Tag Archives: Nvidia

Intel will take on AMD, Nvidia head to head

THE CHIP called Larrabee will have so many notches on its gun that there will likely be a gunfight at the not-so-OK corral between Intel, AMD and Nvidia next year.

Today, Stephen Smith, VP of Intel’s Digital Enterprise division, told me that Larrabee, which the firm will demo later this year, will allow the firm to build discrete graphics cards. Products will follow, and that probably means 2009.

So that will mean that it will have graphics products to compete against Nvidia and ATI.

Making 2009 an interesting year in the already highly competitive graphics market.
Larrabee will be vector based, and use shared cache across multiple cores.

Smith also disclosed some details about Nehalem’s successors. It will be followed by a 32 nanometre chip called Westmere, and Sandy Bridges in 2010. Tock. Tick. ♣

BOGGARD The INQ’S take

Intel to brief on Nehalem, Larrabee, Dunnington

CHIP GIANT Intel is holding a teleconference for world hacks this coming Monday on its Nehalem, Larrabee and Dunnington technologies.

It will unveil further details of architectures it expects to implement during the course of this year.

I understand its Nehalem and its Larrabee plans are already far advanced. Nehalem will frighten AMD because it’s an answer to its chip architecture, while Larrabee will frighten, er, AMD and Nvidia because it poses a threat to their graphics business.

We’ll be listening in on Monday for the details after we’re back from Bengalaru. ♣

Nvidia’s back is against the wall

AMD, according to reliable sources, is preparing some shock treatment for Nvidia on the graphics front later this year.

But the same sources reckon that it will be earlier rather than later, pushing Nvidia to the limits. We’d say that Nvidia is a little like Intel in that it performs better when it’s under pressure rather than AMD, which always seems to start misfiring when things don’t go exactly right.

The word is the AMD strategy is something to do with codename Thunder. But don’t be surprised if Nvidia has something up its corporate sleevies too.  Because we suspect it has. ♣