldn’t believe everything you see on TV, or read on the Interweb these days. With Apple’s announcement that it’ll be announcing something on January 27th, the rumours about what Apple is up to haven’t stopped. The latest is that Apple is ready to unveil its own CPU, but the question you have to ask is if this makes any sense at all.
NVIDIA'S GF100 ARCHITECTURE is falling into the same trap that G200 did, shooting for the moon at the cost of the parts that pay the bills. Let's take a look at the architecture and how it stacks up in the market once again.
TRADITIONALLY APPLE HAS been pretty good at keeping a tight lid on things when it comes to leaks about upcoming products, with the odd slip here and there. That doesn’t stop its fans from coming up with some wild speculations as to what Apple is going to launch next as soon as Apple announces that it is about to host an event. The next such event is on January 27th and the interweb has been full of speculations about what Apple is going to announce.
EVGA TEASED US about a dual Intel Core i7 board a few weeks ago, and now it is showing that off. It is big, has lots of slots, and does indeed support two Intel Core i7 chips.
GLOBAL FOUNDRIES has been way ahead of the curve with process tech when compared to any other foundry on the market. Today, it somewhat accidentally cemented that lead by publicly displaying an unlabeled 28nm wafer.
WE SPOTTED THE picture below over at TweakTown and it shows off three GeForce 100 cards, also known as Fermi, running in SLI. This in itself is big news, as it shows that Nvidia has more than one card that’s working, but what really intrigued us were the ports on the cards.
NVIDIA FINALLY SHOWED off Fermi, or in this case, GF100 today, running Unigine without any numbers. It didn't show off cards with three display outs yet, that has to wait for tomorrow.
NVIDIA IS TRYING to make Ion2, its next generation 'chipset' seem like something it is not, but the specs say otherwise. It is just a warmed over G218 integrated graphics chip with a few ports added on.
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.
JUST AHEAD of the holiday’s, Apple’s stock shot up like a rocket gaining nearly $11 in value over two days' trading. The reason? Well, either the fact that Apple has had excellent sales in the run up to Christmas, or the fact that the much rumoured tablet product from Apple got one step closer to being announced in January.
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.
Industrial to continue on, consumers lose a great maker
IT IS OUR really sad duty to inform you about rumors that DFI will be leaving the consumer motherboard business in January. The company is not going away, and will be refocusing on the industrial PC business.
CONTINUING ON where we left off a couple of days ago, more details about Asus’ plans for the future has appeared. It’s not looking pretty and if the rumours and speculations are true, then we can see a lot of users abandoning Asus as the brand to go to for motherboards in favour for its competitors. However, it’s not all doom and gloom, as at least Asus’ share price has started to level out after a sharp drop over the past few days, but it’ll take some time before it gets back to its previous level.
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.
IT’S REALLY SAD that it has come to this, but YouTube is considering charging for certain content. It appears that Google isn’t happy with the way things are going with its purchase, as despite being the most popular video site on the interweb, YouTube isn’t making Google any money. In fact, YouTube is losing money, a lot of money and Google has started to look at other ways of getting content onto its video site.
ACCORDING TO MULTIPLE REPORTS, it looks like Asus might be getting ready to pull the plug on its motherboard business unit. This might sound like a very drastic move by Asus, but with the Pegatron spinoff as a separate business entity, it might just make long term sense. It’s hardly news that Asus is aspiring to become something more and has long had its sights on becoming the next Acer. This might seem to be an odd goal, but Acer has been a phenomenally successful company.
IT LOOKS LIKE Nvidia has put the A3 stepping of Fermi in the oven, it happened some time last week. That means that you may see cards as early as February, depending on two or three other factors.
WORD JUST IN from the far east says that TSMC may have canceled its 32nm process node. On the surface this might seem very bad, but it is much more nuanced than that.
OFFICIAL WORD FROM NVIDIA is that gaming is now a footnote for the formerly leading graphics company, its latest and greatest Fermi chip won't see the light of day until at least Q1 of 2010, and Fermi's clock speeds so far are massively off what the firm had hoped for. Yup, it is a mess, just like we told you.
THREE VERY INTERESTING tidbits snuck out in the Q&A session at the AMD analyst day today. It seems that Fusion and the new cores have taped out and are at the fabs.
AT ANALYST DAY, Chekib Akrout of AMD spilled the beans on the chip company's two new CPU cores, and Fusion. AMD's Bulldozer and Bobcat processors plus its memory controller that is called Fusion were all outed.
IT LOOKS LIKE TSMC's 32nm processes are not doing nearly as well as people think. We hear that things are delayed a bit, and performance is far less than optimal.
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.
PEOPLE WATCHING TSMC'S process development might have noticed a radical change in messaging a few months ago. The foundry not only changed its high-K/metal gate (HKMG) strategy, but it also pulled in the timetables at the same time.
BIRDIES CHIRPING IN the warm Cambridge sunshine just told SemiAccurate that ARM is about to launch the new Cortex A5 core. The smallest member of the A series will likely debut at ARM's Techcon3 next week.
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.
WHAT DO YOU DO when you have nothing, and are facing quarters of buying markeshare and have no competitive products on the horizon? If you are Nvidia, you spin, and use the F, fear, U, uncertainty, and D, doubt, in FUD to pretend there are shortages.
APPLE IS DOING something quite interesting with the upcoming round of MacBooks, differentiating between the aluminum and plastic ones on a level deeper than the case material. Yes, the reassuringly expensive models are finally going to have something worth spending money on.
INTEL KICKED OFF IDF in the traditional way, a keynote by Paul Otellini. The topics were the usual, where they are going, new chips coming up, and all the ways Intel is making things better.
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.
THE SAGA of Nvidia's GT300 chip is a sad one that just took a turn for the painful when we heard about first silicon yields. Nvidia's execution has gone from bad to absent with low single digit yields.
ONE OF THE MOST recognizable and influential Intel executives, Pat Gelsinger, is no longer with the company. His rather sudden departure means a massive reshuffling that reaches just about every corner of Intel.
ONE QUESTION THAT a lot of the financial set are asking has to do with Nvidia and mobile. While the company is effectively out of mobile for 2010, there was at least one GTX480 based laptop at CeBIT.
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.
THE RUMORS AND bits about Intel's next generation core, Sandy Bridge, are starting to come out here and there, but several big chunks have still not been outed. Here are a few of them.
THERE ARE A lot of curious things coming out of TSMC lately, and they all seem to center around dodging real questions. The problem is yields on their 40nm process, but TSMC will not address half of the reported problems publicly.
ALTHOUGH WE’LL HAVE to wait a little while longer for AMD’s new Magny-Cours based Opteron 6100 series processors to turn up in servers and in retail, European pricing for these 8-core and 12 core processors has turned up ahead of the launch.
AMD APPEARS TO BE getting ready to unveil a couple of additions to its range of ATI Radeon HD 5000-series cards over the next few weeks. Although the Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity6 has already been demoed, the Radeon HD 5830 is likely to end up very high on a lot of people’s wish list if the price is right.
AMD IS FINALLY starting to talk about its Fusion CPUs, specifically the first one called Llano. The bad news is that it is not saying very much, but there are some interesting bits that leaked out at ISSCC 2010 in San Francisco.
REMEMBER WHEN INTEL talked about opening Atom CPUs to other companies? I'll bet you didn't think one of the first customers would be Nokia.
A LOT OF people were disappointed by Apple’s last product announcement, as only a single product was unveiled. However, it seems like those that were waiting for new desktop machines from Apple might not have to wait that much longer, because the rumour mill is suggesting mid-March for some new Mac Pro action.
THERE HAS BEEN a lot of talk recently about ATI's 'Grey Screen of Death' and almost all of it is hysterically overblown. Let's take a look at the problem in a bit more detail.
EVGA TEASED US about a dual Intel Core i7 board a few weeks ago, and now it is showing that off. It is big, has lots of slots, and does indeed support two Intel Core i7 chips.
GLOBAL FOUNDRIES has been way ahead of the curve with process tech when compared to any other foundry on the market. Today, it somewhat accidentally cemented that lead by publicly displaying an unlabeled 28nm wafer.
IT IS OUR really sad duty to inform you about rumors that DFI will be leaving the consumer motherboard business in January. The company is not going away, and will be refocusing on the industrial PC business.
CONTINUING ON where we left off a couple of days ago, more details about Asus’ plans for the future has appeared. It’s not looking pretty and if the rumours and speculations are true, then we can see a lot of users abandoning Asus as the brand to go to for motherboards in favour for its competitors. However, it’s not all doom and gloom, as at least Asus’ share price has started to level out after a sharp drop over the past few days, but it’ll take some time before it gets back to its previous level.
IT’S REALLY SAD that it has come to this, but YouTube is considering charging for certain content. It appears that Google isn’t happy with the way things are going with its purchase, as despite being the most popular video site on the interweb, YouTube isn’t making Google any money. In fact, YouTube is losing money, a lot of money and Google has started to look at other ways of getting content onto its video site.
BIRDIES CHIRPING IN the warm Cambridge sunshine just told SemiAccurate that ARM is about to launch the new Cortex A5 core. The smallest member of the A series will likely debut at ARM's Techcon3 next week.