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NVidia Vs. Intel: Fight To Come?
Mostly Monkey was the first to write to us regarding
a new article on Tom's Hardware. The article is about the launch by Nvidia of "...nForce, its integrated graphics, audio, Northbridge, and Southbridge chipset, also referred to as Crush." The implication is that Nvidia is setting itself up to move past the graphics/audio market and get into competing with Intel in the full on chip market. What with AMD's recent success, that doesn't sound so unlikely.
This is pretty interesting in the sense that no company since the original Amiga team has tried to create a fully integrated system with multimedia capabilities from scratch. Instead of building an initial architecture and keep tacking on bus loads until performance starts to suffer, build *everything* into the architecture so that bus transfers from competing chips don't step on each other (well, as little as possible anyway).
With all the talk about the new Amiga (software only), I'm more excited by this development.
Sound is pretty much commodidy stuff these days, just go down to your local hardware store, pick up an SB Live, and you're done. There are some more powerful cards out there for people who need them, but otherwise SB Live is perfectly sufficient. nVidia is just doing the logical, integrating a more powerful sound solution, thereby eliminating most of Sound Blaster's market.
Ether is pretty much commodity stuff as well. Aside from all the no-name clones out there, it's best to just spend the extra couple of bucks and get yourself a real card, 3com, Intel, whatever. This nVidia chip should really also have a good 10/100 component.
And video? Well, I suppose nVidia is already in that market heavily, with all the cards based on their chip, and it's best to leave this part alone, as video cards are the most often performed (and most expensive) upgrades (how many times did you upgrade your sound card or network card, or even cpu?), so it's a cash cow as a stand-alone card.
The only threat to Intel in this chipset is of course the integration and elimination of the North/South Bridges, but most importantly, nVidia's alignment with AMD. It's all AMD this, AMD that, and DDR also features prominently. Good stuff.
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"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Use kernel modules, then. Want to use a new feature? Just compile the module, and set up the appropriate config in modules.conf... I use ALSA sound modules to configure my sound card, for instance.
The single unified driver that nVidia is promoting may help with copatibility issues, but it practically guarentees that this motherboard will be Linux incompatible. nVidia has long sinced closed the GForce drivers, and I bet that Dolby will have some reservations about opening up the APU. A partial doc/source release may staisfy GPL and kernel requirements, but the performance is likely to stink...
nVidia's integrated GForce2 chip communicates with the rest of the chipset at the equivalent of 6x AGP. Yet the integrated chip is not "top of the line"--if you want to upgrade your graphics capability (to say, a GForce3) you'll have to use a slower 4x AGP interface... A difficult tradeoff?
Sounds very nice, but it doesn't mean a thing if it doesn't push bits as fast as the old guys. Or if they can't get the thing to market.
Hmm... what part of dual-bank DDR with h/w prefetch didn't you understand? That's double the memory bandwidth (4.2 GB/s) of any existing mobo, with a possibility for greatly reduced latency due to prefetch. And while the CPU still communicates to the chipset over a mere 1.6GB/s bus, remember that this leaves another 2.8GB/s for prefetches and DMA from the graphics chip and other components. Also, EV6 still has room for further speedups, and this will give AMD a reason to do so. I don't find their claim of 20% improvement to be unbelievable (I'll believe it when I see it, but it isn't unbelievable).
I have no idea where the "cross-bar" part of the memory system comes into play... The idea doesn't even make sense. You have a chipset, and two banks of DDR. That's two point-point links, for which the term cross-bar seems ill-fitting. Anyway...
Also, they've got a demo board using only 4 layers! Number of layers has a high impact on board cost, and having only four is very good. Also, according to the article a number of major board manufacturers have made commitments. So it looks like this thing will see the light of day.
The enemies of Democracy are
END OF LINE.
Not that I really disagree with your post, but how often again do the CPU sockets change? .. about once per generation? .. yup. Can you plug an Athlon into a pii slot? .. nope. CPU sockets is a really weak example for 'expandability'.
(Even within a generation, my supermicro mobo won't take piis (it's smp) above 5(6?)00 mhz.. they didn't exist at the time. I'm currently at 350, a bargain even when I bought them .. how much exactly am I gaining there?)
Not counting that, provided everything works, all-in-one chipsets are cheaper.
It's not like nvidia is preventing you from sticking a matrox card in your box.. yet :)
Pfft. Don't worry about it - they'll just be leaking about 3 driver sets a week, and expect you to sort out which ones work and are worth keeping. This way, they'll have everyone playing beta-tester/lab rat, rather than just their video card customers...
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
For the graphics card market, they've certainly become the standard these days, and perhaps a little complacent about how they approach things.
However, they're the newcomer to a very cutthroat market, and very soon they'll have Intel and VIA (and probably SiS and co. too) breathing down their necks.
If they keep the programming info close to their chests, they'll be limiting the compatibility of their board. And any limiting factor these days is a Bad Thing (TM).
A good dose of open-ness wouldn't hurt the adoption of the board early on, and may even become a deciding factor in it's continued survival in the marketplace, once all it's competitors wake up and produce a more open answer.
One can but hope.
Malk
Precompiled modules?
Though, I very much hope that this doesn't come to pass.
Malk
The article says it's hardware accelerated for DirectX.
This, I'd assume is because a lot of this is X-Box spinoff tech.
If I understand the article fully, then it'd Cirect-X compliant from the word go.
Malk
Well, as per usual, it seems to prove that extra competition in an industry forces innovation. :)
With the Intel/VIA etc. wars, it just seemed to be a war to see who could produce the same solution at lower cost. Very little new actually happened.
When NVIDIA talked about their memory specs in the GeForce3, I was wondering how long it would take for the powers that be in the industry to have the same kind of foreward thinking on motherboards.
Now it seems that it took NVIDIA to jump in with both feet to wake everyone up.
Well, succeed or fail in this new venture, they've certainly given everyone a lot to think about, and I'll definately be putting money aside to buy one as soon as I hear they're settled in and stable.
It'll be fun to see where this race of new ideas ends.
Long live innovation, competition, and hats off to NVIDIA.
Malk
Well, as they said in the article, when queried about why they didn't have an Intel version:
"We don't have an Intel bus license"
From this, I assume that Intel are trying to do what IBM did with the MCA architecture over a decade ago.
They're forcing developers into restrictive licenses, and possibly expensive ones, to use an architecture.
This was a really bad idea, as IBM found when nobody used MCA, and instead went for the inferior EISA bus, which didn't have such heavy restrictions.
I can't blame NVIDIA for trying to get their dedicated graphics cards looking and performing to the best possible standard (as they already have optimisations for the PIII and AMD processors), and it's only logical for them to optimise for P4 if they can. And they have.
However, this new chipset is simply saying that AMD are more open, and easier to develop with, rather than having Intel breathing down their neck with licensing issues at every step of the way.
My view on it is that AMD just gave NVIDIA the license to innovate properly, and good things are now happening.
Malk
I didn't have much luck with the original link.
here's another one that seems to work better.
stay frosty and alert
nVidia has a motherboard chipset that offers integrated sound, video, and an extremely high bandwidth between the two chips?
So now the PC platform has finally come full circle in it's design and reached the point that the Amiga was in 1987
My biggest problem with integrating so much into the systemboard is the lack of upgrade options. A standard PC, with seperate sound, video, and other cards allows you to upgrade any component (including the systemboard/processor) without "losing" the others.
eg. if my systemboard blows, I can buy a new one and salvage the video card from the blown system. However, if the component is integrated into the systemboard I loose this feature.
I'd be hardpressed to buy or recommend something like this for personal use. Perhaps computer labs would be interested (where there are 200 identical computers and any problem systems are swapped for new systems). In that respect I do see the advantage (drivers, integration, etc).
It's cool now, but five years from now? I just don't like throwing things away because they are obsolete. Even if the system board is current, the video card may become useless - install a "full" video card into the AGP slot and the onboard chipset becomes a useless waste of space.
Why not focus on improving memory access or AGP speed? Why not further communication between the graphic chipset and the CPU instead of developing these (IMHO) silly integrated solutions?
Bah.
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Computer Science: solving today's problems tomorrow.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
They're already the Microsoft of the Video card industry, why not take the Microsoft practice of "embrace-and-extend" as well?
Look at history though. I think you'll see that NVIDIA won because it produced better stuff in a tighter development cycle than it's competitors. And it's competitors still exist. I think ATI has a lot of strength in the TV-Video thing and is leverging that strength in the 3D arena. Even though NVIDIA bought up 3DFX, that doesn't leave the entire market to them (although they do have a large chunk).
If I were NVIDIA, I'd be worried about the DOJ and see if they want to attack their monopoly.
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Computer Science: solving today's problems tomorrow.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
> Look at the Linux driver - sure it's legal, but
;)
> is it open source? I know about the NDA
> problems, but why does that prevent them from
> releasing a lower performance open source
> driver? Answer: Because it's not in their
> commercial interests while they have the best
> performance on Linux why let that good
> performance get back into the community where
> other vendors might take advantage of it?
I suffer from this problem. I have never had a system that could run X (XFree86) properly. 99% of the problem was not having proper drivers. On my 486, I had some no-name trident that could barely pull off 72Hz at 800x600. I lived with Linux on the commandline and booted to Windows for gui stuff. On my newer comps, I went thru another Trident AGP card, a TNT, a GF1, GF2, and now a GF3, and I still get a shitty display.
Now that 3Dfx is dead, why can't they release their friggin drivers? Arguh.
> Who knows what the long term holds in this
> industry - we might all be using OS/2 on PPCs
> in 5 years!!
Hey, that sounds sweet.
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Computer Science: solving today's problems tomorrow.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
You didn't answer the question, "how is this specific to the GPL?"
If nVidia can't release 3rd party source-code then they can't BSDL it, put it in the public domain, or GPL it. It's all off-limits.
So how can the GPL be to blame?
G13 technology. Like Emil's arm.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Here's a great summary of the architecture for people (like me) who aren't engineers on HardOCP: http://www.hardocp.com/articles/nforce/index.html
... who _really_ cares?)
Also, in addition, I personally really like AnandTech, so here's a link to his detailed article: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1484
(And no, I'm not a 'karma whore'
The Tom's article says that the chipset does speculative data prefetch to improve memory-CPU throughput by up to 20%...cool... but why are they bothering to do this when Athlon is about to be replaced by Palomino that has hardware prefetch built in?
Where did you get the info that the GF2 was optional? All the stuff I see says it is part of the North Bridge (or IGP or whatever). The Dolby Decoder and twin memory controllers are the only configurable options I can see (look at http://www4.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q2/010604 1/nforce-12.html)
It will never be as easy to use an ATI card with an nVidia mobo as it is to use an nVidia card because of the driver issue. You plug in a GF3 and it will just work - the existing drivers will just pick it up and use it. You are effectively getting your GF3 drivers bundled with the mobo driver package. You plug an ATI card in and your first experience is the good old 640x480 resolution in Windows (assuming we are talking mass marken here - Linux people tend to be cool with figuring out drivers). You also can get weird interactions - ATI end up having to devote time to make their drivers work with nVidia's mobos, while nVidia don't have to care about ATI (remember the nVidia/VIA/AGP4x thing a while back?)
Whatever happens, if nVidia gets a monopoly (very doubtful really) then there is little chance of them not exploiting it by the simple fact it exists. You can't fault a company for testing that it's own products work well with each other!!
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
They do 'embrace and extend'. Ever seen the OpenGL nVidia extensions? Guess what are the first extensions to get coded for these days? Oops - extended a supposedly open spec!!
Look at the Linux driver - sure it's legal, but is it open source? I know about the NDA problems, but why does that prevent them from releasing a lower performance open source driver? Answer: Because it's not in their commercial interests while they have the best performance on Linux why let that good performance get back into the community where other vendors might take advantage of it?
nVidia, just like Microsoft, won out of sheer bloody minded persistance. The NV1 failed badly, so nVidia sided with Microsoft and DirectX and had cards supporting the next version of DX on the shelves as the versions were released. If you wanted T&L with your DX7 games then you had to get nVidia. If you got anything else then you were SOL. Now that nVidia is king of the hill they can afford to take on the bigger challenges - kinda like MS shrugging off IBM and going it alone.
nVidia is one company that I would be very careful of in the future. I think they have a big potential to be the next Microsoft, but don't have a monopoly to speak of at the moment and probably won't for a few years yet (ATI has to roll over first which ain't gonna happen easily). The battle is heating up at the moment and the consumers are going to be the winners in the short term. Who knows what the long term holds in this industry - we might all be using OS/2 on PPCs in 5 years!!
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Oh. Yeah. Throx is stupid. Bad Throx. :-(
You are also right about the exploitation. Thanks for setting me straight.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
The reason they are using a GF2 and not a GF3 is simple really - if you want a GF3 then you have to buy it from nVidia and they get to make more money. If you don't want a GF3 then they've sold you a GF2 already which will keep you from spending money at their competitor.
Remember the GF3 driver is likely to be included in the unified driver they are going to be shipping, but if you go with the competitor then you have to worry about driver issues. Looks like nVidia is set to become the Microsoft of the chipset/hardware industry!
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Someobody came out with a chipset for Althlon/Duron CPUs that isn't from VIA.
The VIA chipset (and USB controller) on my board (Asus A7Pro) is the crappiest, most unstable piece of junk i've ever used. - and its not even overclocked.
I just hope NVidia does a better job of delivering a chipset that works properly than VIA has.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
While this looks like an interesting development, it looks like nVidia is trying to play both sides of the battle. The top graphics article on Tom's Hardware, here at http://www4.tomshardware.com/graphic/01q2/010511/i ndex.html, discusses the next nVidia driver release, which focuses entirely on Pentium 4 optimizations to the nVidia drivers. I would decalre an all-out war yet, guys. ;-)
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
- crossbar memory architecture, with point-to-point connections between individual memory banks and I/O devices and CPU.
Sun's UPA bus architecture works this way, as do various proprietary SGI, IBM, and HP(?) workstation and server busses with various minor distinctions among them. AGP, in a sense, has kinda provided a "good enough" variant of this by segmenting graphics to a separate bus, but a crossbar approach is more general solution for the same problem- maximizing bandwidth utilization without the data traffic conflicts that arise in bus-based solutions.--LP
- ability to guarantee bandwidth and latency for specific I/O requests (what they're calling "StreamThru"), a feature previously only available on mid-range (Octane) and high-end SGI systems with the XIO bus.
This can be quite handy for things like handling multiple video streams without dropping frames, or mixing video with other I/O requests. I wonder if there are other cool things you could do once you can allocate bandwidth for I/O and have said allocations enforced in hardware?I've never seen this capability on the Intel platform before. It was a cutting-edge SGI feature back in 1996 or so. Sun/HP/IBM/Intel were never concerned enough about video to implement this on their workstations, but I do recall some discussion about whether it'd be in Infiniband or not (don't remember the outcome).
--LP
- Competition--the GF3 is still pretty new, and budget cards (the "MX"s) are expected in the fall (at the earlies). Including the same level of graphics power in a supposedly cheap motherboard chipset would compete directly with graphics board sales.
- Transistor counts--the GeForce3 is >57 million transistors. Perhaps it was a bit too much to integrate?
- Memory bandwidth--a GeForce3 typically has a 128-bit DDR memory interface, clocked at 230 MHz. That's 7.2 GBps, or more than 50% more than all the memory bandwidth provided by the nForce!
Now, let's just hope NVIDIA are kind enough to allow Linux to run on motherboards based on the nForce. Darn, I think my formerly so simple next-computer-purchasing-plan ("must have SMP Athlons, must have SMP Athlons...") just became a bit more complex. The nForce is *cool*!!main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
It's all been caught on video, right here.
I see people making this mistake time and time again. Everyone seems to think that a graphics driver is just like any other driver. They think that the code for the driver is mostly useless for any card other than the one it is written for. With graphics drivers, that is not the case.
In order for your driver to be OpenGL certified, is has to implement *all* of OpenGL. That includes T&L, NURBS, and much much more. NVidia has an *excellent* software implementation of T&L, and I'm sure the people who made the Kyro and Kyro II (neither of which have hardware T&L) would *love* to get ahold of it. You expect NVidia to just give that to you for free? Um, I don't think so.
Motherboards are a different issue, and I don't really think NVidia would do something dumb like keep their motherboard specs closed. I suppose we'll find out, but their record with graphics cards says nothing about it.
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Now, NVidia is just jumping right on in to the motherboard and sound processing markets. And from the looks of it, their very first product already blows the competition out of the water. How long has this competition been here? We're talking about *Intel* and *Creative*, for crying out loud! You don't just beat these guys overnight! What have they been doing all this time? Why is NVidia able to take them out so easily? Why can't ATI or Matrox touch the GeForce 3? Why is NVidia not afraid to spend Microsoft's money to develop Linux and Mac drivers? What is going on here? At this rate, NVidia will rule the world in five to ten years!
Obviously, NVidia's technology is being provided by aliens. There just is no other explanation. We have to stop this conspiracy before it's too late!
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Now, as virtually every game requires a 3d card, why not just integrate the damn things into the motherboard? Strikes me that this more or less follows the traditional progression within the computer industry.
So my question is, why the Hell do I still need a sound card?
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
First, Microsoft was expected to lose about $200 per unit on early Xbox units. With this NVidia announcement, there's a path to an NVidia/AMD Xbox implementation at a lower price point. This gives Microsoft much more leverage with Intel in bargaining for discounts on parts for the Xbox. Microsoft probably won't lose $200 per unit. Intel will get squeezed hard.
Second, it makes it very clear that entertainment apps now drive the PC industry. More transistors are now devoted to 3D graphics and audio processing than to the main CPU. The PS2 had that balance too; all the innovation is in the graphics and media processing, while the main CPU was an old design. Now it's taking over. Business desktops will have full 3D graphics and 5-channel audio, even if they never use it.
Third, it's now clear that one more generation and one-chip PCs will go mainstream. There have been one-chip PCs, but they were low performance. As the chip count goes down, motherboards get smaller. With this level of integration, there's little need for slots for plug-in boards. AGP goes away, and probably so does PCI. Add-ons will go on FireWire, USB, or Ethernet.
Finally, this all leads to downsized packaging. The computer can fit in the base of a flatscreen, and will probably end up there.
It's not clear why this new chip is GeForce 2, rather than GeForce 3 architecture. The XBox uses GeForce 3. It's probably a production bottleneck; NVidia was having trouble getting GeForce 3 parts out the door in volume. But NVidia will fix that.
I'm pretty sure that the whole board is using a unified driver, so they might not want to open it up after all... check socketa.com's review for more info.
If they don't open the video driver, they can't open the video++ driver...
This is the one angle of this story that I feel has not been sufficiently explored. This new chipset is a potential godsend for IT managers and workers. Why? When you troubleshoot a PC, one of the first things you have to look at are Video Drivers, Sound Drivers, NIC Driver, IDE Driver, Chipset Driver, etc. NVidia is going to make sysadmin's lives much easier if this product is 1/3 as good as it looks. Much easier to properly maintain PCs this way. This gives AMD a much bigger wedge to use to pry into the corporate market. Saving a few dollars per unit when buying PCs is nice, but anything that drops TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) gets major attention.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
The reason their Video Drivers are so closed is first because of various NDAs that they (Nvidia) had to sign to get bits of tech from other people and also because one of their great strengths in the video market is the unified driver setup that they have. Whether you agree with then or not (I don't) it seems clear why they would think that keeping that info close to their chests would be a good thing. In the MoBo chipset market it is a diffrent story these things need to be open and everybody else has them open. Also the entire history of the Linux drivers seems to indicate that they really did want to open them and just found themselves unable to do so. Comparing that with this is apples and oranges and it seems obvious they will do the right thing here.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
I might be taking this wrong, but it looks like this architecture might bridge the gap between console gaming and PC gaming. Its like the in-between. With all the audio and video integration, it looks like a nerd-souped-up-super-gaming-setup.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
What, so now I have to sign an NDA to get chip programming manuals, if I can get them at all?
No thanks... nVidia is one of the least-open companies out there, repeatedly denying requests for programming information. They finally did produce Linux drivers for their cards, but they are binary-only. How would you like binary-only kernel support for your CPU?
Or maybe they would support Linux. It's a fairly lucrative market in the server area, at least. But based on their past attitude I wouldn't count on it.
-John
nVIDIA is trying to be the next MS? Isn't everyone trying to be the next MS? You speak as if all companies aren't trying to take control of their respective markets.
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
If not, then I brought up that question to ask this one... maybe it'll give us Linux/BSD users a chance to NOT have to play catch-up to Microsoft on a new architecture?
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
That's awesome. Now I get to have outdated and nonexisting drivers for my motherboard from nvidia instead of just this goofy video card!
(If you don't see the sarcasm in that statement I pitty you)
The point is that the two channels aren't "crossbared", but the connection to them is.
...
... the crossbar allows the north bridge (IGP) to allocate memory in both channels at the same time, thereby reducing the latency, since it can write/read to/from them simultaniously.
How to explain it
uhm
I hope that helps a bit.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
And no, a PS2 or XBox is not like a computer with a keyboard, mouse, and expandability built into its design. (Although they are getting closer to this realization).
It's funny to see that a while ago nVidia was the underdog and 3dfx were the bad guys. All of a sudden nVidia has turned into the bad guy.
Is this some kind of dillema in today computer industry? You cant be big (and make lots of $$$) and good a the same time?
Anyway i hope ATI's TRUFORM will kick their butt a bit. Competition is a good thing.
keep it simple.
Take a look at HardOCP for pictures of the new board (Abit MicroATX featuring NV22 and the Crush 12).
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG