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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.'"
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.
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.
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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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.