Archive for the ‘nvidia’ tag
Posted at 15:48 by Alex Watson with 19 comments
Well,
this time it's real - probably. Nvidia PR man Brian Burke just posted a picture of a Ferm-based graphics card - which he called the GeForce 100 -
on Twitter.
In the tweet, Burke says it's running the
"Unigine Heaven" DX11
benchmark.
Here it is!
You may now commence your speculations about how it will stack up against the new
Radeon HD 5970.
And speaking of Twitter, don't forget you should
follow bit-tech!
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Posted at 12:22 by Richard Swinburne with 6 comments
The rumour is that Nvidia really
really doesn't like Lucid's Hydra chip - you remember, it's load balancing chip which, when present on a motherboard, allows you to mix and match graphics cards in a multi-GPU system.
The reason is obvious: Lucid is making something that could clearly damage Nvidia's SLI business model, so it's within reason that it would be miffed and it's not unlike Nvidia to protect itself with software DriverIDs and whatnot as has been evident from the
recent kerfuffle over
Batman Arkham Asylum.
Of course there's more than one side to every story, and we've recently spent time trying to find out what's happening with the Hydra chip and whether there's any truth to the rumours that Nvidia is playing a part by causing a stir with motherboard manufacturers.
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Posted at 11:17 by Clive Webster with 29 comments
After years (well, one at least) of Nvidia saying that it doesn't see the need in DirectX 10.1 because developers aren't demanding it and it has some DX10.1 features in its GT200 design anyway, it's finally made a DX10.1 GPU. However, it isn't a huge high-performance part to rival the
HD 5870. It's a low-end part.
Nvidia has also trialled the 40nm fabrication process with this new GeForce GT 220 and GT 210 line-up.
The question is, do you care?
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Posted at 19:35 by Podcast with 10 comments
The sixth Hardware podcast sees Antony, Clive, Harry and Rich chat about all the latest hardware goings on. Discussed in the episode is Nvidia’s new GPU architecture,
Fermi. Yes, yes, Nvidia’s got a Fermi – stop sniggering at the back!
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Posted at 15:32 by Tim Smalley with 7 comments
Over the past six months or so, it has become increasingly difficult to get excited about the computer hardware industry. Regular bit-tech readers have probably noticed my own output has dropped a little.
I've been focusing on the bigger picture (which included a lot of strategic work and a bit-tech site design refresh), and also turned some of my attention to new projects within Dennis that I'll be working on while I continue my role as Editor of bit-tech.
The lack of excitement is, in many respects, down to the recession - companies have been pulling down the hatches and boarding up windows while they weather the storm. There's been nothing exciting to talk about and it has been difficult to get hugely enthusiastic about the industry's future when nobody has announced a major technology breakthrough.
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Posted at 10:08 by Richard Swinburne with 13 comments
If it ain't hundreds of frames per second, I don't want to know.
If I'm forced to use a CPU, it feeeeeeels painfully slow.
Everyday I get the train into London, and with the luxury of a 16GB iPod touch I usually watch an episode of something on the way in. The downside is that this usually requires transcoding video from a DVD or other source so that it works on the iPod.
Since my PC houses a still very capable GeForce 8800 Ultra, I decided it'd be worth having another look at Badaboom, the CUDA compatible GPGPU video transcoder.
It's come a long way since we first saw it and for the most part it works great - a 30 minute episode of animation or TV takes 3-5 minutes to do in the morning. By the time I'm out the shower it's ready to zip to the iPod and I'm out the door.
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Posted at 10:58 by Tim Smalley with 7 comments
One of the most interesting discussions we had last week was with silicon manufacturing firm Global Foundries, and it talked about its future following its separation from AMD.
Naturally, we talked about process technology and where the industry is heading, and bit-tech came away with a good idea of how Global Foundries hopes to succeed where AMD couldn’t, becoming a leader in silicon manufacturing technology.
Ever since AMD acquired ATI, the new combined company has talked at length about its plans to integrate the GPU onto the CPU die. This decision has been greeted with polarised reactions; Nvidia argues that the integrated GPUs will be ‘outdated’ while AMD and Intel, which later announced its intention to do the same, say it’s the natural progression of technology as CPUs becomes more parallel and GPUs become more general purpose.
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Posted at 10:32 by Richard Swinburne with 22 comments
Are Nvidia motherboard chipsets significant anymore? Do we need them? A simple pair of questions, but doubtless they'll receive a mixed response.
If we hark back to the days of VIA, innovating with its SDRAM Pentium 4 chipsets, while Intel was pushing expensive RDRAM chipsets, and then offering the highest performance DDR chipsets, it's clear that third party chipsets have played an important role in helping PC builders get the best deal and best performance. Nvidia itself made significant contributions - nForce 2 supplanted VIA's DDR2 chipsets, and then of course came the reintroduction of SLI, which owned the market for a while.
How things change. VIA gradually became reduced to mainstream, then niche chipsets for its own CPUs. Unfortunately for Nvidia, it is going in the same direction. The 9400M might be made sexy by the 'Ion' name, but it's a low end chipset and arguably has only a limited life until Intel Pineview launches and brings graphics all on-CPU.
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Posted at 11:43 by Alex Watson with 9 comments
Several strong candidates for being given the boot emerged from last week’s
blog post, some of which I whole-heartedly agree with and others which I found quite wide of the mark.
Before we decide who really should get the chop, we should bear in mind the words of Surallan: the team that makes the most money will win, the team that doesn’t will lose and on that team, one of you is going to get fired (cue pointing).
In other words, a CEO’s responsibility isn’t solely or directly to serve customers, make great products, be a cool guy or give good quotes to the press – he or she needs to deliver profit and growth to the company he or she leads, and to its shareholders (indeed, in the US, it’s a legal requirement for shareholder owned companies to maximise the profit they return to the shareholders). So, let's see who was put up for firing...
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Posted at 12:24 by Clive Webster with 37 comments
Most areas of our modern life seem easy to create jokes from – politics is an obvious choice, but you can probably think of quite a few jokes about pubs, traffic wardens, flying, pretty much everything. But it struck me last night that I haven’t heard a funny IT joke for ages. Or perhaps ever. The best I could up with was this:
Q: What’s Ali G’s favourite MP3 player?
A: An AiiiPod.
How lame is that?
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