NVIDIA's Bumpy Ride: A Q4 2009 Update
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 14, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Chipsets: One Day You're In and the Next, You're Out
Presently, NVIDIA’s chipset business is far from dead. They are in nearly every single Apple computer on the market, not to mention countless other OEMs. I’m not sure how much money NVIDIA is making from these chipsets, but they are selling.
NVIDIA won Apple's chipset business, Intel was not happy
Long term I don’t see much of a future for NVIDIA’s chipset business. NVIDIA said that they have no interest in pursuing an LGA-1156 chipset given Intel’s legal threats. Even if NVIDIA had a license to produce DMI chipsets, I’m not sure it makes sense.
NVIDIA's Advantage: A single chip GeForce 9400M instead of a dated Intel solution
Once the ‘dales hit, every single mainstream CPU from Intel is going to come with graphics on-package. Go out one more generation and Sandy Bridge brings the graphics on-die. AMD is doing the same thing starting in 2012.
It’s taken longer than expected, but there’s honestly no need for a third party chipset maker anymore. Most of the performance differentiation in chipsets has been moved onto the CPU die anyway, all that’s left are SATA, USB, and a bunch of validation that no one likes doing. NVIDIA is much better off building a discrete GeForce 9400M GPU at low cost and selling that. There’s much less headache involved with selling discrete GPUs than selling chipsets, plus graphics is NVIDIA’s only value add when it comes to chipsets - everyone knows how to integrate a USB controller by now. I’d say the same about SATA but AMD still has some AHCI silliness that it needs to sort out.
NVIDIA committed to supporting existing products in the channel and continues to poke fun at AMD with lines like this:
“On AMD platforms, we continue to sell a higher quantity of chipsets than AMD itself. MCP61-based platforms continue to be extremely well positioned in the entry CPU segments where AMD CPUs are most competitive vs. Intel”
As successful as NVIDIA’s AMD chipsets are today, AMD is telling us that nearly all OEM designs going forward use AMD chipsets. Again, NVIDIA’s chipset business is quite healthy today, but I don’t see much of a future in it - not that it’s a bad thing.
The only reason NVIDIA’s chipset business has lasted this long is because AMD and Intel couldn’t get their houses in order quickly enough. AMD is finally there and Intel is getting there, although it remains to be seen how well the next-generation of Atom platforms will work in practice.
A pair of Ion motherboards we reviewed
The main reason Ion got traction in the press was because it could play Blu-ray content. If Intel had done the right thing from the start and paired Atom with a decent chipset, NVIDIA would never have had the niche for Ion to fit into.
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neomatrix724 - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
Were you looking at the same cards as everyone else? AMD has always aimed for the best price for performance. nVidia has always won hands down on performance...but these came at the expense of costlier cards.AMD hit one out of the park with their new cards. OpenCL, Eyefinity and a strong improvement over previous cards is a very strong feature set. I'm not sure about Fermi and I'm curious to see where nVidia is going with it...but their moves have been confusing me lately.
shin0bi272 - Thursday, October 15, 2009 - link
actually nvidia hasnt always won. Their entire first 2 generations of dx9 cards were slower than ATi's because nvidia boycotted the meetings on the specs for dx9 and they made a card based on the beefier specs that they wanted and that card (the 5800) turned out to be 20% slower than the ati 9700pro. This trend sort of continued for a couple of years but nvidia got closer with the 5900 and eeked out a win with the 6800 a little later. Keep in mind I havent owned an ATi card for gaming since the 9700pro (and that was a gift). So I am no way an ATi fan but facts are facts. Nvidia has made great cards but not always the fastest.Griswold - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
That didnt make alot of sense...vlado08 - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
I am wondering about wddm 2.0 and multitasking on GPU are they coming soon. May be Fermi is better prepared for it?Scali - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
WDDM 2.0 is not part of Windows 7, so we'll need to wait for at least another Windows generation before that becomes available. By then Fermi is most probably replaced by a newer generation of GPUs anyway.Multitasking on the GPU is possible for the first time on Fermi, as it can run multiple GPGPU kernels concurrently (I believe up to 16 different kernels).
vlado08 - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
You are right about that we are going to wait but what about Microsoft and what about Nvidia they should be working on it. Probably Nvidia don't want to be late again. May be they want to be first this time seeing where the things are going. If their hardware is more prepared for wddm 2.0 today, then they will have more time to gain experience and to polish their drivers. Ati(AMD) have a hard only launch of the DirectX11. They are missing the "soft" part of it - (drivers not ready). ATI needs to win they have to make DX11 working and they are puting alot of efort in it so Nvidia is skipping DX11 battle and starting to get ready for the next one. Every thing is getting more complex and needs more time to mature. We are also getting more demanding and less forgiving. So for the next Windows to be ready after 2 or 3 years they need to start now. At least planning.Mills - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
Couldn't these 'extra transistors' be utilized in games as well, similar to how NVIDIA handled PhysX? In other words, incorporate NVIDIA-specific game enhancements that utilize these functions in NVIDIA sponsored titles?Is it too late to do this? Perhaps they will just extend the PhysX API.
Though, PhysX has been out for quite some time and there are only 13(?) PhysX supported titles. NVIDIA better pick up its game here if they plan to leverage PhysX to out-value ATI. Does anyone know if there are any big name titles that have announced PhysX support?
Griswold - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
Physx is a sinking ship, didnt you get the memo?shin0bi272 - Thursday, October 15, 2009 - link
nvidia says that the switching between gpu and cuda is going to be 10x faster in fermi meaning that physx performance will more than double.Scali - Thursday, October 15, 2009 - link
Yup, and that's a hardware feature, which applies equally to any language, be it C/C++ for Cuda, OpenCL or DirectCompute.So not only PhysX will benefit, but also Bullet or Havok, or whatever other GPU-accelerated physics library might surface.