Mildly Recent News v3

Wednesday 28th May 2008, 09:30:00 PM, written by Arun

In today's edition of yesterday's news, we look at NVIDIA's two latest purchases, P45, GDDR5, Intel's CPU pricing, NV's CSX, and AMD's stand on the 450mm transition. First of all, the news items...

May 27th: Intel delays Centrino 2 to July 14 [TG Daily]
May 27th: TSMC may raise prices for leading-edge process technology [Reuters]
May 25th: Nvidia has two CPU lines - Meet the Tegra APX and CSX [TheInq]
May 23th: GDDR5 enters picture for next-gen graphics [EETimes]
May 23th: NAND flash recovery fading fast [Fabtech]
May 22th: Folding@Home NVIDIA GPU Client Confirmed [PCPerspective]
May 22th: NVIDIA Acquires RayScale Software - Bringing Ray Tracing to the GPU [PCPerspective]
May 22th: Intel to Cut Prices on Existing CPUs and Introduce New Parts in Q3 [DailyTech]
May 22th: A first look at Intel's P45 chipset in action [TechReport]
May 21th: AMD ducking and diving over 450mm wafer transition [Fabtech]
May 14th: Anark sells off Gameface – to Nvidia? [Develop]

Interestingly, NVIDIA's CFO revealed during the latest quarterly CC that, in addition to Ageia, they made two acquisitions in Q1 but refused to say which. Apparently, Anark's Gameface is one (GUI middleware for game developers), and now it looks like Rayscale Software (interactive raytracing software) is the other one; although it's also possible that's one of them and is happening in Q2 instead. Who knows. Either way, it definitely looks like NVIDIA is aggressively following Intel by acquiring software & middleware expertise.

In related news, it looks like NVIDIA only paid $29.7M for Ageia (see: latest quarterly filings to the SEC) - which is massively less than what Intel paid for Havok and they got some hardware engineers out of the deal too, plus it's less than what the Venture Capitalists invested - so it looks like a surprisingly good deal and easy to justify considering that many, including myself, expected the sum to be in excess of $50M.

EETimes.com also looks at GDDR5 (which AMD will adopt in the RV770) and mentions a couple of good technical tidbits; interestingly, Joe Macri of ATI/AMD also claims that their GDDR5 PHY isn't much bigger than NVIDIA's GDDR3 PHY; implying in passing, too, that their GDDR3 PHY is smaller than NVIDIA's. Meanwhile, Fabtech points out there's little evidence the NAND market will do as good as forecasted by industry insiders.

The P45 and Intel CPU pricing pieces speak for themselves, as does the 450mm transition blog post on Fabtech and the Folding@Home client for GeForce8+ GPUs. However, what might not be quite as obvious is separating the truth from the FUD in The Inquirer's news piece about NVIDIA's upcoming CXS600/650 SoC. Just like the APX 2500, they claim it sports a 700-800MHz ARM11 CPU; however, it also supports 1080p @ 24 FPS video decode, presumably H.264 High Profile. Charlie then claims that's weak compared to Atom's full 60 FPS, without realizing that Atom doesn't support 60 FPS and Bluray/HD-DVD are both 24 FPS.

The 3W TDP is also dubious; 1080p decode isn't big enough of a task to justify that increase in TDP's compared to APX2500 which is in the hundreds of milliwatts. We'll see what happens, but presumably peak is <1W and it might sport a dual-core ARM11 with no video encode/imaging capabilities. If so, it'd also be appropriate for HDD-based Portable Media Devices. The only way it could take so much power is if it had a DX10 GPU instead of a handheld OpenGL ES2.0 GPU, which wouldn't really make any sense given the target market of large Windows CE devices...

The TSMC news speaks for itself - they'll likely increase pricing for 65/55/45nm, but the impact of such a move shouldn't be overstated; the price increase will likely be in the single digits if it even happens at all (they could just be using that as leverage not to lower the price over time as traditionally expected), and in the PC market it will likely be passed on to consumers but, given that the chips themselves represent far from the entirety of the bill of materials, the impact will not be that significant. As for the Centrino 2 delay, it might obviously have a slight positive impact on AMD and NVIDIA but the magnitude is very difficult to estimate.

So that's that - hopefully we're fully up-to-date now and won't lag behind (too) much in the future!


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Tagging

beyond3d ± nvidia, intel, amd, gddr5, nand, gameface, rayscale, folding@home

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