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Hard Case: Is Nvidia All Grown Up?

Loyd Case — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:00:00 -0500

As a developer of graphics technology, Nvidia has been incredibly successful. Despite severe competitive pressure from AMD, Nvidia’s desktop GPUs still hold the number one market share, though AMD recently upped the ante with the release of the Radeon HD 5870, which is hands down the fastest single GPU card today.

It’s clear, though, after Nvidia’s recent GPU Technology Conference, that the company’s aspirations lie well beyond building graphics chips. That’s not a revelation – Nvidia’s been saying this for several years now. For an industry observer, though, the GPU Tech Conference lays out Nvidia’s model for moving beyond just graphics.

That model, ironically, is Intel.

You won’t see Nvidia rushing out to buy or build new fabs, nor is it likely the company will bring to market an x86 CPU. Rather, what Nvidia’s trying to do is present the face of a modern, mature company with its fingers in many pies and its eyes firmly on future growth.

image credit: venturebeat

The press conference last Wednesday proved illuminating. It wasn’t so long ago that CEO Jen-Hsun Huang was throwing out phrases like “opening up a can of whoop-ass” when referring to Intel. By contrast, the press conference at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose was positively restrained. Huang was still the centerpiece of the press conference, taking almost all the questions. But every time he’d start to stray into “whoop ass” verbal territory, he’d pull back just a bit. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he’s still very competitive. It’s also clear he’s become a little more cognizant of what Nvidia needs to do to stick around for the long term.

“We’re not a startup anymore,” he said at one point. “We’re a big company now.”

Everyone knows that, of course, but Nvidia’s always behaved like a startup. Now, it’s starting to think of itself as a large, mature entity. There’s a tendency to think of “mature” as some kind of pejorative in the technology business, but technology is mainstream now. Investors and analysts feel much more comfortable when a company acts like a grown-up.

The attitude extended to my conversations with other people at the conference. Take, for example, how the rollout of Nvidia’s new GPU technology, dubbed “Fermi,” was handled.

In a meeting with Tony Tamasi, Nvidia’s senior VP of technology and content, he acknowledged that they needed to say something to counter AMD’s recent Cypress (HD 5870 & 5850) announcements. But his tone when talking about Fermi was low key. When pressed about CUDA, Nvidia’s proprietary interface for writing general purpose GPU applications, he took the position that Nvidia was in no way positioning CUDA against emerging standards like OpenCL or DirectCompute 11.
“It’s about getting apps on the GPU, any way possible. CUDA, OpenCL, DirectCompute – they’re all good.”

Nvidia’s cool new add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio, Nexus, reinforces the point. Nexus works with CUDA, but also OpenCL and DirectCompute, allowing Windows developers to work natively inside Visual Studio, and picking their interface of choice to the GPU – all working seamlessly with CPU code.

Nvidia has lost none of its ambitions, though. Sanford Russel, the GM of the compute side at Nvidia, said it bluntly: “We’re a processor company, not a graphics company.”

But rather than blindly take on processor companies head on, as it seemed to want to do a couple of years ago, it’s taking a longer term approach, working with key software partners like Microsoft and Apple to gradually position the GPU as an equal to the CPU. That’s a much more indirect approach than trying to take on Intel directly.

Still, the road will not be easy. AMD has already shown it can build a great graphics processor with Cypress. As it moves slowly towards integrating CPU and GPU functionality, it will more directly compete with Nvidia on the GPU compute front – something it hasn’t placed a strong emphasis on in the past. Similarly, Intel is slowly – too slowly for some observers – building Larrabee, their take on a completely software programmable GPU.

Sanford Russell believes that Larrabee is too unbalanced toward the x86 side, and won’t be as good at the highly data parallel applications Nvidia is targeting with Fermi. In reality, no one really knows how good Larrabee will be. However, Intel has the will and the resources to pursue Larrabee until they get it right.

Right now, Nivdia is seeing some success with its much smaller Tegra line, and is starting to rack up some design wins. However, its chipset business is slowly fading away, since Intel has been unwilling to issue bus licenses for the Nehalem generation of CPUs. There’s Ion, of course, but that’s really a long term dead end, as Intel’s Atom transitions to become more of a system-on-chip.

So it won’t be an easy path for the other Santa Clara chip company. It is, however, a path that Nvidia needs to pursue to remain relevant and keep growing. The pressures, however, will be enormous.

Foxconn to Stop Selling Own-Branded Videocards

Paul Lilly — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:15:39 -0500

With all the hoopla surrounding lifetime warranties by the likes of EVGA, BFG, and XFX, you probably don't own a Foxconn-branded videocard anyway. But in case you do, you may want to hold onto it as a nostalgiac keepsake, because pretty soon, there won't be any new Foxconn-branded videocards.

Foxconn said it's getting out marketing its own brand and has instead rearranged its Channel Service Division (CSD), along with most of its 9,000 employees, to its OEM division.

That doesn't mean Foxconn will suddenly disappear, however. The company still expects to ship 6-7 million of its own-brand motherboards in 2009, which is a whopping 5 million more than it shipped in 2008. As for videocards and other OEM products, the company expects shipments to reach 30 million units, those products just won't bear the Foxconn brand.

Image Credit: Foxconn

BFG GeForce GTX 295

Will Smith — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:00:00 -0500

With speed to burn, this dual-GPU videocard delivers SLI in a single PCI-E slot

Just in case you missed our review of the new GTX 295 reference board last month, we’ll revisit the high points. To make a GeForce GTX 295, Nvidia sandwiched a fairly large heatsink between a pair of boards—that’s one kick-ass sandwich!

The GTX 295’s GPUs are basically modified GTX 280 GPUs. They’ve got the same shader core configuration as the GTX 280, but Nvidia shrunk the chip’s die from 65nm to 55nm, and lowered the core clock speed to 576MHz (the same as the GTX 260). These two adjustments help keep power requirements and heat generation under control, while the full complement of 240 shader cores keeps the frame rate up in shader-limited benchmarks, such as Crysis and Far Cry 2.

The GTX 295’s memory configuration is also similar to the GTX 260’s. Each GPU is paired with 896MB of GDDR3 clocked at 999MHz, connected to the GPU by a 448-bit bus. Where ATI increases memory bandwidth on the 4870 family of cards by using quad-pumped GDDR5 memory, Nvidia is still using double-pumped RAM with a wider bus. The upshot is that the 4870 X2 has a tiny memory-bandwidth edge. In reality, it’s probably not something you’d ever notice.

The performance story hasn’t changed much from our last review, despite new driver revisions from both ATI and Nvidia. Even in shader-limited tests that typically favor ATI’s massive array of 800 shader processors (Crysis and 3DMark Vantage), the GTX 295 managed to outpace ATI’s fastest. Indeed, the BFG card laid down the smack in every single benchmark we test, a rare feat.

This card fits into a single PCI Express slot, but it will cover the adjoining slot, as well. It requires both 6-pin and 8-pin PCI-E power connectors and a decent 680W power supply to run. BFG equipped its board with a pair of dual-link DVI connectors and a single HDMI output.

It’s fast, it’s beautiful. ‘Nuff said.