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NVIDIA To Exit Chipset Business
The rumor that we discussed a few months back is looking more real. Vigile writes "Once the darling of the enthusiast chipset market, NVIDIA has apparently decided to quit development of future chipsets for all platforms. This 'state of NVIDIA' editorial at PC Perspective first highlighted the fact that the company was backing away from its plans to develop a DMI-based chipset for Intel's Lynnfield processors due to legal pressure from Intel and debates over licensing restrictions. That effectively left NVIDIA out in the cold in terms of high-end chipsets, but even more interesting is the later revelation that NVIDIA has only one remaining chipset product to release, what we know as ION 2, and that it was mainly built for Apple's upcoming products. NVIDIA still plans to sell its current offerings, like MCP61 for AMD platforms and current generation ION for netbooks and nettops, but will focus solely on discrete graphics options after this final release."
They better have a compelling product with the upcoming fermi then, but from I what I hear they're trying to design their GPUs for more general purpose computing, specifically scientific computations. It's a really big gamble and I can't see that it will be a huge market. Their upcoming products are supposed to have 3 billion transistors which is way more than 4x the amount in an i7 CPU. It's probably going to cost a ton too.
I think this is a clever ploy to make Intel play nice with Nvidia. By "letting go" of the market, true or not, Nvidia sends a message that Intel is a monopoly, which puts Intel in a much worse position (remember the EU) than Intel has when competing with Nvidia in the chipset scenario. Obviously, it's impossible to know what's going to happen. But if I were at the top @ Intel, I'd be freaking out a little, for this tiny little company "we have crushed" (that's what Nvidia makes it look like) will get us into the spotlight from regulators. I'm gonna go get some popcorn.
Intel will be putting graphics on the CPU, according to their roadmap.
AMD will be putting graphics on the CPU, according to their roadmap.
At that point the GPU is already a "sunk cost", noone will buy an integrated GPU that's only slightly better than another integrated GPU. It's also not only legal reasons, but also about pricing, timing, access to resources and so on. Intel can increase license costs, do accounting so more profits go on processors, delay launches of competing chipsets, deny access to resources trying to work out incompatibilies or instabilities and so on. Intel is doing extremely well and is ready to do that landgrab, one way or the other. I think nVidia is doing a better play as the victim of Intel's legal department rather than being gently pushed out the door as the GPU joins the CPU.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Then there's also the whole thing of nVidia producing utter crap chipsets... That might have a teeny weeny little something to do with it.
It has nothing to do with intel's "market dominance" and everything to do with nVidia's inability to be competitive in a market segment they know little about, and the shoddy crap they try to pass off as a chipset. Once you put the koolaid down and have an objective look at their product, it simply sucks.
I've had 3 of them and all three were utter garbage. DFI, Gigabyte, ASUS, it didn't matter. Every time it turned out to be the MCP in the chipset or some other part of it failing or not working correctly to begin with. In one case the interrupt controller didn't work at all with a dual core CPU and on both linux and MS Windows they had to put a "software" interrupt controller in the kernel to make it work with a dual core cpu. As you might guess this made the multi cpu performance _worse_ than a single cpu. And this was a chipset designed for multi-core CPUs.
I've subsequently had 2 AMD crossfire chipsets, both worked perfectly. nVidia chipsets are 0-3 in my book.
Good riddance...
That's hundreds of thousands of consumers that won't get burned. Intel or AMD chipsets for the win...
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Unless you run Linux. Check the MythTV mailing list sometime, nearly every post referencing an ATI gfx chip can't get even basic stuff working. NVidia gave us VDPAU, ATI has yet to answer that one. I have no idea how ATI does in Windows for HTPCs as I don't run Windows on my HTPCs. The license alone would be 30% of the cost for the machine even if I wanted to use it. Too much for too little.