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CEE2003: A One-Vendor Trade Show
Billy Stephens writes "Few people knew about the CEE2003 event put on by Chaintech this year. They flew some of the top media analysts and resellers out to Spain to show off their new K8 motherboards and Nvidia Geforce FX based video cards. Unfortunately there was a lot of bad news to be had as well. AMD pushed back their Athlon 64 CPU until September so there were no motherboards based on it to show off, and Nvidia announced they would only release around 4,000 of their Geforce FX GPUs, primarily for preorders only. It looks like ATI has rattled Nvidia more than what people thought. Monkey Review has a great summary of this event with plenty of pictures. Overall I am impressed with the quality Chaintech has put into their products from an aesthetic point of view, it's a shame that both Nvidia and AMD are having product issues."
Interestingly by looking at the Road Map I noticed that the 760 & 761 chipset will offer a form of integrated graphics, 760 utilizing Utlra256 Graphics and the 761 equipped with Real256E Graphics.
Yeah but, Sis still hasn't made much headway in terms of the 800 MHz FSB which Intel will soon offer, at least not in terms of what we saw from their roadmap although this might change if their able to get the appropriate "go ahead" from Intel, which, from what I hear, hasn't been an easy task.
Is it just me, or does it seem like the whole PC graphics market has gotten well ahead of their consumers and software (i.e. games)? Along with other aspects of PC's, it seems AGP 8X and 128MB video cards are really necessary, at least for the larger customer base that would justify their production. There will always be the bleeding-edge enthusiasts who snap up the latest gear...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Just another case of a submission ruined by the submitter inserting an uninformed opinion at the end of the article.
"Overall I am impressed with the quality Chaintech has put into their products from an aesthetic point of view"
That should be great for people who leave their boxes open and stare at them like its a TV.
oh yeah, this is slashdot. my bad.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
I told you so...
nVidia probably knew that they weren't going to ship on time. They just wanted to keep gamers from buying Radeons at Xmas time.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Half of me wants to say that AMD and Nvidia must be insane for not keeping their timetables in better order, and the other half of me is glad that they are not releasing (or are releasing only on a minor scale) incomplete or inferior products. All of me is frustrated at the irony of these situations. I recall reading a tour of Nvidia's headquarters, which included a ton of expensive Sun hardware going to work at the design phase of the Nvidia's GPUs. The guys giving the tour said that they couldn't wait until AMD released their new 64 bit chips so they could replace those farms with Linux-powered machines on AMD hardware. Now with AMD pushing back the Athlon 64 to September, that delays Nvidia's ability to make and design chips on the hardware and software they really want to use.
Since I really don't have anything that actually requires an immediate upgrade (picking up another 1/2 GB of ram and a decent video card put that off for a while), I'll just keep waiting.
I want one (ok, two) for my house, but really, I do want inexpensive blade servers using the new Athlon MP chip to use as web/application servers first....
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
About the portion on "it's a shame that NVidia and AMD are having product issues". It just seems to be that Chaintech is unable to collaborate better with their vendors to make sure they don't release products that cannot be shipped in volume. I think the reason we don't see this from other manufacturers (think ATI/Intel...) because they have ways to collaborate and make sure these kind of snafu's don't happen.
I like the way Apple releases products. You hear NOTHING until every vendor is producing in volume and they are shipping or about to ship assembled units. This whole idea of announcing products 3-12 months before they can ship is just FUD trying to keep customers from buying right now.
With an MSDN subscription you can get copies of 64 bit XP. Their download page even lists 64 bit patches and service packs, what are you talking about? Intel already sells I2 servers and desktops. Its totally AMD's issue.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
As much as I don't want to beleive it, I am now thinking that we could be seeing the end of nVidia, just like we saw the end of 3DFX a few years back now. The GeForceFX is just so huge and noisy comapred to ATI's offering, it is not even funny.
:P
I guess there are not as many companies (especially computer/IT/internet companies) that can survive long these days - we are seeing more and more "infallible" companies failing nowadays.
As soon as ATI makes better drivers for Windows/Linux and other OSes, then they will sell even more than they do now.
I wonder if this will apply to companies such as Google and Microsoft....
Arc
If you really can't wait until then buy a cheap Alpha from ebay. I have a PC164 box that was built in 1997 and was true 64 bit back then. It has two ISA, two PCI, and two 64 bit PCI slots. 8 simm sockets so you can interleave the two banks of memory for double the throughput. Built in IDE controllers that don't have any issues with seeing 80Gb drives (most pII boards can't). A shame it never caught on. It runs NetBSD and happily routes packets for my firewall.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Apple pulling out of MacWorld Comdex Having Record Low Numbers
I think in the next 5 years or so there will be no more trade shows just because of the lack of revenue. Dont get me wrong their will still be Convenentions like Defcon and Rubi-Con but I think the trade shows will be gone...so get your free schwag now!
---
I Think Nvidia are on the way out. Whenever the market starts talking about raw frame rates and speed as the defining benchmark the winds of change are blowing. Concentrating on speed killed 3dfx. I see a great similarity now with Nvidia Vs Radeon. Raw speed is never the key. when 3dfx concentrated on raw speed issues like pass-thru cables and enforced full screen acceleration became glaring errors. With Nvidia you have Cards taking up a pci slot and fans that sound like lawnmowers. When a company starts to lose its advantage over the market they look for something they can put in a press release and say "we are better". and thats what benchmarks are for but by concentrating on that ina vain attempt to say "we are better" just means your not innovating enough and someone will come up with a better product
Check out the Tech Report's for more text, and a better picture of the video card that may never be.
they don't have to develop a 64-bit version of their OS. Since the hammer runs in 32-bit mode, all they have to do is make the chip run in normal old 32-bit mode. They don't have to optimize it for 64-bits, however it would be nice.
we have a ralley/march in the town where AMD's headquartered. That, and maybe convince some IBM and HP execs to come and speak about how we want the Athlon64 now and not on Microsoft's timetable. AMD's all but ignoring their AthtlonMP line of products, as they haven't come out with a new MP chipset since the MP's inception (760MP/X). It would give the Open Source movement a big boost, since Linux and AMD 's motherboard manufacturers are ready to run on it. This whole MS timetable thing is absolutely-fucking ridiculous.
It seems to me that Nvidia is going to go for another product, superior to the announced GeforceFX, in order to compete with the announced Radeon successor.
Of course this is pure speculation, but I don't see the point of filling pre-orders only if the product is merely "delayed".
The ENIAC Demo Competition
I thought the brown M&M thing was in a Van Halen rider not Ozzy?
From The Register .uk.co domain was wiped off the face of the Internet this morning with no notice, leaving more than 8,000 livid individuals and businesses - including Amazon and Priceline - with no Web presence or email.
.co owner - the University of the Andes in Bogota, Colombia - saying that the registrar for the .uk.co domains Net Registrar had failed to agree terms of a new arrangement and so it was "no longer entitled to operate uk.co sub-domains". Therefore, "Net Registrar is not entitled to permit you to use the uk.co domain names that you had registered with them".
The only proof of its existence is a posting on www.uk.co from the top-level domain
Drug dealing assholes. Terrorists...nuke the fuckers!
I'll show you a demo model in an Apple store.
Still waiting on 17" Powerbook which was announced 3-4 weeks ago and has a 5-7 week ship time as of today.
I love apple but don't compare them to a "We only announce when we can sell it" company.
I agree with you but you forgot one word. competitor
The line should read:
is just FUD trying to keep customers buying from a competitor right now.
That is by the way one of the reasons Apple can keep a much better track record on new product releases. They are to a major extend competiting against itself, at least in the short term.
Help fight continental drift.
Buy a new Athlon, which will put out enough heat to melt all the snow in a 4 block radius around your house. Then you don't have to stay inside any more.
IIRC, it was a problem getting a decent/profitable yeild of chips that would support the high clock speeds they were shooting for on the 5800 line. But I seem to remember reading somewhere that nVidia was still going to release their more moderate cards (5200 and 5600, maybe?) sometime in the future.
;)
I can't find any of the articles I remember reading this, but I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong.
As you say, "there will always be the bleeding-edge enthusiasts who snap up the latest gear..."; those enthusiasts often influence the buying decisions of family, friends, and acquantances. Success of NVIDIA, ATI has not been solely based on the sales from the enthusiasts. Buzz influences OEMs indirectly and they (Dell, Gateway, HPQ, etc.) follow along. Okay, so they buy into the extreme performance hype like the rest of us; that hype fuels the consumer notion that product differentiation exists and encourages consumers to pay extra for a few extra FPS. Enthusiasts are a bigger group than you think, if consider everyone that they influence.
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Microsoft HAS a 64-bit operating system. They have a 64-bit version of Windows XP. Runs only on the Itanium at present. That was actually one of the reasons Intel pushed out the Itainum 1. I mean face it, the chip was pretty worthless for a production environment what with the expense. Basically it was only good for R&D.
Well, that gave companies, like MS, time to recompile their stuff for it. Now the Itainum 2 actually ahs software and platforms it can run.
Despite the fact that you can mess with a chip simlator, you really can't code and test until you have actual silicon. If MS is going to make a version fo 64-bit Windows for AMD chips, it won't happen till the processor happens. They may do some work on it with simulators and get it ready, but they aren't going to ship it till they've tested it on the real deal.
I think it's silly that some people expect software makers to support a chip before it comes out.
uh
ATI offers drivers for a few things non-M$
Mac (duh)
Linux
BeOS
the real question - Where the hell is your head at?
Is that nVidia releases a new chip archeticture, then refines it. The GeForce 3 was the last major architectural upgrade before the FX. Subsequent GF3s were faster, or slower, or smaller and so on, but no real different. The GF4 addedd some things, a little more efficient AA engine, a second vertex shader, but kept the same fundimental architecture.
The FX is totally new again and it looks like designed with teh future in mind. It's more programmable than the Radeon and more programmable than DX9 currently calls for. This should mean that the overall archeticture will last for some time and through a number of refinements.
I would predict that the FX as it is now will have rather limited sales, much like the orignal GF3 did (probably even less). However the next incarnation will probably do quite a bit better.
Granted I'm running on year old information, but isn't Chaintech known for producing POS motherboards? And anyways, a little research will show that Amptron, PC Chips, Chaintech, ECS, and ASRock might as well be the same company. (PC Chips motherboards and Amptron motherboards look surprisingly similar.)
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
The 'GPU' makers are in a war of brute forcing solutions to problems that haven't arisen yet in order to drive sales. The evidence of this is clear in 3dfx's card requiring an external brick power source and nVidia's offering requiring two cards.
They are simply at the limits of what can be put on a card, but have nowhere else to go yet.
The next logical step in this war is the "home render farm" where we replace the GPU with a graphics computer networked to the desktop.
Sheesh.
In the meantime the unwashed browsing masses and pointy hairs have figured out that Rage 128's work just fine for reading email and the odd round of Tetris.
This will only end when one of the players is willing to drop back a round, punt, and come up some *new ideas* in GPU architecture.
Which, unfortunately, puts them in the position of risking the company if they don't pull it off, which makes the stockholders edgy, which puts pressure on them to just stay the course as they are, which risks the company.
Rinse and repeat.
KFG
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.html?i=1711
"NVIDIA would love to move away from these costly Sun boxes altogether and transition to a much more affordable x86-linux platform, but the problem is finding a 64-bit x86 solution. NVIDIA is currently evaluating Intel's Itanium for use in their farm but as far as their needs go, AMD's Opteron would be a gift from God. NVIDIA is eagerly awaiting the launch of Opteron so that their dreams may be fulfilled with an affordable x86 solution that offers 64-bit memory addressability; until then, they'll have to stick with these million-dollar sun systems."
I believe TomsHardware, in a review of the GeForceFX, stated that Geforce4/FX drivers had problems w/ Serious Sam 2 Z-Buffers, which the Geforce 3 processed w/o incident. I thought someone said unified drivers were consistent in controlling the Gfx cards and thus were a valuable asset to NVIDIA.
No, they are not releasing a new card until there is demand for the card. Curently there is not enough demand to justify cost of the manufacturing, marketing and distrobution of a new latest greatest card. So yes, they could release the card, and it would be the fastest on the market, but they would loose money. It is not about having the latest greatest card, it is about making money. They put all the numbers together, and releasing the card now costs more money than it makes.
Let's see here, AMD's quarterly losses are up to $256,000,000.
Intel on the other hand made $686,000,000 in the same period.
Yes, Virginia, AMD does have issues. You can only sieve cash like that for so long.
This story is submited by a troll accepted by a troll. One does not make such marketing commetns by accident. Slashdot gets paid to further the goals of Nvidia and AMD's compatitors (in this particular case). It's the usual extortion raket that media pulls on governments and private businesses. SHAME on SLASHDOT!!!
Haven't I seen this troll before?
It is all about the money. Nvidia is not releasing a new card because there is not enough consumer demand. If the demand justified the cost of ramping up production, and doing all the marketing that goes along with releasing a new product like this, then they would release the card. Technical merits of the card are secondary. The only reason ATI has the "fps lead" right now is to market to people who that is important, a nich market at best. For Joe 6 pack consumer (aka 90% of the market), what they have now is more than enough.
Looks don't matter in my world, the hardware could look like a Vogon destructor ship spouting poetry through the sub-etha, and I wouldn't care. My criteria for hardware is stability, performance, and saftey (ie: not a fire hazzard).
I see them on TV trying to sell overpriced white(err black..)box PC's with the 'window to the future' in the side of them, ie a case window with a neon light inside. Alot of people are like "ooooo prety", but umm.. what if it breaks? Where's the solid steel?
This whole case mod/pretty hardware thing has me wondering.
I don't know if anyone is aware of this one...
but if I recall, in an interview with the bitboys (hold the flames) - I recall them describing a "trick" with the 2d drivers of their video cards which will make the frame rate of things on screen sync with the video refresh.
What this means is it will create the illusion (yes illusion) that 2d video is much faster as there will be less tearing if you move things around quickly.
It's only a small thing, but it's a fantastic idea (in my opinion)
I wouldn't be surprised if something similar is already in some form of linux gui / driver and has been for years., but I don't follow that scene so please no ms vs linux flames here.
Definately a simple yet effective feature.
The Opteron is still launching in March. The Athlon64 is the desktop version and is the only product that is delayed until September.
"the whole PC graphics market has gotten well ahead of their consumers and software"
9 &p=14
"Serious Sam 2 AA/Aniso Performance
Minimum FPS - 1600x1200x32
GeForce FX 5800 Ultra: 41.7fps"
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=177
Considering that a game that has been out for over 13 months now still is not playable with the maximum quality settings would seem to directly contradict your absurd statement.
My guess? The reviews were bought and paid for. You can't help but come to that conclusion when a company pays hundreds if not thousands of dollars to fly someone over. That doesn't count hotel rooms, entertainment, free hardware, etc.
Argue all you want--they took a check, and admitted it.
yep, bought and paid for. And who are these monkey guys anyways? Never heard of 'em.
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], "Pray, Mr.
Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers
come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of
ideas that could provoke such a question.
-- Charles Babbage
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