Nvidia's Drew Henry: Fermi Yields are Fine, We're Not Close Partners with XFX
Nvidia's Drew Henry: Fermi Yields are Fine, We're Not Close Partners with XFX
Posted 04/28/2010 at 3:41pm
| by Paul Lilly
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In an interview with DigiTimes, Nvidia's general manager of MCP business Drew Henry fielded a variety of questions and in some cases, offered up a little more than just canned responses. Other times it was a bit of a mixed bag, such as when he was asked to address the rumors that Nvidia gimped Fermi's core count in response to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC's) low yields.
"Nvidia does not comment on unannounced products; however, we have a chance to launch a graphics chip with 512 cores in the future," Henry said. "TSMC's yields for its 40nm process has met our expectations and market rumors about the yields being lower than 20% are completely untrue. We currently have everything under control."
Henry also didn't shy away from commenting on Nvidia's relationship with XFX, a one-time exclusive partner who now sells both AMD and Nvidia graphics cards.
"I need to make two clarifications, one is that Nvidia's share of the graphics card market in the past six months has seen steady growth and did not drop," Henry explained. "Another one is that XFX is not a close partner of Nvidia and the company has a lot of partners such as Asustek computer, Micro-Star International (MSI), Gigabyte Technology, and Zotac that we are currently working closely with."
On the topic of Fermi's heat output and increased power consumption, Henry said he believes consumers won't mind paying a "little higher electricity bill in exchange for 10 percent more performance."
Read the full interview here.
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bikerbub
April 28, 2010 at 5:01pm
Go for it. Keep turning a blind eye towards your main market of PC Enthusiasts. More power for a 10% (only in Nvidia benchmarks) improvement in preformance may sound nice to you, but the amount of power included with heat output and cost doesn't make up for that little of a preformance boost. It's only an excuse for a poorly designed product.
This sounds extremely alike to the time that Nvidia's hot shot prick of a CEO decided to diss all of the Custom PC fanbase, by taking a side with Apple, and approving their ways of business.
Eventually i hope all of this will come to bite you in the ass. And if you think you'll get a bailout, guess what? nobody in congress has probably even heard of you. I'll admit, that's sad, but you aren't getting any help.
If you read all that, congrats. I'm just venting at Nvidia.
Danthrax66
April 28, 2010 at 5:07pm
actually in most cases there is greater than 10% improvement it's just that most review sites don't show you all the features you get if you want an honest review look at the hard ocp review they show you that the gtx 480 is a hell of a lot better at using sampling than the 5870; which results in games looking a lot better.
Also Nvidia doesn't need to cater to gamers they make way more money selling ion and tegra and professional computing technologies than gtx 480's, just sayin.
bikerbub
April 28, 2010 at 7:18pm
Nvidia could probably stay afloat with ion alone, but it would be slim. The Fermi chip, imo, should be just that. What it was intended to be. A gpu compute chip. that's why it's good at physics stuff, but it isn't really all that much better at graphics stuff. They should have started on a graphics specific gpu earlier, like AMD, instead of taking an already existant chip and adding a little onto it.
And no current games (to my knowledge) take any advantage of the tesselation, and little advantage of the phys-X. Some games use Phys-x, but any gtx270 can take care of that.
[h]'s own review sounds pretty biased considering that in the Metro 2033 test of single gpu comparison, the 480 socred an average FPS of 37.6, but they still said there was a significant boost in preformance over the 5870, which had an average FPS of 37.4. that's .2 frames per second. BFBC2 was even across the board, even in the sli setup. AvP they said themselves that there was no noticeable gameplay difference between the 480 and the 5870. i could go on, but the conclution says and i quote:
"When you break it all down to cost, power and performance, the GTX 480 and GTX 470 don’t measure up. The only saving grace is the awesomeness of GTX 480 SLI, but it comes at some high costs." Those aformentioned costs are over $1000 worth of card, plus the massive psu and the cost of rewiring your house to accomidate it.
Danthrax66
April 29, 2010 at 4:58am
In the hardocp review the reason they were saying that is because they had on 4xAA filtering with the gtx480 but did not with the 5870 in fact in almost every test the 480 was able to have additional levels of filtering enabled. So if you are looking for the best picture quality then Nvidia clearly has the lead the TR filtering looks especially promising. Once you get above 60fps it really doesn't matter for frame rates (hell metro is playable at 25-30fps) so the ability to add eye candy with minimal performance hit is awesome.
bikerbub
April 29, 2010 at 12:16pm
but in a bunch of the game reviews, the reviewer himself said that the extra eye candy didn't even make the slightest of difference.
and reread the end of the conclusion.
kevaskous
April 28, 2010 at 4:12pm
And i'm also your next president.
In short, yeah ok, put up or shut up.
TechJunkie
April 29, 2010 at 4:21am
He's being sarcastic towards Nvidia saying that if the yields and thermals are fine, then he will be the next president.
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