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At CES, Intel felt an obligation to respond to AMD's 4x4 offer which consist in a dual socket Opteron renamed Athlon 64 FX, and 2 dual core processors. The Santa Clara giant made the demonstration of a computer featuring 8 cores, the Intel V8.
 In fact this configuration isn't really exceptional as it is only a platform based on two quad core Xeon E5300 and a motherboard based on Intel 5000X chipset. This trio has already been available for almost two months. The platform isn't really intended to be a high end game station as the 5000X only supports one PCI Express x16 slot. It has however other advantages such as the support of quad channel FB-DIMM DDR2-667. This hasn't, however, prevented Intel from being proud to announce the CPU score of 6089 with 3DMark06 which is much higher than the 4000 of the QX6700. Now, the thing is that we don't play with 3DMark06 and while waiting for games using 8 cores we would already be very happy to see some capable of using 4 cores or even two. We have to hope that this computer will remain a concept: AMD's initiative with the 4x4 was already questionable but If Intel starts answering…we don't know how it will end! |
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 Even if the lack of official drivers for Windows Vista is bothering some of the users, NVIDIA intends to use the release of the new Microsoft OS to communicate about the Preface Personal Media Display platform. This is in fact a set of components (secondary processor couple to a display sub-system) developed by PortalPlayer before being bought by NVIDIA that can be implemented in a computer or an external peripheral communicating with the computer via Infrared or Bluetooth.
Concretely, the result is a presence of a small LCD monitor on the device and command controls that make it possible to select the services available such as slide shows, battery level, emails, RSS flows… even when the computer is in stand by. NVIDIA's components are using a new functionality of Windows Vista designed for this type of use and named Windows SideShow.
NVIDIA started working in this domain a long time ago and intends to continue this diversification while reinforcing its credibility as an actor for mobile platform. The company is also working on increasing its presence with chipsets for notebook like the nForce Go 430 MCP or display circuits for mobile phones such as the GoForce; and the least we can say is that thee manufacturer seems to be ready as the "Best of Innovations" price obtained by the Personal Media Display at CES shows.
More prosaically, we believe that it will be with the availability of product featuring this interface that NVIDIA will really be able to make a break through. The company has already announced, in partnership with LG Electronics, the release of the laptop computer Z1 with a secondary LCD monitor in the back of the main one. About remote controls for Windows Media Center, several products will be released by Interlink Electronics, SMK and TopSeed Technology.
Finally, other projects (see below) are currently under development. There will be several game peripherals, integrations in backpacks or even clothes… but NVIDIA still has to find and motivate partners before facing the public… |
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