How Nvidia plans to get its mojo back
Last year was a terrible year for Nvidia. The company had a ton of inventory going into the fourth quarter, just as the demand for its graphics chips evaporated. Today, the company’s executives talked about how they plan to get their momentum back.
In 2008, Nvidia let Advanced Micro Devices get ahead in the graphics chip race. Nvidia’s partners also ran into reliability problems attaching its graphics chips to laptop system boards. And then the economic… Continue Reading
PC game software grew 18 percent in 2008, with China taking the lead
PC game software grew 18 percent in 2008, thanks to growing usage of online games that are played primarily on computers and not on consoles.
The PC Gaming Alliance is one of those groups that insist PC gaming is not dying. If you look at U.S. retail game sales, it certainly looks like it is. But much of the growth is in online sales and new kinds of business models that aren’t easy to measure.
In 2009,… Continue Reading
Stanford’s Bill Dally leaps from academia to the computer graphics wars
Bill Dally recently made the jump from head of the computer science department at Stanford University to being chief scientist at graphics chip maker Nvidia. Now he has to be the chief visionary for the products that Nvidia will make in the future. His expertise is in parallel computing, which he believes will come to dominate the picture. If he’s right, we’ll see a shift of billions of dollars of sales from one part of… Continue Reading
Craig Barrett bows out with wisecracks at his last Intel annual meeting
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Bringing an era in Intel history and a storied career in the chip industry to a close, Craig Barrett (above) retired as chairman of Intel today at the company’s annual meeting in Santa Clara, Calif.
The 69-year-old spent 35 years at the company and rose in the manufacturing ranks under the leadership of Intel leaders Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove. Barrett succeeded Grove as chief executive of the world’s biggest chip maker in 1998… Continue Reading
Nvidia to buy Ageia, improve gaming physics
NVIDIA recently announced that it intends to acquire AGEIA Technologies. The acquisition was announced after the signing of a definitive agreement. The deal might finally push hardware accelerated physics into the mainstream, and also yield a hybrid GPU-PPU add-in board.
AGEIA’s flagship product is the PhysX Physics Processing Unit (PPU). Sold as a new discrete add-in board, the PhysX PPU is a specialized physics processor.
There are a number of advantages of using a PPU. First off,… Continue Reading