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What to expect from NVIDIA's GTC conference

by Sylvie Barak on 30 September 2009, 13:26

Tags: NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qat7v

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Identity crisis?

"Nvidia's  management doesn't think it has an identity crisis," tech-spert Jim McGregor of In-Stat told HEXUS, adding "they are pretty clear on the company's direction - Discrete GPUs, GPGPU, and Tegra."

"I anticipate that Nvidia will make a big push on CUDA at this week's bash," added Nathan Brookwood of Insight 64 who also believes the firm will discuss the architecture of its new GPU, the GT300, and possibly show off its performance and announce availability.

"Maybe they'll unveil a strategy for maintaining their platform business once Intel rolls out its Pinetrail, Calpella and Ibex Peak platforms next year," Brookwood added.

"And Tesla - oy, will we hear about Tesla and Cuda and how it has or soon will save the world," chipped in Jon Peddie.

But as to how NVIDIA may address some of its upcoming road bumps, analysts seemed a little more uncertain.

"Don't expect to see an answer to the challenges that the company faces, just expect to see more about their products, strategy, and roadmaps," said McGregor, who noted there was no doubt NVIDIA's environment was becoming "challenging."

"But," continued McGregor,  "with the lack of information from Intel on Larrabee and the release of OpenCL and DirectCompute on Snow Leopard and Windows 7, respectively, things would seem to be on the more positive side for Nvidia." 

It's certainly true that the firm does appear to be gaining some traction with its Ion chipset and is also one of the few processor vendors really sinking its teeth into the smartphone/MID market with a host of OEM design wins for Tegra.

"I expect a lot of Tegra announcements and Zunes to be auctioned off or given out as door prizes," added Peddie with more than a whiff of cynicism.

"Nvidia has new competition from a refreshed ATI/AMD, soon from Intel, and the IGPO business is going away, so the company has to work harder than ever to be the super star it has been," he continued, adding that the "old Nvidia" was a tough act to follow.

Our appetite, however, has been whetted by what an NVIDIA bigwig had to say recently, commenting on the upcoming GT300 graphics processor as "more like a CPU than a GPU."

 



HEXUS Forums :: 5 Comments

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As an NVIDIA fanboy, I'm rediculously excited to see what insues. I'm almost just as excited about the GT300 series as I am about the Telsa conferences. Some pretty amazing technologies coming out of NVIDIA these days? Identity crisis? No, just expansion of a high successful GFX company into markets that are untapped by high performance graphics.:rockon2: Rock on nVidia. Rock on.
I sincerely hope they have the hardware to back up these “promises”.

From what i've seen so far. GT300 is too little, too late and too hot.

They need to sort their **** out and now. Their recent acts have been VERY poor.

Rebrands, the laptop fiasco, pulling physx from any system with an ATI card, the pathetic 40nm introduction.

Tegra is promising and will take off in the mobile phone world. But tanking your GPU world ? Come on NV we know you can do better than this. Pull your bloody finger out and fast. Cos as of now. ATI is winning. Oh and if you want a laptop? I wouldnt buy any with NV chips in them till they properly fix it and bring out a new generation unless you like buying a new laptop every year.
I watched the webcast of the keynote last night (:geek:). Some very interesting stuff on show, particularly in terms of the flash acceleration, but very little to get me excited in terms of gaming. Holding aloft the next gen card seemed nothing more than a gimmic. If they can't even get a working prototype on display today, what chance have they of getting any products to market before Christmas?
Answer : They cant.

Jensen just had this to say live at the NVIDIA GPU Conference in regards to the next-gen GPU: “You will have to wait just a little longer.” From that we went to talking about GPUs decoding HD Flash video.

And as HardOCP states.
If you are waiting for NVIDIA to jump out of the GPU closet with a 5800 killer and put the fear into you for making a 5800 series purchase for Halloween, we suggest paper dragons are not that scary. We feel as though it will be mid-to-late Q1’10 before we see anything pop out of NVIDIA’s sleeve besides its arm. We are seeing rumors of a Q4’09 soft launch of next-gen parts, but no hardware till next year and NVIDIA has given us no reason to believe otherwise.

I agree with them. NV has missteped and without working silicon its going to leave ATI with at least a quarter to hammer them hard.
We are sitting down at the NVIDIA GPU Conference in San Jose, California (Live Webcast is linked on this page.) listening to Senior Vice President Dan Vivoli talk about how far reaching the word of GPU computing is going to be in the future. But I can't help but wonder about issues that are a bit more evident to the hardware enthusiast and gamer. Where is NVIDIA's next generation technology for the gamer? What is NVIDIA's answer to ATI Eyefinity technology? Why does NVIDIA detect AMD GPUs in Batman: AA and turn off AntiAliasing? Why do new NVIDIA drivers punish AMD GPU owners who want to leverage an NVIDIA card to compute PhysX? Hmmm.

Most interesting is that NVIDIA is showing off some demos with incredible fidelity, namely a Bugatti Veyron, that cannot be distinguished from an actual photograph. Sadly though, it does take about 18 seconds to render a single frame using ray tracing, and most disappointing is that this is being demonstrated on the currently available retail GPUs. No next generation is being shown off at NVIDIA's biggest event of the year. That said, the tech used to render the car is incredibly impressive and we remember that not very long ago it would take a bank of computers hours to do this.

Jensen Huang does make some incredibly efficient points about parallel computation possibly using a GPU as a co-processor though. There is no doubt in my mind that GPUs will find a huge place in our economy as a needed component, but all this makes me think that NVIDIA is on the way out as a gaming company and on the way in as a “CPU” company.

Kyle posts some very interesting points. I'd like those answers too.

Where is NVIDIA's next generation technology for the gamer? What is NVIDIA's answer to ATI Eyefinity technology? Why does NVIDIA detect AMD GPUs in Batman: AA and turn off AntiAliasing? Why do new NVIDIA drivers punish AMD GPU owners who want to leverage an NVIDIA card to compute PhysX?

Doing those things are not the sign of a company that is being responsible. Just like the burying of the laptop GPU issues. Rebranding of old as new.

With the rest of the stuff from the conferance it does look like they are no longer taking the gaming scene as a priority. Diversifing into other areas due to loss of their chipset business at the expense of other key area's.