Nvidia: GT-200 & plateforme for $45

At a meeting with analysts, Jen-Hsun Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, declared that We're going to open a can of whoop ass. This expression, well known by some players of FarCry, well represents the more than tense state of relations with Intel. Generally, this is a result of some particularly aggressive action or Powerpoint presentation by the other.

In this case, it would be Intel’s announcement at the IDF that current GPUs do not have a future (when compared to the Larabee) and that the majority of users will no longer have to buy an additional graphic card. This is based on Intel’s claim that its IGP performances will be multiplied by 10 from now until 2010 (or in other words, the equivalent of a 9500 GT).

Furthermore, according to some rumors we’ve heard, the two companies will not miss opportunities to complicate the other’s existence. You may remember the final Quad core 45nm which didn’t function with the nForce 680i, unlike the first samples, while on the other side there was Intel’s Skulltrail motherboard, the D5400XS, equipped with two Nvidia chipsets to for SLI support but limited to two card SLI when there are 4 available PCI-E ports.

Coming back to the meeting with financial analysts, Nvidia unveiled what it describes as the most affordable Vista Premium PC. At less than $45, the platform consists of a VIA Isaiah CPU and Nvidia IGP. It was stressed that the power of this solution attains 36 GFLOPS versus barely 6.4 GFLOPS for a Celeron-i945 combo. In addition, it there is DirectX 10 support while Intel’s solution is limited to DirectX 9.

However, the less optimistic amongst us will point out that unless CUDA is used to carry out certain types of calculations which we would rather give to workstations, it’s going to be difficult in practice to fully take advantage of the supplementary power offered by the "nVIAdia" solution. Playing in DirectX 10 with an IGP however good it may be and combined with a CPU whose FPU doesn’t make it stand out, isn’t the most realistic.

Concerning the APX 2500 which was already unveiled some time ago, the creator of the GeForce specified that its consumption was 50mW and confirmed the goal of 10 hours of autonomy with a single battery. The first devices which will integrate it will be GPS this year but they will also be destined for PDAs and will even have support for an HDMI 1.2 output.

Finally, Jeff Brown, a member of the corporate hierarchy, confirmed at a press conference in Munich the existence of a "GT-200" which integrates roughly 1 billion transistors. It will have 200 scalar processors versus 128 for the G92 and will arrive this summer. Many wished that the company with the green chameleon would have used some of the supplementary transistors to offer a memory controller wider than 256 bits.