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Nvidia to Buy ULI Electronics
Steve from Hexus writes "In a move that has taken the technology market by surprise, graphics card and chipset manufacturer Nvidia has announced its intention to buy ULI Electronics, Taiwanese chipset designer and maker: 'NVIDIA openly recognizes that a large proportion of chipset innovation happens in the Far East where ULi is based and that is one of the things that makes ULi an attractive proposition. The move is seen by many as good sense on NVIDIA's part as its own in-house chipset makers are based solely in the USA. ULi, in contrast, has relationships with chipset makers in Taiwan and China, as well as in San Jose.'"
Guess this closes the gap even more for nvidia, brining more of their processes in house.
-===- "Those who would sacrifice freedom for security deserver neither" -===-
imho...
also, who owns diamond/s3 now?
The next technology is to have two GPUs on one card! What they don't tell you is, that the second GPU is wasting all of its time its not in a game running a botnet to factor NSA passwords..
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
http://www.transmeta.com/efficeon/partner_tech/uli .html
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It says right there in the article that they plan not to make their products better, ever again. I think it's a bad move for the company.
Also... what the hell are you talking about?
oh wait....
and it's pretty cool - has both AGP and PCI-Xpress sockets so that I can continue to use my ATI X800 AGP video card, and then upgrade to a PCI-Xpress when it becomes too old. It also comes with two SATA ports, and an SATA2 port.
The motherboard is built by Asus (their value line, called ASRock), and it's been a great performer. It's the first motherboard that I've gotten dual-channel memory working.
The chipsets are innovative, but are they so innovative that nVidia wouldn't want to copy them? Maybe the lead-time, and wanting to keep their chipset line small was the reason.
the fun part is that lots of MB using ATI chipset use ULI southbridge as ATI still has a way to go for SATA, usb ans sound.
The real story is that it gives nVidia a good office in Taiwan and will strengthen their ties with taiwanese and chinese design house, mostly for MB and especially for laptops.
ULi also appears to be the only company other than ATI making chipsets that support CrossFire (ATI's multi-GPU solution, competing with Nvidia's SLI, for the one person who doesnt know but cares) in the form of the ULi M1575. I cant imagine Nvidia will let that continue.
I really, really hope this has positive impacts on the quality of nVIDIA's chipsets. They've been ridden with bugs times and times again, whilst ULi seemed to get along without major hickups like the totally b0rked SATA-implementation on the nForce3 150, for example.
And I hope they'll continue to provide the Linux Kernel Hackers with specs of their chipsets, just in the fashion ULi used to do. It can only get better for nVIDIA by embracing ULi's practises in more than a few fields of operation, in my opinion.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
I recently purchased a Asrock 939DualSataII with a ULI chipset. This board came with AGP and PCI Express graphics slots, another slot for a future M2 upgrade board, no whiny fans on the northbridge and is very stable. I am not a overclocker but people were having great luck OC'ing this board. Although most board companies were using the ULI chipsets in their budget boards, this was starting to change. The current ULI chipset competed very well with the Nvidia chipset, in some cases its actually faster and I think if ULI was a seperate company it would be giving Nvidia some great competition in a few years. If you don't want Nvidia what else is there? Via chipsets are not what they used to be and the ATI southbridge has horrible USB 2.0 performance - this is supposed to be fixed in the next southbridge they release. I bought a NF4 based motherboard and had alot of problems with it. I found out through forums that the IDE drivers are buggy so I didnt install them, the 'activearmor' is buggy so I didnt install that and active armor was one of the selling points for me when I bought the motherboard. I never did get all of my driver problems worked out. I hate to say this but my next computer will probably be Intel motherboard with a Intel chipset. I havent used a Intel processor since 1998 but unless ATI or Via releases a much better chipset I don't see myself as having any choice. Nvidia makes great graphics cards so don't take this as a anti-Nvidia comment, I just don't like their chipsets. I suppose its easier for a company like Nvidia to buy ULI than it is to fix their own product, something we have all seen over and over again.
'Hey everyone lets all contract out to companies based in China and pay them to make it, its much cheaper and it steals jobs from hard working Americans!'
:(
This is just total BS, I dont care what you say about it. If stuff like this keeps happening most of the US will be on welfare because we're outsourcing all the jobs to the east. Outsourcing on vast amounts should be made illegal, this country has gone so far down the drain I am starting to be ashamed of it
The fascist Clinton and Bush families are all part of the illuminati, my friend. Please understand that the very air and water you consume is being tainted from their machines on their moon base. Fight the mind control. Drink distilled, not filtered. Spend at least two hours each day 25 miles outside a city to breath the untainted air. Bleed yourself one pint each week to cleanse yourself from the nanobots inserted into fresh carrots at the grocery store.
It's all there, my friend. I plan on living on an island eating seafood and scraping my underside with sea shells. Your average roll of Charmin is infected with various gene altered cow viruses. Use tree leaves and college ruled paper instead. You, my friend, are all part of the experiment. I for one will have no part of it. The Bush and Clintonian puppeteers are eating our babies. Please, vote libertarian.
Ha! I love this guy!
-STankyG
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances...
Most chip design firms, Nvidia farms out production to various fabs, mostly overseas. With the ULI purchase, it's only a matter of time before all of the design goes overseas as well. Meaning that the value the US operations add will amount to warehousing and paper shuffling. If their order fulfillment is anything like Apple with the iPod, they won't even have warehousing to deal with.
So, regarding the economic theory of "constructive destruction", at what point does anyone actually start constructing anything with higher value added within the US? Unless the value added was when someone pulled the phrase "constructive destruction" out of their ass at some economic thinktank, and spent a couple of months concocting a PhD disertation around it. Gotcha.
Luke, help me take this mask off
For a moment I thought they were going to a pull 3Dfx by making their own cards and killing their market.
I had a job interview for a QA position at 3Dfx about six months before it went under. I was shocked that the marketing department was calling the shots instead of the engineers. After that Dilbert experience, I didn't want to work there. Of course, asking the marketing hack why I should be interviewed by him when I was applying for a technical position probably didn't help.
Shamefully, you really cant for most machines - although there is hardware out there that contains a majority of Non-Asian sourced parts (e.g. IBM RS/6000 270, with parts made in USA and Europe, with some from Taiwan). It might be a bit more expensive, but the quality points to it being worth the expense to ensure reliability.
I'd wonder what it'd look like from a durability standpoint if the hardware (nvidia's products for example) was made in the US and/or EU. Maybe then those $500 cards would have some actual justification to their cost and profit margins.
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As someone mentioned above, ATI's southbridge offerings are, to say the least, lacking. I know on their (ATI's) new crossfire platform, most if not all motherboards use the ULI southbridge. That chip has some great features - SATA300, PCI Express link, and RAID0/1/0+1/5. What will ATI do now? I can't see nVidia making this integration any easier for ATI, so will ATI go looking for its' own chipset company? VIA, SiS, etc. will soon be saying, show me the money!
Someone needs a refresher in logic.
Come to think of it, a large proportion of desktop operating systems are developed in the United States where ChaosDiscordOS is based - and that is one of the things that made ChaosDiscordOS an attractive proposition. Anyone want to buy full rights to my operating system, ChaosDiscordOS*? I figure $10,000,000 is a reasonable price, since it's so attractive.
* Warning: Operating system may consist of nothing more than an ugly logo thrown together in the GIMP and a main.c file that contains, "/* TODO: Write operating system */"
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Does this mean Nvidia will support SLI on existing ULi chipsets? I would be wise if they wanted to bring existing ULi customers "into the fold" and give everyone a nice warm fuzzy feeling about Nvidia. Or they could just leave them out in the cold and tell them to buy an official Nvidia SLI chipset.
I guess this means I can forget about a 939 mother board with IGP, sideport memory and SATA-II with no fan.
Video giants are all the time getting squashed but now that the video game companies have taken sides and got their favorites but sort of support the competetion we're down to a AMDvs.Intel democrat/republican sort of thing. From now on ati and nvidia will dominate while maintaining outward appearances of being seperate entities.
Good cop bad cop, we always fall for that.
How long before governments look to stop nVidia from buying out the entire chipset market? They're starting to verge on monopoly here. Just when another chipset maker starts to get established, they buy them up.
The move was merely to swallow up a competitor and likely use ULi's current line as a low end chipset.
nVidia has been making a lot of inroads in the chipset market, but not ATI is joining the fray... Eliminating ULi as competition, and acquiring it's current portfolio doesn't really provide a big bang for the buck, but marginally improves market share for nVidia in the chipset market.
It doesn't hurt that ULi came up with it's own configurable PCI-E setup (ala SLI, though not supported by video card makers, yet). That's probably the key piece, and there may be some parts of the IP portfolio nVidia can leverage toreduce their own licensing costs - which means cheaper chipsets.
Additionally, they gain a group of driver and firmware developers, probably more accustomed to rapid technology changes than nVidia's own group (allowing their original people to concentrate on video)
Overall, it's a "Decent" move, probably having more to do with opportunity, rather than as some large-scale strategic move. ULi simply doesn't command the market share nVidia does, and there are plenty of Asian motherboard makers using nForce chipsets already - this move has NOTHING to do with building those relationships.
I liken it more to buying that 300GB SATA drive on Black Friday because it's a decent deal, not because I suddenly need all that extra capacity, or even that I'll need it in the future... however, it does give me more options.
I bought a Chaintech S1689 mobo with ULi chipset recently, and haven't been able to get it fully functioning under Linux. The redhat installer wouldn't even boot. I got the Suse installer to boot with some jiggling. I have to pass acpi=off and agp=off to the kernel to get it to boot, and if I have any USB support enabled in the BIOS, or even have a PCI USB card plugged in, it freezes at the "Probing for PCI Hardware" stage. I guess this is as much of a Linux problem as a ULi problem (it all works fine under Windows) but I'm not a kernel hacker, I just want something that works out of the box. Guess I got what I paid for. (Incidentally, has anybody else had problems like this? Or am I just a total retard?)
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
* daring code hacker by night *
http://www.silent-tristero.com
That is, the chipsets seem okay (currently using an nForce 4 SLi).
It's their drivers that are bad. Installing their IDE drivers breaks most DVD writers. Installing their active armor firewall not only corrupted my HTTP downloads, but also installs TWO copies of apached on your machine because their configuration tools for it are HTML-based.
But hey, right now, I am using 4 DIMMs in a dual-channel config at 200MHz (full speed, a bit tough to do) and AMD Cool n' Quiet. And it works very well and very reliably.
And I'm supposed to want to trade this for a ULi chipset which doesn't even have GigE? I don't agree.
It would be nice if nVidia would spruce up their audio support a bit. It'd be nice to get the auto-AC3 encoding of SoundStorm back.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Yesterday, I read two news articles end to end. The first was Anandtech's preview of the upcoming ULi single-chip chipset solution U1697 http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2641. I most particularily noted that although the chipset is competent and very full-featured, aside from 10/100 mbit networking, it would most likely not be able to support dual-videocard solutions - i.e. Nvidia SLI or ATI CrossFire - because both ATI and Nvidia like to keep such support for themselves and their licensees - of which ULi is not one.
The article also states that ATI was most likely to allow ULi support for CrossFire, since ULi and ATi have been doing motherboard business together already. ATI has been using ULi Southbridge chips together with their own Northbridges.
The second article I read yesterday was that of Nvidia buying ULi. ULi make fully-featured low-cost motherboards. Their U1695-based motherboards are on sale for as little as 60 in Europe, with most competent motherboards costing twice that amount. Nvidia already have a full range of Motherboard offerings, so why buy ULi? Probably not to expand their offerings, and probably not because they want to be nice to ULi by offering them free licenses. It's a buy-out of a possible future competitor, while they can still be had for cheap.
As an added bonus, Nvidia will own one of their main competitor's suppliers.
/ Per
This is the first step towards offshoring their design and manufacturing operations. All of those USA jobs at nVidia are now in jeopardy as once the corporation owns an Asia entity, they can a) transfer design tasks overseas, b) import cheap labor on L-1 visas to avoid paying prevailing wage, c) exert downward pressure on US payroll, d) reduce benefits, e) freeze US hiring.
I have seen too many companies do this to believe their goal is anything other than to nix American jobs in favor of cheap foreign labor. They'll bring over a sea of L-1 visa people to learn how to do the job, then send them back to Asia with a trial design task. If that succeeds, boom, no more American jobs at nVidia except for upper management.
Seems to me every day I see two or three articles about a company acquiring another company. I figure in about ten years, every company will be owned by someone else until it's just Microsoft and Google. Then they'll merge and create a one-world government, one-world religion and soon knock down the borders between nations.. by that time it will be too late. Owners of small businesses.. do not sell out so easily! You only speed us toward a dark future..
This message will self-destruct in 5, 4, 3...
If you read the Inq today, there is an interesting article noting the shipments of chipsets in Q3 of 2005. Nvidia's shipments fell sharply while ATI's shot up to the top. This move is clearly intended to keep ATi in check.
So why don't you marry him.
from the beaver picture?
Obviously someone doesnt see the point of the the reply to that joke...
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Well, this seems designed to give nVidia lower production costs, yes.
However, it seems to me that graphics cards are WAY more expensive than they used to be. Normally, when new technologies become mainstream, they are introduced at a similar price to the old tech. and competition's tech., in an effort to compete. This is by design in capitalism, of course -- companies are supposed to compete to bring technology to the people at an ever cheaper price.
nVidia seemed to sidestep all of that good social design, though. Instead of bringing their new tech out at the normal price, they brought it out -- perhaps a LITTLE before its time, but not much -- at a higher price. And people bought it anyway. So now, people pay hundreds for cards that are really useless outside of high-end 3D workstations, since the software doesn't catch up that quickly.
Translation: nVidia and ATI are getting close-to-mainstream levels of sales at above-mainstream prices. As a result, they have ever more money to put into their products, and stomping out competition.
Let's hope we see those Free/Open graphics cards soon, before it's too late and nVidia is the hardware equivalent of Microsoft.