Tag Archives: Nvidia

Roy Taylor and John Byrne – memories are made of this…

IT WAS in Monaco – I flew in, I think for a channel gig.  I certainly took a helicopter from Nice to Monaco, Sukh Rayat and me were in the helicopter.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been to Monaco, but certainly was the last.

I found myself in a channel conference with old muckers Roy Taylor and Scot John Byrne.

They had fallen out – I’m not quite sure why – because they were one partnership when I’d first met them as a channel journalist.

Now, of course, they are very important people. I think John Byrne works now  for Dell-EMC and Roy works for Nvidia – sorry, AMD.

They were hammer and tongs in Monaco. I, being the perfect diplomat, brought them together in the cheapest bar in the place – a Guinness bar – where I persuaded them to love each other again.

I hadn’t expected Byrne and Taylor to jump on a table and kiss each other – in obviously  a fraternal rather than a gay way.

The rest is history. Or maybe mystery. 

Channel vet Roy Taylor talks the talk

ROY TAYLOR. What a mensch!

Nvidia and the eggs – revisited

HAD A CHAT with old Charlie Demerjian at the INQster this morning about Mr Peddie’s post and the matter of eggs in the face.

Charlie tells me that sure enough the conversation was real, but after Mr Derek Perez laid down the guidelines for how to have a deep and meaningful conversation with Nvidiazilla, Charlie rejected them totalismo. At which point, rather than throw eggs at Demerjian, Derek just lost it.

Charlie said he was chatting to Jon Peddie about this stuff at the ATI conference at Computex and our darling debonair graphics analyst embellished it, quite colourfully we believe.

Is all well that ends well? We think not. Not yet, anyroadmap as we used to say at the INQsteria.  

Nvidia’s Jen-Hsen gives Intel Corporation horrific kicking

INTEL IS NO favourite of Jen-Hsen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, who lives cheek by jowl with Paul Otellini, Intel’s CEO in Satan Clara.

 

The feeling is reciprocated, we are sure.

 

Jen-Hsen took time out of his busy schedule (pronounced shedule in Blighty) to diss Intel. According to analyst Doug Freedman, who has been around since our Rogister daze, Jen-Hsen is “fricking mad” at Intel, and claims the stuff it’s doing is not good enough.

 

Doug worries that Jen-Hsen doesn’t get too obsessed by stuff. He says: “We hope that competitive drive doesn’t become an obsession distracting from technical advances and increasing target markets.”

What is Doug saying?  He is saying: “Although landscape changes are underway in graphics and heterogeneous computing, NVDA’s driving position will become more apparent in 12-18 months”.

 

If only Doug was talking in straightforward English. This is what we think he means. Nvidia is far from dead and is still kicking big butt. ξ

Nvidia, Via in unholy alliance

SEEN this yet?

We had some inklings something like this was going to happen.  It’s a case of unlikely bedfellows.

There was never any likelihood that Nvidia would buy Via, as Charlie D points out – that was Digitimes froth, of course.  They did chat about licences and that a year or two back, but that wasn’t a goer.

Intel might resort to the legal stick, Charlie reckons – but if it does, it’s not entirely clear how that would work out. Larrabee and discrete graphic cards could alter the legal picture for Nvidia, we guess. Will be interested to see how this all works out. ♣

Nvidia says Intel is playing “catch up”

INTEL’S LARRABEE is no threat to Nvidia, according to a geezer called Andy Keane, chatting to the Wall Street Journal today.

Keane, who is the general manager of Nvidia’s graphic chip division, told the Journal that Intel is doing “old computing”  and attempting to catch up.

That’s what I like about Nvidia – it’s got some balls. Last week Stephen Smith from Intel told us that his firm will have competing products with AMD and Nvidia next year. The quotes from Keane were buried deep in an article that – surprise, surprise – was featuring the sub-prime market. ♦

AMD drops in top 25 semi league table

MARKET RESEARCH firm Isuppli said that falling memory sales  significantly slowed growth  in the semi market in 2007.

AMD took an inevitable hit in 2007 compared to 2006, while Nvidia rose, as did Intel, which remained in first place, followed by Samsung.

DRAM revenues fell by 19.1 per cent in Q4 compared to the earlier quarter, while NAND flash revenues fell by 3.9 per cent in the period.

Forecasts by the manufacturers had been ebullient, based on the previous year. Dale Ford, senior VP at Isuppli said: “This was a complete role reversal for memory semiconductors compared to 2006.” Sales of memory integrated circuits had helped prop up the growth of the overall semi market, he said.

“If memory were excluded from the revenue total, the semiconductor market would have grown by 2.4 per cent in the fourth quarter. However, due to the influence of the weak memory market, total semiconductor market revenues fell by 0.5 per cent in the fourth quarter,” he continued.

Nanya and Qimonda were particularly badly affected, with their memory IC revenues falling by 32.4 per cent and 26 per cent for the year.

Data courtesy of Isuppli, figures for revenues are in millions of dollars. ♦

Semiconductor 2007 league table

2006 2007 Firm
Rev
06
Rev
07
%
change
%
total
1 1 Intel
31,542
33,995
7.8
12.6
2 2 Samsung
19,842
19,691
-0.8
7.3
3 3 TI
12,600
12,275
-2.6
4.6
4 4 Toshiba
10,141
12,186
20.2
4.5
5 5 ST Micro
9,854
10,000
1.5
3.7
7 6 Hynix
7,865
9,047
15
3.4
6 7 Renesas
7,900
8,001
1.3
3
14 8 Sony
5,129
7,974
55.5
3
15 9 Infineon
5,119
6,201
21.1
2.3
8 10 AMD
7,506
5,918
-21.2
2.2
9 11 NXP
5,707
5,746
0.7
2.1
11 12 NEC
5,601
5,742
2.5
2.1
16 13 Qualcomm
4,529
5,619
24.1
2.1
10 14 Freescale
5,616
5,264
-6.3
2
13 15 Micron
5,247
4,869
-7.2
1.8
12 16 Qimonda
5,413
4,005
-26
1.5
19 17 Elpida
3,527
3,838
8.8
1.4
17 18 Matsushita
4,022
3,800
-5.5
1.4
25 19 Broadcom
3,668
3,746
2.1
1.4
25 20 Nvidia
2,578
3,466
34.4
1.3
20 21 Sharp
3,341
3,401
1.8
1.3
21 22 IBM
3,172
2,977
-6.1
1.1
26 23 Marvell
2,550
2,777
8.9
1
23 24 Analog
2,603
2,707
4
1
22 25 Rohm
2,882
2,633
-8.6
1
82,401
83,027
0.8
30.9
Total
Revenue
260,355
268,905
3.3
100%

SPEC developing graphic power-performance benchmark

INDUSTRY BODY SPEC said that it is in the course of preparing an industry standard benchmark for power and performance related to professional workstations.

The body said that the SPEC/GWPG benchmark will be available this summer, and will use workloads from the SPECviewperf benchmark for 3D graphics, as well as CPU workloads for a number of applications including financial modelling, scientific computing,  and open source.

Participants in the push to the benchmark include AMD, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, HP, Nvidia, Sun and Intel.

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. ♣