|
|
 |
|
|
|
 Michael Hara, vice-president of Investor Relations, and Daniel Vivoli, senior vice-president of Marketing, gave some interesting information last week at the JP Morgan Technology Conference.
For the first time, a clear explanation was provided on G92 yields which were said to be lower than expected. According to M. Hara, it involves more of a problem related to an overly strict validation procedure than a production one. The transition to the G92b, which should be engraved in 55nm, will help to resolve these difficulties. Moreover, the G92’s product life has been prolonged for a period “from 6-8 to 12 months”. According to these Nvidia employees, everything that will be announced in the next 3-4 months will be more powerful. This should indeed be the case as there are few differences in terms of functions and the G92(b) can easily be placed in a lower position for some time while waiting for the arrival of a “tailored” mid-level card (if there is a need for one).
There is some optimism concerning the Tesla line which involves the calculation power market. However, the current market isn’t really the target. It’s true that decreasing the relative importance of the CPU will take some time but certain areas such as "personal" supercalculators for researchers look promising.
In terms of chipsets, the objective of a 25% market share (on the part where Nvidia can be present) on the Intel platform is still relevant. Nvidia will not attack the "ultra-low-end" segment where quality and brand name aren’t a factor which implies that costs are the most important when competing in this domain. It’s clear that they want to attain 15% to 20% of market shares on this platform. The upcoming arrival of the Nehalem and integration of the GPU to the CPU doesn’t scare Nvidia and Hybrid SLI can be a major advantage here.
As for the APX 2500, the first "design wins" will be concretized in the third or fourth quarter of this year with the arrival of personal navigation assistants equipped with them. For portable digital players, we will have to wait until the fourth quarter or even early 2009. M. Hara declared that no other company could have targeted these two markets as well as that of the smartphone with a single and same chip. Eventually, its price should be between $8 and $12. |
| |
|
 As the environment should now be a preoccupation for everyone and "Green" has become a non-negligible marketing argument, numerous manufacturers have adapted their communication to the subject and sometimes their products as well.
Gigabyte recently accused its rival ASUSTeK of almost exclusively being interested in the "com" aspect of the subject, of using components of dubious quality, not keeping its promises in this domain, and even offering a hardware EPU (Energy Processing Unit) which is only software. ASUSTek reacted by issuing a series of press releases. In the first, they stated that they reserved the right to bring about legal action against any individual, organization or company which started or propagated such rumors.
This has since quickly evolved because in a new press release ASUSTeK specifies that it has informed Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission and that it will sue Gigabyte for defamation. Without taking any position, we can only hope that if there is a trial, this will enable seeing a bit more clearly what is actually done by manufacturers to reduce energy consumption and the results attained in practice. |
| |
|
The Samsung Mobile Solution Forum was the occasion for the South Korean manufacturer to present an SSD with a capacity of 256 GB and with sequential reading/writing speeds of 200 and 160 MB /s, respectively.
 The company announced that this was accomplished using MLC chips and a controller which functions with proprietary technology. Of course, the interface is SATA-II type and the drive is in 2" ½ format. In terms of power consumption, it doesn’t surpass 0.9W in "active mode" which is indeed interesting for an SSD based on MLC. No price was given and the first samples for clients are planned for September while a 1.8" format version should be available in the fourth quarter. |
| |
|
 With the E7200 and Q9300, Intel offers more affordable 45nm Core 2 dual and quad cores. Do these processors live up to promises in terms of power consumption, performance, and overclocking?
> Product review: Core 2 Q9300 & E7200 |
| |
|
|
Copyright © 1997- Hardware.fr SARL. All rights reserved.
Read our privacy guidelines.
|
|
