VR World » Freescale

Intel’s license attack on Nvidia is an old “Thank You”

Theo Valich — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:14:19 +0000

This Monday, Intel filed papers claiming that Nvidia’s four-year chipset license does not apply to Nehalem architecture (Core i3, i5, i7, new Xeons) e.g. that Nvidia has no right in manufacturing chipsets for Intel processors that use integrated memory controller. These news come just after Nvidia enabled SLI on Intel’s X58 chipse6t, including Intel’s own DX58SO motherboard. Given the current state of affairs between the two companies, I was not surprised that Intel is going to oust Nvidia from the chipset market.

How Nvidia came into the Intel chipset market is another story – at the time, Intel was seriously hurting with its Prescott marchitecture and didn’t had anything to show in gaming and enthusiast segment. The company was playing around Nvidia and in the end – Nvidia launched “nForce 4 SLI for Intel” chipset (famous for the fact that it didn’t work with low-end Pentium D 820 processor) and started to pave way for the creation of “Axis of Evil” (comment by former ATI PR manager): Intel Core 2 CPU + GeForce 8800GTX + nForce 680i.

Also, this wasn’t the first time Chipzilla asked for help. When the company got struck with Rambus RDRAM gremlins in infamous Caminogate, Taiwanese VIA Computer skyrocketed to a shocking 60% worldwide chipset market share (for two quarters). Lack of confidence in Intel’s chipsets was proven with the launch of Intel-based workstations from Silicon Graphics. Imagine my surprise when I opened up my flashy Visual Workstation 550 (an $8,000 machine) featuring 2GB of PC-133 memory, Intel Pentium III 1.0 GHz processor, first Quadro card and VIA’s Apollo Pro 133A chipset. You will probably agree it was a very weird experience. Intel pushed VIA from the market with lawsuit regarding Pentium 4 license. By the time trials came to an end, VIA was less than also-ran in the Intel-chipset arena.

Coming back to Core 2 architecture, Nvidia enjoyed its success with 650i/680i and didn’t invest in the platform (780i was nothing else but 680i with PCIe Gen2 chip). At the same time, Intel grew stronger, releasing P35/X38/X48/P45 series of chipsets and Nvidia was no longer needed. Thus, it is logical that the company wants to squeeze out pesky Santa Clara neighbor for its Core i5 and i7 series.

Ultimatively, this is a battle that customers will lose. Regardless of what court decides, incertanties are costing both companies money. Truth to be told, we saw interesting papers about the actual financial situation in Intel, and it is no wonder that the company is now attacking everybody. But to play around with chipset licenses and patents – ultimately, this is a losing game. Once that you hit the “lawsuit-trigger”, path of innovation takes the backseat and development begins to be closely monitored by legal departments.

All I can conclude here is that Nvidia has patents that could block a lot of Intel’s products. AMD could stop Intel’s CPU production, so could Intel stop AMD. And then there is a case of 3rd party companies that nobody takes seriously, yet they can change the landscape of IT industry for good. When I spoke with couple of engineers from IBM, I was told that Big Blue could block Intel, AMD, Freescale, Motorola, even Texas Instruments – “in a jiffie”.

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GPGPU is the future: Khronos releases OpenCL API

Theo Valich — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 09:05:34 +0000

First day of inaugural Siggraph Asia 2008 conference came with a bang. Few months after announcing the work on the spec, Khronos group came up with the OpenCL 1.0 specification. GPGPU is now officially covered with a open-source, royalty-free cross-platform API that enables parallel programming on the GPUs, regardless from whom they’re coming from.

This specification covers all GPGPU-capable hardware, regardless of that hardware being in servers, workstations, desktops, notebooks or handhelds – if your GPU is able to compute, the manufacturer only needs to adopt OpenCL support in the driver and that’s that.

That should not be an issue, with AMD/ATI and Nvidia strongly standing behind the standard. Computing engineers on both sides bickered about Brooke+, CAL or CUDA in the past, but both makers are firmly behind OpenCL as the way for the future.

So far, companies that developed and ratified this initial spec include 3Dlabs, Activision Blizzard, AMD, Apple, ARM, BARCO, Broadcom, Codeplay, Electronic Arts, Ericsson, Freescale, HI, IBM, Intel Corporation, Imagination Technologies, Kestrel Institute, Motorola, Movidia, Nokia, NVIDIA, QNX, RapidMind, Samsung, Seaweed, TAKUMI, Texas Instruments and Umea University.

You can learn more at the official page of OpenCL API, but I wasn’t able to check the site as it was hammered down with numerous requests (this story was written at 10:05AM CET).

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Silverstone launches a revolutionary case, gaming mice

Theo Valich — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:30:15 +0000

I just received word from Cheney Tseng of Silverstone fame about the launch of their new product line. Under the name Raven RV01, Silverstone launched a gaming mice and a case. Now, the mouse is a standard answer to heated competition on the market (more on that below), but case is… something completely different, as Monty Phyton would say.
As we all know, heat flows upwards, while the cool air stays on the ground. In the world of computers, more and more components are heating up. This was not solved even with ATX motherboards placed upside down (BTX-style), so Silverstone decided to kick up a notch and start manufacturing a case where motherboard is turned at a 90 degree angle.
Exhaust of all components is now placed at top of the case, meaning the heat will flow towards the top of the case and will be exhausted almost immediately. This will actually dramatically reduce temperature on 3-Way SLI and CrossFireX setups, as the heat will flow through the cards to the top, instead of two lower cards cooking the card in first PCIe x16 slot.
Idea behind the Raven case is a very worthy one, but we will reserve our judgment until we see the review unit.

Second product launched today is Raven RVM01. This gaming mouse comes with several unique features, and I personally especially like the presence of carbon fiber on the top of the mouse. In fact, I think this sort of mouse would be an ideal companion to Voodoo’s Envy 133 notebook
SST-RVM01B features Philips twin-eye laser, while the heart of this mice is Freescale MCU processor. RVM01’s tail is very long, stretching at 1.8m or 6 feet. Personally, I am intrigued by the positioning of buttons and this large, blue-lit knob on the left side… I just loved MX Revolution and its two scroll wheels (absolutely ideal for shooters, too bad Logitech dumped that feature on latter models).
All in all, good to see Silverstone launching somewhat unique products on crowded market. Their case concept has a good shot at attracting an army of Chinese copycats.

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