So What's all this Talk about NVIDIA? - Rumor Roundup
Category: Video CardsPosted: October 14, 2009 05:52PM
Author: jammin
By now, we are all used to rumors circulating about what big companies in the world of technology might be up to. With the constant break neck pace of hardware development, there is always something new to talk about, and with that comes plenty of ways for things to go wrong. When it comes to the two big names in GPUs (for desktops at least), rumor mongering is intense, with PR for each side very happy to highlight weaknesses in the competition. Add to this the fact that consumers often like to pick sides (you can witness this by dropping into any forum discussion where the names of the two companies crop up), talk can get quite heated. Since ATI/AMD kicked off the most recent generation of competition with the release of its 5800 series cards, stories have been appearing with regard to how NVIDIA might respond, with some doubting they were in much of a position to do so. Rather than try and negotiate all the conflicting information and attempt to come up with an answer, I will attempt to lay out all the varying reports and let you try and make sense of them.
Of course, we know about NVIDIA's upcoming Fermi architecture already, following the announcement made at the company's GPU technology conference. Now, the presentation in itself lead to some chatter after NVIDIA showed a 'Fermi' card without making it too clear that the board was a mock up (well at least not until afterwards). Whether you want to make much of that is up to you, as you could explain it in favorable or less favorable terms, but it certainly isn't the only thing that has got people talking recently. Now we have moved on to debating the state of NVIDIA's current generation products, the GTX 200 series. The same source that first highlighted the Fermi board mock up, claimed that NVIDIA was planning on ditching it GTX 260, GTX 275 and GTX 285 parts, citing that they simply couldn't be made and sold at a profit. While NVIDIA PR has denied this, there is still further information being published that suggests that it is/was NVIDIA's board partners opting to discontinue the parts. There have certainly been claims of shortages to go along with this, but you can still go out and buy say, a GTX 260 right now if you want. Of course, other reports say that this isn't the case at all, and that NVIDIA's partners claim mass production of GT200 based parts is continuing as normal. You are welcome to join our forum members in the debate (though as it is with these things, it easily gets sidetracked).
During this time, NVIDIA has also announced what many had suspected for a while, that it would be halting development for Intel CPU chipsets going forward. That means chipsets for Core i7 and i5 and anything else that uses Intel's new QPI/DMI bus architecture (that's going to be more and more in the not too distant future). The two companies have disagreed over the chipset license that is the main cause of this problem since early in the year (Intel believes the license doesn't cover products with integrated memory controllers, while NVIDIA believes it does). That certainly doesn't help matters.
As for Fermi, it is obviously going to be an interesting architecture and a move further towards using the GPU as a computing tool, rather than something we use just to play the latest games. Again, there have been some concerns raised about when NVIDIA will be ready to get products out to consumers, but similar concerns are always aired when next generation parts from another company have already hit the shelves. According to the latest reports, partners are actually pretty confident about GF100 and have already put in large orders. It's still unsure when we may see these launch, but it could be by the end of the year. Mainstream products based on the architecture would seem to be further away than that, which would give ATI a reasonable buffer to build up sales of its own cards.
Personally, I find all of this a little tiring and that is without even touching on issues surrounding recent PhysX happenings. I have always been one to make judgements once products actually become unavailable, or once I can get new hardware in my hands, but not before. Maybe that is a little strange now?
