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nVidia Strikes Deal With Apple
Stefan MacGeek writes: "Nvidia, the manufacturer for 3D graphics chips has closed an OEM deal with Apple. Future Macs will use Nvidia graphics chips.
Nvidia has recently presented the GeForce 2 MX, their first chip suitable for use in Macs. It is not yet known if Nvidia will take over as Apple's main supplier of graphics chips from ATI. Source: The German computer news site Heise " Here's a link to the story itself, und wenn Sie Deutsch nicht können, continue your scavenger hunt at Babelfish. This sounds great for Macs and their users. One thing to keep in mind though: the article cautions that it's unclear whether nVidia chips will be installed as full-fledged video cards, or integrated as in previous Macintosh models. [Updated 8 July 3:00GMT by timothy] An alert Bethor points to this MacCentral story in which Nvidia denies the whole thing, claiming that such news is at least months in the future.
The "personality" of the GeForce 2 DX seems perfect for Macintosh's long history of cutting edge purist architecture with lower clocks. A smooth elegant approach rather than the wintel end of the spectrum which seems more like a brute on steroids. Hopefully this will help generate more of a game market for Macintosh.
- learn mathematics - shoot dope -
Just because North America was (invaded? re-settled?) by people who were kicked out of England because their religious views were too strict doesn't mean that everything here is pervaded by religion.
Assuming that that was indeed the intent (which seems likely) then it seems likely that they wanted that association, as in, this is the card/company to envy. After all, they've been doing some useful things here that 3dfx hasn't been able to match - And don't even talk to me about S3 or ATI, though S3 Savage4Max is actually a halfway decent chip, unlike anything ATI has to offer. S3 can also almost manage to write drivers properly.
In other words, nvidia is the big kid on the block, at least for the moment. They want to get that point across in as many ways as possible. They are definitely the company to beat at the moment.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Your comments seem to be outdated by quite a bit.
The only reason apple killed off the clones was because the clones quite simply were not doing anything to expand the market. After years of hearing "If only they'ed allow clones, the cloners could go after the market segments that apple can't reach", so they opened up, licensed a few cloners, and then sat back for a year and a half and watched them gobble up their core markets. Since they didn't have to pay any R&D, they could undercut Apple and decided that was the easiest way to make money.
Before then, during then, and since then, Apple continutes to be one of the most trully innovative companies around. In general, if you sit back and watch, where Apple goes, the rest of the industry follows within a year or so... Now if apple wasn't there, who'd take the lead? Microsoft? no. There aren't any other contenders.
And as for the not-invented here syndrom... witness PCI, SDRAM, IDE drives, AGP, USB, etc. About the only real difference between mac hardware and PC hardware is the CPU and the chipset.
But just think of ATI's fortunes suddenly turning if Apple switched to Nvidia for all their computers! Suddenly, ATI has ZERO market for their overpriced Mac cards. I've been watching 3dfx getting their toes wet with MacOS drivers for their cards, but with Apple bundling a card with every Mac, they won't continue developing their drivers for very long. Matrix was in the Mac video card game for a while (up to Millennium II), but dropped development when Apple did their exclusive bundling agreement.
Apple sealed their long-term fate in the desktop computer business when they killed the clones. They had warehouses of unsold (excellent but overbuilt and overpriced) 6500s. So for the short term, they kept more factories open, kept the price for Macs up and sold their 6500s, but long term they lost too much market share for them to be viable in the future.
Apple is at the mercy of Motorola for their G4. The economies of scale prevent this chip from competing with the I86s and Athlons. Motorola can't scale the mhz up on it given the volumne of sales.
So instead of Apple selling their high-end machines, and many clone companies selling many other Macs, AND APPLE SELLING MANY MORE COPIES OF ITS OS FOR $99 A POP, Apple is selling very few computers at a high profit margin, and very few copies of its OS at $99 a pop.
If any folks out there think Apple isn't greedy and arrogant, just try and become an Apple reseller!
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Ok, as RadioHead ha already pointed out, MacWorld New York is a scant 10 days away, and all signs point to a "refresh" of at least the iMac and the ProDesktop (G4) "quadrents" (Apple marketing speak). Possibly also a speedbump in the powerbooks. There is a good chance that at least some of these new products will be "avaible immediately". I will leave you to the rumor sites to get more rumors.
But there is no chance that NVidia products will be in the new boxes for at least four months (that is assuming the they have been secretly working with Apple behind the scenes already). NVidea just this week announced that their new MX cards (the only ones that would make sense) are hardware compatible with Macs (has to do with the color space... Microsoft made the wrong decision all those years ago, and went proprietary), they still do not have final drivers.
What I hope that will be announced at the keynote on this subjects is that the Apple store will start offering third party graphics cards (read: not ATI) as Build-To-Order options on the G4. This might be only as additional cards, or might (fingers crossed) be as replacements to the primary card. A simmilar option on the iMac is unlikely, as it would require that Apple move the graphics chip off the motherboard and onto its own PSB. This costs money, and how many of you already complain about $950 for a nice computer including monitor?
Why do people have such adversity toward Apple? Apple is great alternative, and despite claims, they are computers -- not a rotten apple with a computer chip stuck in its side. When OSX comes out, and if they still use nVidia, IBM PC's will be underfire so long as consumers are OK to change over (which in many cases, they like their Windows). nVidia will help Apple rock.
IRS: Created at war-time, still at war with us.
It should be noted that NVidia has categorically denied that any OEM partership has been struck with Apple at this time. http://www.maccentral.com/news/0007/07.oem.shtml Additionally, one would think that if such a deal had been reached, NVidia would have an exhibit at MWNY this month, but they do not. However, NVidia's vice president of marketing says that NVidia has decided to support the Mac, but he says to wait until later this year for any news pertaining to NVidia in the Mac market.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
1) Bring it home.
2) Plug it in.
3) Make it work.
Yes micros~1 is blabbing about games, but the box can run any software including a dialer and a browser.
___
According to this story on MacCentral
Also see this cnet article.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
Hello? McFly? Mac models since the G3s have had video cards in them. My PowerMac G4 has an AGP 2X card doing its video. I think even iMacs have replaceable video cards inside, though I could be wrong. Can anyone else confirm that?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
UT runs great on my Powerbook G3 (with a Rage 128), so does Q3... and im sure it runs even better on a G4 desktop. Am I really missing something besides pretty benchmark numbers?
If I were running Apple, I would get NVidia's latest chipset and design a high-bandwidth memory architecture (like SGI did) chipset to bypass AGP and package the whole thing as a (relatively) low cost iMac. IMHO, the memory bandwidth is the bottleneck in PCs nowadays. Having a low cost version of an SGI-like station would get me to buy (and program) a Mac again (sold my Mac SE w/Radius monitor and Lightspeed C about 10 years ago). Imagine coupling their upcoming version X OS and OpenGL and hardware transformations @ a higher memory bandwidth than AGP?
ATI and Apple are made for each other.
ATI has a long history of claiming obscene numbers for it's new cards and then delivering a mere fraction. Apple does the same thing with its PPC processors. The "g4 as supercomputer" is pretty comic as was the "100 MHz 604 will achieve 160 SPECint92".
On the good side, both Apple and ATI deliver excellent products for the casual user. The companies are really quite similar. I just wish they'd both stop claiming that their products compete well (at all) with high end hardware.
--Shoeboy
Ultrix? as a superior unix? I don't think that even the folks that wrote it like it :)
After many years of reading alt.folklore.computers, I think that the nicest thing I've ever seen anyone say about it is that it wasn't VMS . . . or that one version of it wasn't as much a pain as another that shared nothing but the mname . . .
There were a couple of weird products before it, but the SE on had this capacity. As the Mac II was introduced at the same time, I assume it has already had it.
.)
I had a 19" 1024x768 screen attached to my SE/30 in 1989, as a second display (and at the time, I was really more interested in mirroring, because I wanted to be able to turn the internal display towards my clients . .
hawk
>Just because North America was (invaded?
>re-settled?) by people who were kicked out of
>England because their religious views were too >strict
Uh, no. The pilgrims did *not* come seeking religious freedom, nor did they regard it as a virtue. They are about the most religiously intolerant group history has seen.
The puritans *were* allowed to do their own thing in England. However, they wanted to "purify" the church of England--that is, make the *rest* of the country comply with their beliefs. Yes, these are the people that made celebrating Christmas a criminal offense (seriously!).
They came to North America to establish a theocracy, which they weren't allowed to do in Europe.
My cynicism has been overruled both because of ongoing reports about this from Mac OS Rumors and because Heise would be pretty stupid to put its reputation on the line for something like this if it wasn't verifiably true.
Take a look at http://www.nvidia.com/apple. A password protected realm labeled "/marketing/oem"? It sounds like there might be some truth to the rumors after all.
Daniel
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It is not unusual for companies to deny any type of partnership until both parties are ready for an announcement. I would suspect that nvidia and Apple and are having serious contract negotiations.
Everything in this post is false.
The only reason apple killed off the clones was because the clones quite simply were not doing anything to expand the market. After years of hearing "If only they'ed allow clones, the cloners could go after the market segments that apple can't reach", so they opened up, licensed a few cloners, and then sat back for a year and a half and watched them gobble up their core markets. Since they didn't have to pay any R&D, they could undercut Apple and decided that was the easiest way to make money.
Your right, the clones were faster, cheaper, and Apple couldn't compete with them. In an open field, Apple can't compete. Instead they used their monopoly powers over that platform to stifle competitors to the point of bankruptcy. For Microsoft this would be considered illegal, but for Apple this is innovating!
Before then, during then, and since then, Apple continutes to be one of the most trully innovative companies around. In general, if you sit back and watch, where Apple goes, the rest of the industry follows within a year or so... Now if apple wasn't there, who'd take the lead? Microsoft? no. There aren't any other contenders.
Okay, so what was the last major innovation to come out of Apple? The over-bloated Quicktime format? See thru cases? What exactly have they innovated in the last 5 years? They did do up a spec for Firewire, then demanded licensing fees that pretty much assured little in the way of industry support.
What lead does Apple have in the computer industry? Seriously now, can you name one? They've got a GUI that's integrating Win95 features into it and call it innovating. They've got this beautiful G4 processor that Motorola provided them, and the darn things still run slower than an equivalent PIII with NT on them. The one time lead in graphics processing is LONG gone due to some really great cards on the PC side. The network stack sucks, and won't talk to anything other than other Macs on a LAN without glitchy 3rd party support. Until OS X hits the streets you sure wouldn't want to use one as a server, and even OS X has to rely upon FreeBSD's inovations. They're far more expensive than an equivalent Pentium platform, and certainly don't have the performance to justify the cost. Exactly how far back would the rest of the industry have to go to catch up to Apple?
And as for the not-invented here syndrom... witness PCI, SDRAM, IDE drives, AGP, USB, etc. About the only real difference between mac hardware and PC hardware is the CPU and the chipset.
Yes, I have noticed this. I've also noticed that these true inovations have come from a far more open platform than Apple.
My original question still stands. Why is it that the open source community continues to think so fondly of a truly closed source mind set? Can you get any more closed than Apple?
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
The support for ATI hardware in the various PowerPC Linux distributions is quite good. The older Mach64 and the newer RAGE 128 cards work great even with the stable kernel.
I hope nVidia is free and open with the necessary information so that X acceleration for the new OEM Mac video will be as easy to set up as the current stuff.
John
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MacSlash: Your Daily Dose of Mac News and Discussion.
>An urban legend.
:)
No, they really named the car Nova. It's just the part about the Nova and Mexico that's an urban legend
I read it, and I did not misrepresent you. They were not so much kicked out, as left because they wren't allowed to do what they wanted.
Specifically, the *only* requirement placed on this group was that they receive Communion once per year in the Church of England. They left rather than comply; they weren't kicked out.
It wasn't about them being strict; they were otherwise allowed to do whatever they wanted among themselves.
hawk
Well then, maybe you can explain to me why it is that the open source community gives Apple such an easy ride, all the while giving Microsoft every bit of grief they can? Apple has been the very model of greed, arrogance, and why closed up systems are bad business. What keeps getting referred to as "inovations" in the last few years by these folks looks far more like emulating Windows 95 features. Oh yeah, "Sticky Menus" and "Network Neighborhood". Now, in all fairness, they did manage to put out an overpriced translucent TRS-80 case in a variety of flavors.
When Apple had the opportunity to open the doors even a little bit to 3rd party hardware vendors, Steve and crew shut them down with licensing and legalities. First these idiots encourage 3rd party vendors, then leave them hanging out to dry in bankruptcy court. Not the first time Apple has left folks hanging out to dry, and certainly not the last.
So as to keep this in topic, do you really think that nVidia's support would even be newsworthy if there were still 3rd party manufacturers of Macs? Of course it wouldn't, because it would have been far more commonplace for 3rd party vendors to be supporting an open platform.
Apple has proved themselves to be every bit as bad, if not more so, as Microsoft in stifling competition. The only difference is, they executed their plans with incompetance, thus relegating themselves to a permanent niche market.
Again, I have to ask here, why is it that the open source community doesn't call these folks out as to what they are? Closed hardware, closed source software, and practically the inventors of the "not invented here, it must be crap" mentality. The only thing "open" about Apple is when they need to take from the open source community to get their next OS working with a network layer that doesn't suck eggs.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Naw...the iMacs (rev A and so on) used Rage II and Rage Pro. The new ones (350-400 MHz - the iMac, iMac DV and iMac DV SE) all have Rage 128 with 8 MB of RAM. Not replaceable.
Some people did but an 8MB Voodoo2 card in the mezzanine slot of the Rev A iMacs...but thats not an option in iMacs made after...what...November of '98? Or was it in the flavored iMacs of Jan '99...I forget.