NVIDIA Responds To Intel Suit 215
MojoKid writes "NVIDIA and Intel have always had an interesting relationship, consisting of a dash of mutual respect and a whole lot of under-the-collar disdain. And with situations such as these, it's easy to understand why.
NVIDIA today has come forward with a response to a recent Intel court filing in which Intel alleges that the 'four-year-old chipset license agreement the companies signed does not extend to Intel's future generation CPUs with "integrated" memory controllers, such as Nehalem. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, had this to say about the whole ordeal: 'We are confident that our license, as negotiated, applies. At the heart of this issue is that the CPU has run its course and the soul of the PC is shifting quickly to the GPU. This is clearly an attempt to stifle innovation to protect a decaying CPU business.'"
Decaying CPU business? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Decaying CPU business? (Score:5, Interesting)
WTF? Does Intel sell more CPUs than NVIDIA sells GPUs?
Doesn't Intel sell more GPUs (admittedly crappy integrated ones) than Nvidia does?
I think they mean "decaying" margins (Score:5, Interesting)
By locking all competitors out of the chipset business, a company can boost margins (and thus boost profit), as opposed to living with decaying margins and lower profitability due to commoditization.
As standalone CPUs get commoditized, the margins and profitability decay.
Also if you sell crappy integrated GPUs, you can protect the GPUs from competition and the CPUs from commoditization by bundling them and locking out competitors.
Intel didn't get to where they are today by not knowing how to play the game. They wouldn't be walking away from their standalone CPU business and move to integrated CPU/GPU if they didn't think their old standalone CPU business would suffer from decaying margins. As they move into this space, it also only makes sense to try to put up barriers to your competitors who might be trying to screw up your future business strategy. Remember how Intel made AMD go try and execute "SlotA" when before they made pin-compatible chips. This is seems like a very similar strategy to try to kick Nvidia out of the Intel eco-system.
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They wouldn't be walking away from their standalone CPU business and move to integrated CPU/GPU if they didn't think their old standalone CPU business would suffer from decaying margins.
You seem to be asserting that they would only change business plans if the current plans are losing ground. This is not true. Companies are always looking for ways to make more money and could simply look for something with more potential even if their current approach is still going strong.
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If you are talking about self flanking, your analysis is incomplete.
In this case, a company doesn't shift because of "ways to make more money". They shift because if they don't do it, some other company will adopt that business practice, and virtually kill their current business model. Sometimes this shift even carries a lower profit margin. See more on Gillette vs. Bic, regarding the shaving business.
This is a classic example of an important marketing strategy, well illustrated on several book (including t
The other way around too (Score:5, Interesting)
While Intel is trying to lock nVidia and ATI/AMD out of the chipset business by bundling the CPU and the chipset and bridging them with an interconnect - QuickPath - which they won't license to nVidia,
nVidia on their hand has tried to do exactly the same, locking Intel and ATI/AMD out of the chipset business by bundling them with the GPU and bridging them with a technology that they won't sub-license either : nVidia's SLI.
nVidia has tried to be the only chipset in town able to do SLI.
Intel is currently trying to be the only chipset in town usable with Core 7i.
Meanwhile, I'm quite happy with ATI/AMD which use an open standard* which doesn't require licensing between the CPU and the chipset (HyperTransport) and another industry standard for multiple GPU requiring no special licensing (plain PCIe).
Thus any component on a Athlon/Phenom + 7x0 chipset + Radeon HD stack could be replaced with any other compatible component (although currently there aren't that many HT-powered CPU to pick from).
*: The plain simple normal HypterTransport is open. AMD has made proprietary extension for cache coherency in multi-socketed servers. But regular CPUs should work with plain HyperTransport too.
Re:The other way around too (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Decaying CPU business? (Score:5, Insightful)
Define sell. If you mean bundle for virtually free with CPU's (or in some cases cheaper than just a CPU, go Monopoly) then yes they do.
If you mean as an actual product someone would intentionally seek out then Intel sells 0 GPUs.
In fact they count sales of chipsets with integrated graphics as a graphics sale for market share even if that computer also has a discrete graphics card. So if you buy something with an NVIDIA or ATI card and a 945G chipset that counts as graphics sale for Intel even though the graphics chip is never used.
Their integrated graphics actually benchmarks slower than Microsoft's Software DirectX10 implementation (running on a Core i7). If people were more aware of just how poorly Intel integrated chips were they'd probably sell even less.
Sadly, most people aren't aware of the vast difference in performance, and just assume their computer is slow when Aero, The Sims, Spore or Google Earth run poorly.
Until Intel ships Larrabee we won't really know if they can ship a GPU, and that looks to be still over a year away.
Re:Decaying CPU business? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everybody particularly cares about 3D graphics performance. If you ask the common joe, they probably care more about video performance than 3D performance, as people typically watch videos on their PCs more often than play 3D games.
With that being said, Intel Integrated Graphics tend to do quite well with video, especially HD Video, rendering.
Somebody that cares about 3D graphics performance, because they want to play the latest and greatest games, is going to buy discrete graphics regardless, doesn't matter if the integrated graphics is made by nVidia, ATI, etc.
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Not everybody particularly cares about 3D graphics performance. If you ask the common joe, they probably care more about video performance than 3D performance, as people typically watch videos on their PCs more often than play 3D games.
Yea, and then ask more clued up friends why a game they just got runs like crap. Just because they don't care does not mean they don't use it.
By the way, both desktop machines at my place have unused integrated gfx.
Re:Decaying CPU business? (Score:5, Informative)
Yea, and then ask more clued up friends why a game they just got runs like crap. Just because they don't care does not mean they don't use it.
That's exactly what I was getting at. I have friends who aren't die hard gamers who have no idea what a GPU is. But they still like to play games occasionally.
They go out and buy games like The Sims 2, Spore, or even World of Warcraft (yeah casual people play this) and get frustrated that it runs so poorly.
I hate to tell them that because they have a low end Intel integrated chip they're just screwed (especially friends with laptops where an upgrade is unheard of). Heck even the lowest end NVIDIA or ATI INTEGRATED chip is over 10 times faster than Intel, and honestly costs only a couple $ more.
Sure the NVIDIA/ATI integrated GPUs aren't top of the line, but at least with those the game is playable. I know someone who was trying to play some games on their Intel chipset and textures and some other affects are just missing.
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At least the "Intel Integrated" desktop PCs normally CAN be upgraded with a dedicated graphics card.
You should see Via's approach: "What graphics slot?"
A PCI nVidia 5600 was actually an upgrade...
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No joke: aside from the more advanced support for DirectX and the like, an old Fujitsu laptop I've got with an ATI Radeon chipset has better performance with Compiz than an MSI Wind PC with i9x0 graphics (Atom). The old Fujitsu clocks at 500MHz; it's a Celeron.
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What's really going on here is that in the future (after Core i7) "GPUs" are being viewed as the next big thing.
Believe it or not, the talks I'm hearing are that "GPUs" are going to be everywhere soon, Intel knows this, and who makes the best GPU? Not Intel.
Re:Decaying CPU business? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not just about games, there are business uses for GPU acceleration. Presentation software could use the GPU to be more dynamic, and render complicated graphs more smoothly. Some complicated PowerPoint presentations get slow, why not use a GPU to accelerate this?
Perhaps Excel or Matlab could use a GPU to crunch numbers to speed up calculations. Or even use the GPU to make the charts more interactive.
Perhaps MS has some overhaul to their display system which would allow it to use the GPU to render Word documents with better anti-aliasing and allow large documents to scroll faster. Adobe Acrobat actually supports some GPU acceleration (not on be default I think) which makes PDFs render faster. I know turning on PDF acceleration actually makes me more productive since I can read documents without having to wait for redraw.
Maybe we can do GPU accelerated vector graphics, for web site and UI rendering. Who knows what could be done to improve the business experience if the option is there.
NVIDIA expects to change the way people USE the GPU so it's NOT just for rendering 3D pictures anymore.
Some improvements to business experience might be small, but still give a small boost in productivity.
All that said, there will always be people who just use a very basic word processor. But these people also don't need Intel's next Core i7 quad mega CPU either. They'll be fine with their P2 running Window 95 if the hardware didn't eventually break down.
The whole point is that NVIDIA wants to innovate on the GPU so that business, and people can use it in new ways to do stuff they couldn't before. Intel wants to do the same, but require you to buy a bigger CPU. Instead you could get a cheap integrated GPU and CPU combo, and get the same productivity boost you were getting by buying just a bigger CPU before.
CAD needs a good video card also people who do dua (Score:2)
CAD needs a good video card also people who do dual display use needs a little better then on board gma. Low end amd and nvidia chips can do dual dvi out and the amd boards can have 64-128 side port ram. Do you really want to use 128-512 system ram on dual display with on board video and windows vista areo?
Intel should add 64-128 side port ram to intel gma.
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Most CAD users aren't just going to be buying a discrete card, they'll be buying a Quattro or FireGL card for $500+, possibly $1000+.
Re:Decaying CPU business? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's more to GPU acceleration than gaming.
What does your wife do? Does she just send e-mail? Then beyond some UI improvements there's not much for her (but those UI improvements could be cool).
Does she encode music or video's for an iPod? That can be enhanced with the GPU. You can encode movies in faster than realtime on current GPUs. Something you can't do with current CPUs.
Does she watch YouTube? I saw a demo of a program that runs some fancy filters using the GPU on low quality YouTube like video, and spits out something that looks pretty good. It was something that couldn't be done in real time on a CPU but a mid to low range GPU could do.
Does she do graphic design? Features like the new Photoshop allow the program to be much more responsive when editing images, large filters also complete in fractions of a second.
In the simplest cases a better GPU might increase UI responsiveness, and make the experience "smoother". But long term changes will likely change WHAT you do with the GPU.
NVIDIA at least is trying to change it so GPU acceleration isn't just about gaming. They want the GPU to be a massively parallel processor that your desktop uses when it needs more processing power.
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NVIDIA at least is trying to change it so GPU acceleration isn't just about gaming. They want the GPU to be a massively parallel processor that your desktop uses when it needs more processing power.
I have a feeling that intel has it right, and the CPU is here to stay and the GPU is going away. CPUs have already been augmented with multimedia functions before, it will happen again.
In the mean time, we'll have entertaining arguments like this one to rehash.
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Absolutely. What nVidia is missing is that developers don't want their model. Oh, they'll use it if that's how they get access to the GPU hardware, I'm not saying they won't. But if you compare what developers have said about the Xbox 360 and the PS3 it's clear that they favor ease of development over theoretical performance improvements hardly ever realized due to increased complexity.
It would be interesting if someone would develop a processor architecture that would allow neighboring cores to borrow each
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I think you're going to need to qualify this, because the second quoted sentence (fragment) is not true.
totally predictable (Score:2)
Many of us saw this coming over 5+ years ago. CPUs get more parallel due to technical and cost reasons while GPUs become more flexible to the point where they are programmable. The CELL processor design was the first big leap in this convergence that is now clearly happening (like anything that far ahead of the curve, its different and not anywhere near as successful as the designers hoped.)
Its totally expected that intel will have so many processor cores that they will start to tackle GPU sized problems;
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True that people aren't looking for to play Crysis, but simple programs like Spore, and even Google Earth benefit from going to an NVIDIA or ATI integrated GPU. There's a visual quality upgrade on even these "casual" games as the Intel chips do such a poor job.
Also both the ATI and NVIDIA integrated chipsets do a better job of decoding HD video with less CPU usage. (Check out reviews of the ATI 790G and NVIDIA 9400M chipsets if you don't believe me.)
Plus with OpenCL we might start to see more regular applic
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The 9400 and 9300 are pretty much the same but I think the 9300 has 16 shader cores, and the 9400 has 32. I'm not sure if that affects HD decode much. It does make a decent amount of difference for gaming, and CUDA apps I think.
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I would say that at least an order of magnitude greater of computers just run email, browsers, spreadsheets and word processors, that's Intel's market.
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Intel graphics are crap at basic 2D desktop manipulation, as well. 7-year-old Nvidia cards outperform the latest, greatest from Intel without breaking a sweat. Same for integrated ATI stuff from the same era (or earlier - ATI Radeon smokes i9x0 in a significantly older laptop, both 2d and with compiz). It's like the difference between a Matrox G200 and anything else from that era.
And that doesn't even consider the fact that Vista, by default, needs 3D acceleration AND a fast CPU to work well. This isn't suc
Re:Decaying CPU business? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is not about bundling. It is about the fact that the vast majority of PC sales are to business customers who want to put desktops under the desks of their employees and don't give a damn about the GPU performance. To those customers, spending the premium for an nVidia GPU is absurd. Hence, they buy inexpensive machines that have GPU's which suck at rendering 3D but are fully functional when it comes to running Office or Email applications. This, btw, is in my opinion the real reason AMD bought ATI. AMD wanted to work toward having a solution for that high volume market, and seemed to think they needed to own ATI to do it.
Many of the people who put together high end machines for gaming and/or other 3D application purposes---the people that buy and value what nVidia has to offer---frequently forget that type of machines they love are a very tiny percentage of the desktop market...
Decaying Matrox business? (Score:3, Interesting)
"This, btw, is in my opinion the real reason AMD bought ATI. AMD wanted to work toward having a solution for that high volume market, and seemed to think they needed to own ATI to do it."
I think you're partially right. If they indeed wanted entry into the business graphics market. Matrox would have been a better purchase. But ATI makes better GPUs and they wanted entry there as well. It's easier to scale down a high-end GPU than it is to raise up a low-end GPU.
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If all AMD wanted was the low end business market they could have passed on ATI, and just licensed a cheapo core from someone like SiS, or they could have even acquired S3.
They probably wanted some of the chipset design expertise of the ATI side to create a "Centrino" like platform. That and they thought that the CPU will want to incorporate some of the parallel features of the GPU (Google their Fusion CPU project).
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They most certainly wanted more than just the 2D chipset. If they'd wanted the 2D chipset, they'd have been very well off to have just picked up the Matrox company for a fraction of the price; Matrox always had very fast, well-made 2D cards (and drivers), and their early 3D stuff wasn't half bad. They were also the best cards for Linux for a long time - and may even still be ,for that matter (but I haven't seen any of their stuff in so long I wouldn't know).
AMD could probably have cornered the "hobbyist Lin
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Almost, but I think the real issue is that even traditional business desktops are beginning to need 3D, just for window compositing and "downloading..." animations. With Vista rating the entire computer based on the lowest score of a number of tests, and one of those tests being 3D performance, Intel were forced to up their
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Re:Decaying CPU business? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you mean as an actual product someone would intentionally seek out then Intel sells 0 GPUs.
I actively seek out Intel graphics when looking at laptops due to the lower power requirements and better driver support (I hate it when NVIDIA and ATI drivers don't install in Windows as I have to contact the OEM for an older version, and I've always had more issues with the same brands on Linux). I know the performance is abysmal in comparison, but I don't care. You don't want Intel graphics, that's fine and I understand why, but that doesn't mean no-one intentionally seeks them out.
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NVIDIA has their laptop drivers on their website so you no longer have to get outdated ones from your OEM. (Took them long enough.)
As for battery life, have you checked out NVIDIA integrated vs Intel integrated? The discrete systems do suck more power, but I think the integrated chips for NVIDIA/ATI are still better and don't consume more power than Intel integrated.
Apple is picky about battery life, and they recently switched to all NVIDIA on their laptop line, including the Macbook Air.
Don't just assume t
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NVIDIA has their laptop drivers on their website so you no longer have to get outdated ones from your OEM. (Took them long enough.)
Only for some models. My old 6600 Go (a very powerful laptop chip for its time) is still unsupported.
As for battery life, have you checked out NVIDIA integrated vs Intel integrated? The discrete systems do suck more power, but I think the integrated chips for NVIDIA/ATI are still better and don't consume more power than Intel integrated.
I have, and they aren't particularly appealing. Their performance isn't sufficiently better such that I can perform tasks that I otherwise wouldn't be able to, so the gains are effectively worthless to me. The driver support isn't fixed switching to NVIDIA/ATI integrated either (and is sometimes worse). Battery life is probably comparable, but it would need to be clearly superior for me to consider them.
Don't just assume that because it's NVIDIA it's a power hungry monster. Sure the high end graphics cards need their own power substation, but they can do some nice low power stuff when they need to (9400M, Tegra).
I do
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Only for some models. My old 6600 Go (a very powerful laptop chip for its time) is still unsupported.
That's annoying. I guess it looks like it's mostly just newer stuff up on there so far, and even not all their shipping products are supported.
I'll have the keep that in mind next time I go laptop shopping.
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NVIDIA has their laptop drivers on their website so you no longer have to get outdated ones from your OEM. (Took them long enough.)
This seems like a good time to mention that Mobile Quadro owners can now install the desktop Quadro driver if they feel a need to get that recent. Microsoft seems to have kicked out a pretty recent driver in *Update which appears to be performing so I'm leaving it alone for now. HP last updated my last laptop's Quadro driver softpaq at least a year ago, maybe two...
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Definately! If you don't think Nvidia can produce low-power GPUs, look at their supposedly-upcoming Tegra ARM-based SoC: it's power use is a pittance.
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Since I don't run Aero, The Sims, Spore and only occasionally play with Google Earth, I don't really care for 3D performance.
On the other hand, since I only run Windows under VirtualBox (and don't play games under it - BTW, since when /. became a gamer site?), I do care about compatibility and Intel has given me, for the last couple years, the least headaches when it comes to 3D acceleration under Linux. While I would have to think hard and test a lot before buying a new computer with ATI or Nvidia graphics
Intel GPUs are great (Score:2)
In my new laptop I've got an ATI card, which I regret... I have nothing but problems with it... And there is NO open drivers for it... Which is in fact the only reason I went ATI and not nVidia or Intel.
And unless ATI starts actually delivering drivers for their mobile hd series then I'll be looking for intel for my next laptop, that's for sure...
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"If you mean as an actual product someone would intentionally seek out then Intel sells 0 GPUs."
False.
They have very good support for linux, to the extent that unless dual-boot and 3d games are your thing, they are pretty much the best option. Until AMD/ATI start making progress that is.
Also for business use they are cheap, reliable and a lot less power-hungry than the other two big players. For business desktop/workstation they make a lot of sense.
So? (Score:2)
1. NVidia sells integrated GPUs too, and they too count crappy integrated GPUs as GPUs sold. And yes, even if you later go and buy an ATI 4870, Nvidia still counts it as a GPU sold.
So it seems to me like the GPs basic point still stands: Intel sells more GPUs than Nvidia. By a metric Nvidia too uses when they willy-wave about their market share being larger than ATI's.
2. You seem to assume that it's some inescapable misfortune for the users, or that that's somehow not included in the choice to buy this comp
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To be honest, in many cases I'd actually pick the intel integrated GPU over say the Nvidia 8400.
Because in recent times, Nvidia has had a higher than normal failure rate with a whole bunch of their GPUs.
While the Intel GPUs are crap in performance terms, and have 3D rendering bugs, they appear to be very reliable in hardware terms.
Whereas I've had Nvidia GPUs dying on me personally (not just reports from other people).
Thus if you don't g
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I've deliberately bought several Intel integrated-graphics motherboards; they display an 80x25 text mode fine as you install Debian, and my compute servers only have a monitor attached when they're failing to boot.
I wish Intel didn't oblige you to buy a super-SLI-gamer motherboard just to run a Core i7 CPU; I bought the chip for the main-memory bandwidth.
Re:Decaying CPU business? (Score:5, Informative)
If you're looking for accelerated MPEG4 and HD video playback you won't find that on the Intel board. While they support XvMC fairly well that only does MPEG2.
Last month they released some drivers for the VA-API but that's in their closed source binary blob driver which works very poorly on Linux.
NVIDIA has VDPAU support which will already allow you to play back HD streams without having to fork over for a more expensive, and hotter running CPU.
Phoronix has several Articles about this:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=xorg_vdpau_vaapi&num=1 [phoronix.com]
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_vdpau&num=1 [phoronix.com]
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I didn't say integrated graphics was bad. I was saying INTEL's graphics are bad.
Go check out the 790G chipsets from AMD and the 9300/9400 chipsets from NVIDIA.
Both are integrated mainboards, but have much better 3D and HD decoding than what's offered by Intel, even in Linux. These will work for you in an low profile home theater PC, and do a better job of it :).
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My statement may have exaggerated a bit, but in general people seeking out Intel don't seem to be aware of NVIDIA or ATI's offerings. Both companies need to do a better job at marketing so people are aware that they have integrated offerings than Intel.
About the only place were NVIDIA fails is in open sourcing their drivers on Linux, but I haven't seen anyone cite this as their reason for choosing Intel yet. At least I can understand the reason someone would choose the more "open" platform even if it's perf
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Really? I bought a 6200 a while back -- back when a 6-series would have been a reasonable thing to buy -- and it was low-profile except that it had a full-height metal backing plate attached to it (I can't remember if there was a half-height one in the box or not). It was even passively-cooled, too. And I wasn't even looking for a low-profile card
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An Ion is about as small a standard form factor as you can get (pico-itx).
Once you look at the Ion for an HDTV platform, I don't think you'd go back looking at Intel's offering...
That's the way to go in the future. The ION is the NVIDIA 9400M chipset (used by Apple in their laptops) but paired with an low wattage Intel Atom CPU. The entire thing is designed around a tiny pico-itx board, and draws very little power and can be passively cooled.
But due to the use of the NVIDIA ION chipset the package can decode HD video and run Vista Premium (if you wanted to) something you can't do on Intel's stock platform of Atom + 945G for a chipset.
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You know real time raytracing isn't something that has to be done on the CPU. There's no reason you can't write a raytracer for a GPU.
In fact NVIDIA already has a fully interactive raytracer. They demoed it last summer at NVISION, and SIGGRAPH '08. I'm sure as they expand CUDA support you'll see more and faster raytracers.
Go check out http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nvision08-IRT.html [nvidia.com]
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Dude. Even I know GPUs are optimised for compositing. Ray tracing is a way different thing. It has to have a way different system. Pretending it doesn't will not help you here.
Re:DX10? That Vista thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
Dude. Even I know GPUs are optimised for compositing. Ray tracing is a way different thing. It has to have a way different system. Pretending it doesn't will not help you here.
You didn't just write the above did you? You show your ignorance. A long time ago they did just compositing, but that was back in the VGA controller days.
Then they evolved to do fixed function rasterization, but those days are over (unless you're Intel doing integrated stuff).
GPUs are MUCH more programmable, and getting more so with each generation. You can do pretty much any floating point math function you want now. Go look up CUDA, and OpenCL they let you basically write C code for the GPU.
Sure the GPUs might not do so well when it comes to brancing, but you'll see that GPU's are being used to do more than just rasterization. Sure razterization would be an important target for NVIDIA/ATI but that doesn't mean it can only draw triangles.
If you look at the paper I linked (which you obviously didn't) it describes how they wrote a ray tracer using NVIDIA CUDA and EXISTING GPUs. If stuff gets more programmable as NVIDIA seems to be targeting, then it will only get easier to write ray tracers which run on the GPU.
If you want proof GPUs do more than rasterization go check out how NVIDIA's GPU tech is now in the Tsubame super computer.
Even Intel is getting into the GPU business with Larrabee, I bet they plan to write a ray tracer for that.
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Is the GPU a commodity yet? No.
What about the CPU? Probably.
But I do think nvidia are reaching a bit on this one.
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There is difference between a CPU and a multicore processor.
If that processor is the central processor, it doesn't matter how many cores it has or what its internal architecture is in my opinion. It is still a Central Processing Unit.
(I can't help but get the feeling that you are suggesting that current multicore processors such as the Core and i7 aren't actually CPUs as they also are homogeneous multicore processors)
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There's a slight problem with that article (and your reasoning). We're still a long way off to making most applications (and even operating systems) effectively use multicore CPUs through parallelism. Or, for that matter, even use multiple threads. We are a long, long way off to actually having software which would work in such parallelism.
Even if the hardware is there, it'll take a while for it to be adopted in any real sense, I think.
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Well, whichever way you look at it, it is going to happen. The future is a multi-core CPU with SIMD capabilities, that will outshine current GPUs and CPUs alike.
The main question is whether a cores are going to be identical, or whether there are dedicated cores for specific purposes. Same for the memory interface:unified or NUMA?But those are minor architectural issues that only fill in the details of the big picture.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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Just look at the number of people having problems with Creative's stuff.
Bad drivers. Bad hardware. Annoying/Bad software.
For example, we've a SB Live 24 (USB) where if you press the mute on the device, the mute works, but to unmute you have to reset the whole thing! And the recording volume is messed up. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I don't have many complaints about the built-in Realtek or Via Audio.
Then there was that friend who bought one of those au
What's my line? (Score:4, Funny)
"At the heart of this issue is that the CPU has run its course and the soul of the PC is shifting quickly to the GPU. This is clearly an attempt to stifle innovation to protect a decaying CPU business.""
Sounds like he reads slashdot.
Re:What's my line? (Score:5, Funny)
"At the heart of this issue is that the CPU has run its course and the soul of the PC is shifting quickly to the GPU. This is clearly an attempt to stifle innovation to protect a decaying CPU business.""
Sounds like he reads slashdot.
it sounds more like he NEVER reads slashdot.
He said nothing about welcoming overlords, Natalie Portman, or hot grits. the phrase IANAL never came up, and no car analogies were used.
how does he sound like a slashdotter?
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Has it ever bothered anyone else that IANAL looks so much like "I anal," and is that an invitation?
I just noticed this today, oddly, but it's bugging the hell out of me.
More on the point, there was no racist ripping, no your/you're/yor or their/there/I-like-my-cat confusion, so, yeah, this isn't very slashdotty. That said, those things are the things that people put out when they *post* on slashdot. I'd wager that readership is 20:1, at least.
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You must not read Slashdot either, because you completely missed the obvious meme of all:
"The CPU is dying -- Netcraft confirms it!"
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In Soviet Russia, meme forgets you!
Jen-Hsun Huang (Score:2)
Yeesh, does he ever say anything in public that doesn't sound like drug-addled desperate bluster...? He's like the Ken Kutaragi of the PC world...
Typical bluster (Score:4, Interesting)
Jen-Hsun Huang has never been one to keep his trap shut when given the chance... even though Nvidia is in the red right now. Lesson one: When a CEO comes out and tries to use a legal dispute related to a contract as a pulpit to make a religious sermon, he knows he's wrong. See Darl McBride and Hector Ruiz as other examples of dumbass CEO's who love to see themselves in magazines but don't want to be bothered with pesky details like turning a profit or actually competing.
Intel is #1 in graphics when it comes to shipments... now I'm not saying I'd want to play 3D games on their chips, but guess what: despite what you see on Slashdot, very few users want to play these games. Further, I've got the crappy Intel integrated graphics on my laptop, and Kubuntu with KDE 4.2 is running quite well thanks to the 100% open source drivers that Intel has had it's own employees working on for several years. I'm not saying Intel graphics will play Crysis, but they do get the job done without binary blobs.
Turning the tables on Huang, the real "fear" here is of Larrabee... this bad-boy is not going to even require "drivers" in the conventional sense, it will be an open stripped-down x86 chip designed for massive SIMD and parallelism... imagine what the Linux developers will be able to do with that not only in graphics but for GPGPU using OpenCL. Will it necessarily be faster than the top-end Nvidia chips? Probably not... but it could mean the end of Nvidia's proprietary driver blobs for most Linux users who can get good performance AND an open architecture... THAT is what scares Nvidia.
Re:Typical bluster (Score:5, Interesting)
I hate to respond to myself but: Yeah the market share of Linux is not huge, Nvidia is probably not terrified of losing sales to Larrabee on some desktop Linux boxes (high end supercomputing apps could be an interesting niche they might care about though). However, it is afraid that OEMs will be interested in Larrabee as a discrete card where Intel never had a solution before. Given the problems that Nvidia has had with execution over the last year, and the fact that Intel knows how to keep suppliers happy, THAT is where Nvidia is really afraid.
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While reading your post, one thing came to mind: NVIDIA's Tegra.
Not only does it boast a multicore 1GHz (iirc) ARM9-based SoC architecture, but it's very low power for what it can do and can do more than current Intel shit can do by quite a bit. And, if it's keeping with other ARM based devices, manufacturing and licensing costs will be significantly less than x86 based counterparts.
With a device which does not require legacy support, it won't matter what the CPU is provided it performs. And when you've got
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You are insane if you think driver source code availability makes a measurable difference in the business of either chipmaker.
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Turning the tables on Huang, the real "fear" here is of Larrabee... this bad-boy is not going to even require "drivers" in the conventional sense, it will be an open stripped-down x86 chip designed for massive SIMD and parallelism...
What do you mean no drivers? If it doesn't work with existing games it'll be a total failure, so it has to be compatible with DirectX and OpenGL. Which surely means drivers.
Besides, Nvidia doesn't give a damn about Linux in comparison to games. From that perspective it really doesn't look too imposing. These are my impressions from its Wikipedia entry:
Performance: 25 cores at 1Ghz gives you Gears of War at 60FPS at 1600x1200 with no anti-aliasing. That places it in the mid-high range of existing G
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"now I'm not saying I'd want to play 3D games on their chips, but guess what: despite what you see on Slashdot, very few users want to play these games"
Dude, World of Warcraft alone has 12 million subscribers. Its the highest grossing media ever. Do you think Sony and Microsoft have spent billions on gaming because its a niche market?
2007 Hollywood box office revenue was 9.6 Billion Total revenue in 08 including dvds, tv rights, foreign and domestic was around $50billion.
2008 Video game sales in the U.S. al
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You can also dole out this figure when people whinge about "The death of PC gaming." For comparison Xbox Live reached 1.5 million concurrent users in January and it was a record for them overall, not a 48-hour peak.
OpenCL? (Score:2)
Intel, Nvidia and AMD helped Apple formulate the original proposal for OpenCL... Intel makes Apple's CPUs, Nvidia increasingly makes the GPUs (sometimes 2 in a single laptop). So there's bound to be some smack-talking about CPUs vs. GPUs and all that.
I think Apple will be the first to have OpenCL support in an OS, and as others follow suit and we see more CPUs and GPUs in machines, this little tiff might conceivably end up meaning... something.
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Intel, Nvidia and AMD helped Apple formulate the original proposal for OpenCL... Intel makes Apple's CPUs, Nvidia increasingly makes the GPUs (sometimes 2 in a single laptop). So there's bound to be some smack-talking about CPUs vs. GPUs and all that.
I think Apple will be the first to have OpenCL support in an OS, and as others follow suit and we see more CPUs and GPUs in machines, this little tiff might conceivably end up meaning... something.
Yes, it could mean Apple moves to AMD/ATi combo integrated and dedicated seeing as AMD will be OpenCL compliant by the time Snow Leopard is here.
"Ouch and double ouch"? (Score:3, Insightful)
You can plug an NVIDIA GPU card into an Intel motherboard (I did just that for the computer I am using).
I have no idea why Intel wouldn't want Nvidia to make chipsets for core i7. For some reason, even years after AMD bought ATI, the only Intel mainboards which support two linked graphics cards do so through Crossfire. So if Nvidia doesn't make chipsets to support core i7, Intel would be forcing the hardcore gamers to either (a) buy AMD's video chips to use Crossfire or (b) buy AMD's CPU's to use NVidia SLI.
Deluded (Score:2)
Errrrrr, I think you'll find it's the other way aroud mate. That is, afterall, why you're maing comments like this?
PC Gaming is dead (Score:2)
It's exactly this kind of bullshit that has killed PC gaming, and driven most of the video game development towards consoles.
Absent the "Next-Gen" feel of a PC platform (3D performance has always felt one generation ahead of consoles) players have no incentive to upgrade their PCs every 18 months like they did at the turn of the century.
In five years, the only games you'll be playing on your PC will be independent titles that can't get licensing agreements on XBL or WiiWare, and flash/browser games.
Thank yo
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That's a peak of 1.6 million concurrent users in the last 48 hours alone. For comparison Microsoft were boasting about Xbox Live reaching 1.5 million concurrent users back in January, the highest peak they'd ever had.
Your argument about the 'next-gen' concept seems self-refuting. The consoles are already behind PCs a bit in terms of graphics, and in five years they won't be any better but the PC will have moved on considerably. They can't even move on in complexity because they're s
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In my experience geforce cards are usually seriously CPU limited. Or at least, they can be, and they would be if you paired them with an Atom. On the other hand, maybe nVidia could do a major process shrink on an old geforce?
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Same reason.
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The desktop CPU market is being eaten away by the low-power notebook-friendly segment. The writing is on the wall since the Core Duos started appearing in Macs, with a low-power profile and a decent punch much better than any Pentium 4 of the time.
Nvidia is trying to build a CPU/GPU SoC-like thing that's very notebook-friendly and also could power business desktops, that traditionally don't require top-of-the-line performance, and can reap huge savings from power-efficiency.
Intel will fight them with all th
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Well that'll never happen for the simple reason that CPUs and GPUs are different architectures geared towards different processing models. At best you'll have a GPU/CPU combination aka CPU/coprocessor. That's one of the reasons AMD bought ATI. For Intel to stay in this race they have to have a decent GPU to go with their CPUs. And Nvidia needs a good CPU to go with their GPU. Everyone's approaching this from their strengths towards their needs.
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"CPUs and GPUs are different architectures geared towards different processing models"
Perhaps.
But look at the SSE extensions to the x86 instruction set or the Cell: CPUs are becoming more GPU-like. If you could build a GPU with some CPU-like cores, you could do some serious damage in the future.
We are in for some entertaining developments.
And, since we have enjoyed a couple decades of x86 monotony, it's about time.
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Is your GPU going to control the hard disk? How about the USB mouse and keyboard?
CPUs and GPUs are utterly different architectures and live in different places inside the machine. Even if it had access to the peripherals a GPU couldn't run Office or Firefox, not even close.
What the NVIDIA guy is saying makes no sense at all, he's just spouting off. Intel has nothing to worry about, it's NVIDIA who should be scared of Intel taking away the low-end market from them - that's where all NVIDIA's profit is, not i
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Perhaps a current GPU would not be able to do it mainly because they assume there is a general purpose CPU connected to the rest of the system.
The newer designs, such as AMD's Fusion, Larrabee and this Nvidia thingie point in the direction of the GPU being integrated as a CPU subsystem. The trend seems clear to me.
And while I doubt anything non-x86 will ever be able to run Office, Firefox runs on a wide variety of architectures. I assume a non-x86 with lots of GPU logic on die would be no problem. I run it
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A 'CPU' in this context is a general purpose processor core like the x86. It's job is to be able to do everything reasonably well - namely fetch and decode instructions, read and write to memory, and do some simple math. A 'GPU' is a special purpose processor core that is designed to only be able to crunch numbers, but do it very, very well. A CPU is already like a GPU in that it c
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I think you're way off on what CUDA and GPGPU in general really is. It lets you run math kernels on your video card. It does NOT allow it to be used for "any" computation in any practical sense. It may even be Turing complete, but it is so insanely impractical for general processing tasks, it won't replace the CPU, nor should it.
Similarly the CPU as we know it is not fit for handling GPU tasks. Intel is trying to solve that by optimising CPUs and cramming more of them onto a board to make an equivalent to a
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CPUs won't be going away, instead they're becoming less important and more of a commodity part. Which is what Intel is terrified of. Plus you'll still need something to run the OS and handle some IO while the GPU is crunching numbers.
Plus while the CPU might be dying (if you believe NVIDIA) we're not to the point you don't need one. Intel is the big player and if you want to ship products you need a platform to talk with the CPU.
Intel wants to throw hurdles in the way and delay NVIDIA until they launch thei
if...why:x86 (Score:2)
Specifically why the "dying" x86 technology?
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OR everyone will have dual/quad core 1ghz atom-esque processors that cost $10 (and thus have no margins), and all compositing/video decode/specialist heavy lifting will be done by a "GPU/PPU" type chip.
Look at the nvidia ION for this exact situation... using a web browser doesn't need grunt. Working on a word doc doesn't need grunt. Watching an HD video does, and the CPU is horrible at it.
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Watching an HD video does, and the CPU is horrible at it.
Maybe relatively. It might even matter in a laptop...
On a modern dual-core 2.5 ghz CPU, I can play HD video fullscreen, 1080p, smoothly.
So the real question is whether manycore is really that much more expensive or wasteful than decent specialized chips.
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Intel needs them for high-end graphics
Not according to Larrabee. [wikipedia.org]
Nvidia needs them for the CPU
While that is mostly true, it isn't the whole story. They could solely rely on AMD CPUs (which could either cripple NVIDIA or boost AMD or both), or they could try to weasle around the patent issues and make their own CPU.
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Tell you what, mr. CEO, - When you have a chip that not only does teraflops with SIMD but can actually CONTROL a motherboard, let us know.
This. This is EXACTLY the reason for this argument, and this is where nVidia plans to go.
See also: nVidia's "ION" platform and ATX-2500 "applications processor" projects