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While according to the latest news Nvidia will obtain a license for the QPI bus (enabling it to offer chipsets for the Nehalem), it seems that the firm with the green chameleon intends on cashing in on SLI support on one of Intel’s flagship platforms, as was the case with the Skulltrail.
 Given that the Intel X58 should be ready at the end of the year for the launch of its new architecture and that Nvidia has nothing to rival it before some time, the latter will offer the nForce 200 (aka BR04) for roughly $30 to motherboard manufacturers which can then add the SLI logo. This solution is doubly inelegant because not only will the chip be expensive but also it will have to be integrated on the PCB requiring the design of a new layout. With profits and the same percentage of taxes added on, the difference on the final price should be high. In addition, as compatibility was far from being optimal with the Skulltrail, we may wonder what it will be this time. At a time when ATI is making a comeback and a CrossFire Radeon HD 4800 offers a more than competitive performance/price ratio compared to the GeForce GTX 200, the creator of the GeForce probably would have more to gain by opening up SLI (maybe for a small licensing fee) rather than trying to sell off bridges in the name of increased SLI support. |
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 Yesterday, Rambus, a company specialized in technologies used by the latest generation of memory as well as its intensive "legal activities", announced that it would take Nvidia to court for the violation of 17 of its patents.
These involve SDR, DDR, DDR2, DDR3, GDDR and GDDR3-SDRam memory controllers and it concerns chipsets, GPU as well as media communication processors, multimedia applications processors and other products from at least six NVIDIA product lines. In short, this means almost all of Nvidia’s products except software. In addition, the plaintiff is seeking an injunction that will forbid the sale of concerned products as long as the case is unsettled.
Tom Lavelle, Senior Vice-President of the company, says that they tried to find a friendly solution with Nvidia for six years which only led to unsatisfactory results. While it seems that it’s been possible at times to find an agreement with Rambus (for example, AMD signed one with the firm in early 2005), we should keep in mind that the former Intel partner is under investigation by the European Commission for abuse of dominant position involving "patent ambush". Evidently, the Commission isn’t any more pleased with this company than certain manufacturers that have to pay significant royalties… |
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ITOCP was able to take a few photos of the Phenom 45nm Deneb in standby and in action. It will be part of the second generation of the "Stars" family of processors and will succeed the Barcelona. This Deneb is not a simple "die shrink" as it will have an L3 cache as high as 6 MB while L2 is fixed at 512 KB per core.
 Given that the multiplier of this "Engineering Sample" CPU was unblocked, it was able to go as high as 3441.3 MHz, which enabled it to obtain a score of 20.515 seconds in Super PI.  You may recall, AMD should launch at least two Phenom X4 45nm Denebs fitting into the socket AM2+ at the end of the year. While frequencies remain unknown, we can now hope that these processors will slightly reinforce the attractiveness of solutions from the Sunnyvale company. However, we will just have to see if these will actually be competitive compared to what Intel will have at the time... |
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 We’ve known for some time now that Intel will launch the Bloomfield, a high end version of its Nehalem architecture, in the fourth quarter of 2008. You may recall, 3 models are planned:
- 3.20 GHz, 4 cores, 8 MB of cache, 3x DDR3-1333
- 2.93 GHz, 4 cores, 8 MB of cache, 3x DDR3-1066
- 2.66 GHz, 4 cores, 8 MB of cache, 3x DDR3-1066
These processors are destined for the Socket LGA1366 and will be accompanied by the X58 chipset that has support for 32 PCI-E lanes (for 2 ports in x16 or 4 in x8). They are meant to replace the QX9770, Q9650 and Q9550, respectively, and we hope that prices will remain relatively affordable like those of its predecessors.
So what about more widespread integration of the Nehalem architecture in Intel products? This will be done via other processors, the Lynnfield and Havendale, which unfortunately will be based on a different platform and Socket.
The Lynnfield is actually a quad core version while the Havendale is a dual core. Compared to the Bloomfield, in both cases there are two instead of three DDR3 channels and while the cache of the Lynnfield is still 8 MB that of the dual core version is at 4 MB. PCI-Express will be directly controlled by the chips with 16 PCI-E lanes for the Havendale, functioning in 2x8 or 1x16, and 16 lanes are attributed to a single port on the Lynnfield. Moreover, the latter processor, will have an integrated graphic component.
This move of functions from the chipset to the processor means that the accompanying Ibex Peak chipset will only be comprised of a single chip compared to the previous two for Intel. Finally, the Lynnfield, Havendale and Ibex Peak are planned for the third quarter of 2009 and they will cover a rather broad segment which is currently occupied by CPUs ranging from E5xxx’s to the Q9650.
Even if the Bloomfield will not be available in an « Extreme » version, we can only be disappointed by the relatively late widespread integration of Nehalem architecture in Intel products. The lack of serious competition is certainly not unrelated. |
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