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Intel exiting graphics chips market
KEM writes "According to this
news piece, Intel is giving up on the graphics market " They are going to still make integrated chipsets, but will no longer be making discrete graphics chips. Intel chalks it up not being able to keep up with the other chip makers, despite their purchase of Chips and Technologies in 1997, which was supposed to give them that edge.
One thing that most people don't know about is that Intel is allowing Some OEMs to enbed other graphic chipsets onto the 810 motherboards. I know of one that has the G400 built in.
The size and budget issue of Intel is not so much of the R&D issue, but rather that they have the biggest and baddest of the microprocessor manufacturing capabilities. If all of a sudden AMD got access to that kind of manufacturing force, they would be cranking out K7's like no tommorow and be kicking Intel's ass.
Guess you're right, sorry. But my point was that microsoft already made intel take them into account when designing a new processor when microsoft were a lot less powerfull than they are now...
I tried it on windows 95 with the usb update installed and newest directx as suggested, got good color but lagged and freezed and made me think the chipset was crap. I updated the firmware and drivers and still it did the same, and sometimes it would decided 16 colors and low res were kewl. I then tried windows 98...and it again did the same...though it usually only froze in 98...you could not tell about the lag, cause 98 lags any damn way, but the res stayed at 1280x1024 I set it to. I installed NT 4.0 ws, put on service pack 4 as suggested (well it said 3 for agp support). Awesome performance! Screams, no lag...wow kewl...I decided it was a good card. then I rebooted back to linux where it was working fine all along.
Why did you buy such crappy boards to start with? My PC has 1-AGP, 5-PCI, and 2-ISA, even my 2 year old PC has 4-PCI and 3-ISA. A better PCI bus is in development (PCI-X [133MHz]) but it is simply not needed for 99% of the desktops out there. I could see you arguing for an AGP "bus" of 5 slots rather than the 1 point-to-point connection but the reason AGP is faster is *because* it is point to point. You're just whining, if you want the latest video card then the PCI bus that you so love is the bottleneck so you need AGP anyway.
..they'll release the 3D specs, so that we can get some more use out of the i740 when XF4.0 rolls around. I kinda wish I'd pushed from the inside when I worked at Intel this summer..
(Slashdot ate my password)
Scott Francis[Mechaman]
mechaman@mail.wsu.edu
It's not an "ultimatum" that will create good products. Developers have to feel that they have a personal involvement in the product. They don't want to sit in a cubicle and be forced by ultimatum to produce what marketing dictates or risk living at Salvation Army. Treat professional developers professionally and you will get professional results.
Intel are now having to drop products after commiting to Linux support and almost forgetting that most people still use Windows, now they can get back to what they;re doing best - CPU's Let's hope they don't forget about Windows when they release the Merced or they'll go out of business.
And what chip _can_ run win98 without crashing?
The author of that article just casually mentioned the 810, but it seems to me that Intel's decision to drop dead products and focus on the 810 doesn't support a conclusion that they are getting out of the graphics business. Their decision to focus on embedded graphics looks pretty smart to me.
After I read that post it took me about a millisecond to predict the reply
What, you mean besides network adapters, chipsets, flash memory, embeded processors, etc.?
They invcested money into making video drivers for their chips in Linux and didn't spend much time with Windows drivers so the output was shoddy video chips for 90% of their customers. Thats what they get for forgetting about the core market.
I have a apollo joytech I740 and its is the best graphics card I have ever owned. I can go as high as 1280x1024 without any problems. I think you just have a bad card or your manufacture sucks.
1. Their chips were always shit. 2. They _NEVER_ invested any effort or money into making Linux drivers. RedHat had to pay a third party to write them. 3. So what's your point?
1. Their chips were always shit.
2. They _NEVER_ invested any effort or money into making Linux drivers. RedHat had to pay a third party to write them.
3. So what's your point?
Nah, SGI owns all the patents on everything 3D. Unfortunately they make mistakes like licensing it cheaply to Microsoft :)
Just like the modem sideline, poor intel!! ahehe
(more to the point, the C&T acquistion) Just reinforces the old adage, '...you can't buy competancy...'
Using Windows is a user error!
M
My Hurcules MGA kicks ass!!
When Intel started making chipsets for mother boards how many chipset companies went out of business or left that market? Unless you are talking about non Intel processors how many boards do you see with non Intel chipsets? Don't count super 7 boards even if they can run an Intel processor because they are really built for Amd chips. I'm sure they planned on doing this with video cards as well. Unfortunately for them competition in this arena was a bit more fierce than the motherboard chipset arena. Also they have had a big brother named FTC take a greater notice of them. Last thing you want to do at this point is be seen forcing competition out of another area. So what do you do? Exactly what they did. Play a low profile (in the graphics area) after a while, and then claim to get out of the business. Siting fast paced competition as the reason. At least they are smarter than Bill at this game.
In Republican America phones tap you.
PC with 3 PCI slots =
A video card, a SCSI card, an ethernet card, or two video cards, and a SCSI card, or use onboard video, and two SCSI cards and an ethernet card, or two ethernet cards and a SCSI card.
Versitility, a graphics workstation, a file server with heavy storage, or more network capacity.
PC with 2 PCI slots and 1 AGP slot = Less choices in the above!!!
= a market where vidboard manufacturers running scared from Intel make AGP cards instead of PCI cards, so the latest board isn't avail. for your legacy hardware with PCI only.
Make a better PCI bus, chuck AGP in the trash.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Wow, go figure. And now there's nothing left of this evil legacy other than AGP, which is just a faster but much, much less versitile PCI bus. I thought the whole point of PCs was versitility. Oops, wrong, the whole point of PCs was cornering markets, and sucking money from consumers. I hope this AGP crap disappears and is replaced by a better, multi-purpose bus, or at least an updated PCI.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The boards were hypothetical examples.
in 99% of the cases, PCI isn't the bottleneck anyway.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Okay, so I'm being a little overly dramatic on this issue. But the limitations of PCI would have better been addressed by a better multi-purpose PCI bus, not a specialized AGP bus built by intel to give it an edge in trying to take over a new market. Thank goodness it didn't work, and good riddance to intel from the video chip market. I can't wait until they exit the CPU market too! (I can dream).
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
They also have some pretty good video cards...
For 3dfx they seem to head for the way down, the inovation that they once had seem to be gone now...
And let's not forget the laptop computers that need a video card too (mainly NeoMagic, C&T, there where some Cirrus Logic too)...
I hate AGP with a passion, sure it is faster and communicates with RAM better but why make it such a limiting bus. AGP limits people, for instance someone buys a motherboard and later would like a second AGP video card/monitor they can't just just go and buy another one to put into their machine. They are stuck buying a new MB or getting a special new video card. The point behind PCI was it's versitility. I don't want to have a separate bus just for my NIC/modem/video/scsi/whatever. "Specialization is for insects." Heinlein
How about a new PCI bus. I'd like to see 64 bit PCI (I know there are some out there but unless Intel markets this technology it won't become mainstream too easily) and how about being able to hot swap PCI cards. Well that might take a bit of work but still wouldn't it be nice.
Everyone was worried that Intel would start producing boards with their graphics chips built in (and integrated directly to the bus controller chips). I guess this proves that wrong.
I think 3Dfx and nVida are the only choices, even though 3Dfx looks like the Microsoft-wannabe of the graphics chip world. Matrox, S3 and ATI are great too; I use all three and think they're great.
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Poor Intel. What a tragedy. I guess they will have to look for something new to manufacture on those fabs they built ;-).
Sorry to burst your bubble of twisted reality, but it took a while and a lot of cajoling to get Matrox to release enough information for the damned card to work with XFree86.
Well ok they exit the business and incorporate the instruction set in the next gen Pentium. MB's are now cheaper to make and it drives the quest for ever faster ever newer ever premium priced consumer machines. This to me is obviously what they have in mind for positioning the FPU performance of the IA64.
It was obvious from the start that the Intel i740 chipset was no match for the chipsets from nVidia (TNT, TNT2, Ultra TNT2), Matrox (G200, G400 and G400 MAX), S3 (Savage4 and Savage4 Extreme), and ATI (Rage Pro and Rage 128).
The newest of the non-Intel graphics chipsets I mentioned can do AGP 4X, 32-bit graphics acceleration, and so on. Given that type of competition, no wonder Intel threw in the towel.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
I concede from a system integrator's standpoint, the availability of an AGP port at the expense of a PCI slot sucks. I try to steer clear of motherboard manufacturers who do this.
But on the other point you are incorrect. Video card manufacturers are choosing AGP not because they are scared of Intel, but because you can do a whole lot more with AGP, and in order to keep up with the competition performance-wise they need to use it.
There are simply some things hardware-wise you just cannot do with PCI.
You make it quite clear in your post that you have no idea what benefits AGP gives to a video system, and are in general quite clueless about the things you are trying to talk about.
In what way exactly is it less "versitile"? AGP in fact is more versitile than PCI from a technical standpoint, given its ability to make use of system DRAM more efficiently than PCI. That along with sidebanding and write-combining makes AGP much better a choice than PCI for anything (not just video cards) that has high bandwith requirements and/or memory requirements.
Nice little pop today in TDFX, NVDA, and ATYT. Especially NVDA. Curiously, a much smaller response from SIII/DIMD.
Yeah, exactly, I think that explains it better. Although AMD people would have a more personal relationship and dependency in their company because of its size and potential growth factor.
Well it just seems to me that AMD is catching up pretty damn quick compared to their size and budget of intel. I'm just proposing this as an idea. Maybe as another user said, they have a more personal involment in the development of the chip.
I have a theory that the reason why such big companies don't have as good an edge as what they think they might is due to the work ethic of those who work there. AMD for example has yet to produce a profit. They're working like dogs to produce fast chips cheaply. Intel on the other hand has already established themselves, and the work is distributed among many people. They may have deadlines, but its not the end of the world if they miss them (unlike AMD). Its not as much a monopolistic view as it is a financial view. You can see the same thing with MS. They can miss deadlines, however if they were to reduce the devlopment team to 100 people and give them ultimatums, I think they'd produce a better system. Its just a theory of course, and there are obviously companies that can contradict. Any comments? FYI, I won't respond to flamebait, so if you want a response from me, be polite.
Were you using a non-intel chipset on your motherboard? I remember having some compatibility problems running the i740 chipset on my Tyan 1590s Trinity motherboard, which used the VIA MVP3 chipset. They released a ton of patches trying to make the video card work properly, the patch version 2.8 actually ran decent (the latest patch crashed my computer bad). Finally gave in and the other day got a cheap Voodoo3 3000 and threw it in there. No more compatibility problems, and tons better framerate anyhow. Now back to slaying Young Kodiaks...
Hmphh...I didn't know they were into graphics chips in the first place.
Afterthough: If you don't have any nice chips to make, don't make any at all.
---------------------------
---------------------------
Remember, although Intel may not be designing and producing their own graphics chips, they still probably own a fair number of patents and the prior art being used in others'...
:-)
As long as any such patents remain in their portfolio, they stand to gain revenue through licensing.
Just a little food fer thought.
--The more you know, the less you know.
I have used the i740 chipset up until now and I have to say, it was horrible.. I couldn't even run Win98 without it crashing every hour.. unless I switched it into 16 color @ 640x480..
One less chip maker to worry about hyping their chipset
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" -- Albert Einstein
nt
+&x
Fast, fully supported 3d, AND a TV Tuner. they make great boards, fast as all hell, now if they can just figure out how to do 32-bit rendering, and get fully into the OEM market, I'll buy their stock.
BTW: I thought their commercials kicked ass, except for the thing that nobody can quite get right...30 second of screen shots please. I can't stand game commercials that have 2 second of actual gameply and 28 of some idiot actors doing stupid sh*t. The QuakeII commercial is a perfect example of how NOT to do one.
+&x
I've been using an original Millenium 8MB for the longest time, and it still is very fast, although the design is over 8 years old. I got a Voodoo 2, so 3D games are no problem (but lack of PCI slots is :-( )
I saw some Xmark performace figures with the Xfree86 pre 4.0 release on a G400 a while back - around 53 Xmarks! Thats really good for a consumer card that costs less than $200.
Anyway Matrox always has had THE BEST 2D performance of any video card, and the best Xfree86 drivers.
That's close, but not quite right. Somewhere sitting around my house is an old issue of Boot magazine (I think they morphed in maximum pc, or something like that), anyways, in this issue they had a big 3d showdown between all of the various cards of that time. From what I can remember, the Voodoo 2(yes it was out at the same time as the i740) won for speed, and the i740 won for visual quality. On the fps graphs, the i740 came third, beaten by the Voodoo 2, and the Riva 128.
This does remove some of the potential Microsoft 'it's a feature effect' from the market. Intel always had the potential to sell their graphics chips at cost or at a loss, just to get market share. Now everyone is basically at the same level, meaning none of them can afford to sell at a loss. So hopefully the competition will be in the performance, feature, and support areas. Except at the very low end of the cost equation where Intel will still be a player.
Yea. If only Intel hadn't fallen for all this "Open Source" Linux hooey. Suddenly, a very paranoid and market-aware company went off the deep end. If they had only stayed in a Windows-only environment where a cruddy product isn't as important as good marketing, they'd still be making graphics chips today! Damn those Linux people and their crazy talk about performance!
The i740 was a kick-ass chipset for its time. Back then the 3D landscape was Riva 128, Rage Pro, and Voodoo 1. TNT was stil in development, and the GXXX were not announced yet. At a time when you had the choice of good visual quality (Voodoo), faster speed and bigger textures (Riva 128) or neither (Rage Pro) the i740 was almost as fast as a Riva 128, had better visual quality than a Voodoo and supported AGP 2X like the Rage Pro. Unfortunatly that only lasted until the Voodoo 2 came out but still.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Actually I'm still right, i740 had a jump on Voodoo 2 by 2-3 months, by the time that article was published Voodoo 2 had started the 3rd gen accelerators. i740 came at the very end of the 2nd gen chips. 2 issues before that, i740 won a kickass award. BTW. The Verite won for best visual quality.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I actually ran 2 i740 boards on my two computers, and they ran sweet, and still do.
On the other hand, what is going on with the new Intel graphics chip they just brought out not too long ago? Are they ditching that too, including support?
two competent companies, would fight each other driving performance up and price down...
but we wouldnt have all these Mofos with different cards totally screwing compatibility and stuff.
:)
-I go to Rice, so figure out my email address
intel forgot people use windows.
yeah.
and this somehow relates to them making video chips...yeah.
WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT WEIRDO!!!
-I go to Rice, so figure out my email address
1. I havent heard of any linux drivers for that card, so they didnt put all that much effort into them
2. drivers are shoddy for all cards right now due to the pace of development
3. if the core market is shit, its nice to know that some comapnies have the balls to try and make a transistion. the almighty buck is not the only thing in the universe. theres quake and sex too.
-I go to Rice, so figure out my email address
So Intel leaves the discreet market to focus on integrated chip sets the same day that nVidia announces an agreement with ALI (Acer Labs) for northbridge integration...
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/990818/ca_nvidia_2.html
Ouch...
Really, Intel should have to add such comments to these announcements. Things like, "well, we're no longer making network cards. Ever. Or, at least until next year. We'll continue R&D on them, but our stuff gets pounded in the marketplace, so we'll say we're 'leaving the market' until the R&D guys come up with something decent."
They have even released the specs on the THREE-D portions of their latest cards, thus guaranteeing that hardware accelerated OpenGL for Linux for the Matrox cards is just around the corner (with XFree86 4.0). NVidia and 3dfx won't do that, saying that keeping their 3d engine secret gives them a 'competitive advantage'. 3dfx cards work in OpenGL mode under Mesa only because of the proprietary GLIDE libraries, where 3dfx munificently allowed someone under non-disclosure to port GLIDE to Linux (as closed source).
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
The current PCI bus spec tops out at 33Mhz. The current AGP bus spec tops out at 66Mhz. Intel now has a 66Mhz PCI spec (i.e., just as fast as AGP), but a) it is currently available only in their latest motherboard, and b) in that motherboard, it requires eliminating the AGP slot. As for 64-bit PCI, both Compaq and AMI have motherboards that do 64-bit PCI with Intel 32-bit processors. Remember that the width of the bus does not have to be the same as the width of the processor... for example, current chipsets already have a 64-bit bus to main memory, and serialize it to a stream of 32-bit words when it comes time to present the data to the processor. And some Alpha motherboards have busses as wide as 256 bits to main memory, and again, serialize it to a stream of 64-bit words when it comes time to present the data to the (64-bit) processor.
A year ago Linux did not support the 64-bit PCI spec even on Alphas (which did have 64-bit PCI slots even back then). But I have not checked things out lately, too many other fun things to do and I'm not in that business anymore.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.