Hasta La Gadget!

You’d think with ATI having the performance, value and power efficiency lead for so long — at least since the Radeon HD 4000 series — NVIDIA would be in all kinds of trouble, but it’s only now that AMD’s graphics division has finally taken the lead in quarterly shipments. This is according to Mercury Research, whose analysts place the split at 51 to 49 percent in favor of ATI — still a tightly contested thing, but it compares very favorably to the Red Team’s 41% share in the same quarter last year. This data is concerned with discrete GPU shipments only (laptops included), whereas on the integrated front Intel continues to reign supreme with 54 percent of the market shipping its cheap and cheerful IGP units. ATI has made forward strides there as well, however, with 24.5% ranking ahead of NVIDIA’s 19.8%. If Apple shifting its iMac and Mac Pro lines away from the Green livery wasn’t enough, perhaps these numbers will finally start ringing some alarm bells over at NV HQ.

[Thanks, Zubayer]

ATI overtakes NVIDIA in discrete GPU shipments originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Jul 2010 05:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So what if Rambus doesn’t really produce anything tangible these days? We’re hearing the “innovation” business is going really well for the company that recently celebrated its 1,000th patent, and now there’s a nice big windfall in its near future as well. The US International Trade Commission has handed down a ruling agreeing with a previous judgment that NVIDIA infringed on three Rambus patents in the design of its memory controllers, with the ultimate outcome being a ban on importing such infringing goods into the country. Of course, that’s the one thing we’re sure won’t be happening, but NVIDIA will now have to sign up for a license to Rambus’ precious IP portfolio, which might be a tad bit costly given that GeForce, Quadro, nForce, Tesla and Tegra chips are named as being in violation — aside from Ion, that’s pretty much NVIDIA’s whole hardware business.

[Thanks, Marc]

Update: NVIDIA, unsurprisingly, has said it will appeal the ruling. [Thanks, Xero2]

Rambus victorious in patent fight with NVIDIA, can expect neat wad of cash for its troubles originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Jul 2010 03:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 460 hasn’t even been officially announced, much less reviewed, but that won’t keep you from buying the company’s latest Fermi-based graphics card anyhow. Over at Newegg, usual suspects ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI and Palit have fielded twelve models in all, most with slightly different features, thought it seems the base configuration has 336 CUDA cores (down from 352) and a mere 768MB of GDDR5 memory. Interestingly enough, this silicon’s actually rated faster than its older brother the $280 GTX 465 with 675MHz graphics and 1,350MHz processor speeds, and a 3.6GHz effective memory clock. All your frames are pushed through a decidedly narrower 192-bit memory interface, though, so we’d guess that for around $200, you won’t be getting (much) more than you pay for. Let’s just hope they run cool.

Update: The card’s official, and it seems there’s a 1GB, 256-bit version of the GTX 460, too. Hit the break for the full press release, filled with all the puffery a video game marketing team could want.

[Thanks, Polytonic]

Continue reading Twelve flavors of GeForce GTX 460 now shipping from Newegg (update: official)

Twelve flavors of GeForce GTX 460 now shipping from Newegg (update: official) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 11 Jul 2010 16:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well, we’ve gone a full month since the last episode of NVIDIA’s and Intel’s ongoing public feud, but it looks like Intel has now stoked the flames once again (albeit inadvertently) in a paper presented at the recent International Symposium on Computer Architecture. That attempted to debunk the “100X GPU vs. CPU myth,” but it also contained the tidbit that GPUs are “only” up to 14 times faster than CPUs in running application kernels, which NVIDIA has more than a happily latched onto. In a blog post, NVIDIA’s Andy Keane says that it’s a “rare day” when a competitor states that their technology is only 14x faster, and that he can’t recall another time when he’s “seen a company promote competitive benchmarks that are an order of magnitude slower.” Of course, he then further goes on to note that Intel’s tests were done with NVIDIA’s previous generation GeForce GTX 280, and that the codes were simply run out-of-the-box without any optimization — but, still, he seems more than happy to accept this bit of “recognition.” In Intel’s defense, however, the overall finding of the paper (linked below) is that the performance gap between a GTX 280 GPU and Core i7 960 processor is actually just 2.5X “on average,” which NVIDIA hasn’t highlighted for some reason.

NVIDIA thanks Intel for saying GPUs are ‘only’ 14 times faster than CPUs originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Jun 2010 13:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s one thing to have a product called the world’s fastest on paper, but it’s another thing entirely to have the benchmarks confirm it. NVIDIA‘s GeForce GTX 480M has been swooned over for months now, but it just recently hit the hardcore review sites in a big way. Frankly, there’s not a whole lot to say about the thing at this point: it’s simply the fastest mobile GPU to date, with Hot Hardware finding it to be “significantly faster in nearly all gaming benchmarks,” with just one title showing the Mobility Radeon HD 5870 as the champ by only a few frames. If you’ve been searching for the fastest mobile GPU in town, you’re wasting your time looking any harder; ‘course, all of that power consumes an insane level of energy, so true road warriors will certainly want to look elsewhere. Critics pointed out that energy consumption and excess heat were real issues, though both of those are easily overlooked when you’re able to take a beastly laptop to a LAN party rather than your desktop. Give those links below a visit if you still need proof.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480M reviewed: fastest mobile GPU to date originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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