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If not ATI then what? Didn't think Larrabee was coming this soon. Would be a step down if they did anyways. Only other options are no where as big as either nVidia or ATI. Unless...ooo the REBIRTH OF 3DFX!!! 500 VSA-100 cores all on one chip to create, the ultimate Voodoo 5!!!

Just for you and akb25...

INTEL IS AHEAD of schedule with Larrabee. Initial boards are going to be shipping to devs in November. Before you get your hopes up, these are not consumer parts, nor were they meant to be. Dev means developer, and chances are the epic MMO that you are whipping up in your mom's basement does not qualify.

The initial boards are meant to code against, and they will do that nicely. They will not be at the final clock, final core counts, or final anything however. If you want to get your feet wet, Intel should have a board for you in a few months.

Larrabee boards coming in November

Reading the comments on 'All G8x are bad" there's a MB owner who had his GPU fail. According to his accounts over on the Apple forums he isn't alone.

On the plus side, the more MBPs fail, the sooner Apple will update them with a new GPU...since nVidia midrange would be out of the question it then would be either high end or ATI. Either way, yay!

Get a mobile 3870 in a MBP and i'd try to find some way to con me one

Seriously tho, NV screwing up the mobile chips is probably the best thing ever for the next gen of MBPs...unless Apple goes horny for Intel...then of course we're all doomed and my faith in owning another Apple laptop will be forever gone.

Booksley wrote:

NightCougar_37 wrote:

Get a mobile 3870 in a MBP and i'd try to find some way to con me one

Seriously tho, NV screwing up the mobile chips is probably the best thing ever for the next gen of MBPs...unless Apple goes horny for Intel...then of course we're all doomed and my faith in owning another Apple laptop will be forever gone.

If that happened, I'd sell this one in a heartbeat. Especially if they weren't lying about that $1799 price point...

I'll see if I can make this one fit...

Well a new MBP will wait for now. My mom needed a new laptop. Her clamshell couldn't stream content online good enough sooo...just went out and got her a Sony VAIO. Macbook was an option but this sucker came in $100 less and has a 2.26Ghz C2D and a Radeon 3470 256MB VRAM + Shared up to 1.5GB along with a 16.6 widescreen HD display with 1600x900 res. Compared to the Macbook, this was overkill but at least I was there to make sure she didn't get sold a Intel GMA crap chip. She wanted a Mac, but for the price, Apple just couldn't compete. She didn't want to spend much over $1,000.

Best of all, I get to load some games on this and use it when traveling to relatives in other states. Oh and also got Vista Ultimate for $70 with it so...Halo 2 Vista here I come. Just gotta hope it wont recognize my XP install as not entirely legal .

Nvidia CFO 'retires'
Gosh, what bad timing

Friday, 01 August 2008, 5:11 PM

LOOKS LIKE THE Rattus rattus are exiting the subsurface trajectory-bound waterborne vessel, the HMS Nvidia.

According to a report at Darkvision Hardware, Marvin D. Burkett, CFO of Nvidia is chosing this auspicious moment to retire.

Damn, I wonder why? µ

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/ … fo-retires

Dang, he'll miss his Xmas bonus an' ever'thing. Prequel later...

Oh, heck with it. Here it is. And don't miss today's pic.


Edit: Chipsets too. Where'd NV's engineering talent go?

(Did they 'repurpose' a huge batch of surplus VSA-100s? ).

Last edited by Bat (2008-08-01 1:06 pm)

I've never had an EVGA board i've worked with not overheat within a year or so. Cheaper boards ya, but you get what you pay for. Good move AMD, you don't need them.

Related. They used to be a contendah, when they built the division off MS' Xbox money, displacing VIA, becoming arguably #1. Now...

THERE ARE A ton of 'rumors' floating around about Nvidia giving up the ghost on its ailing chipset division. Nvidia is desperately trying to deny it, but don't believe the spin, the division is deader than an Nvidia mobile GPU.

Just over a week ago, Nvidia's maximum leader, Jen-Hsun Huang, held a meeting with Taiwanese mobo partners. He directly asked them if there was a reason why Nvidia should stay in the chipset business. You could hear the crickets chirp.

In mainland China. No one came up with a reason, so the division was officially killed, and the teams will be rolled into GPU projects.

Nvidia PR is having the proverbial hissy-fit, but ignore it, they do that a lot. The INQUIRER has talked to people who were at the meeting, and they confirmed the reports, and are dead convnced that Nvidia chipsets are a thing of the past.

This is not to say that there will be no new chipsets from today. Things currently done or almost done will be out, but new designs won't be started, and early-stage projects are not likely to continue. [..]
...

The problem with axing the chipset division is that it also axes their SLI lock-in lever. Nvidia has long used SLI to squeeze partners for cash, and the partners are not particularly happy about this. Now that Nvidia chipsets are going away and the GPU lead is lost, partners are about to put the boot in.

Nvidia chipsets are history

INTEL HAS ANNOUNCED that its Larrabee chips will feature numerous processor cores and support openGL as well as DirectX. This will reportedly allow the new chip to maintain compatibility with current games and software.

According to Larry Seiler, chief architect of Intel's visual computing group, the Larrabee x86-based chip will target the gaming market and industries that demand high-performance graphics and parallel processing.

Indeed, Larrabee significantly improves application and graphic performance by combining the parallel processing capabilities of GPUs with x86 architecture.

The new chip will also feature dedicated co-processors to handle specific graphics functions.

Although the Larrabee core is similar to that of that of the Pentium, the new core boasts significant enhancements, including a wide vector processing unit, 64-bit extensions, multithreading and pre-fetching.

'09 or -10.  Intel talks up Larrabee

Always liked nVidia chipsets ever since the NF2. Man they must have screwed up big time to allow this to happen. Oh well, i'll get the most out of my 570 for now.

So we piece it together and...

Dates for 45nm AMD CPUs and RV710, RV730
Author: Richard Swinburne
Published: 4th August 2008
AMD's 45nm die - available to buy Q4. Apparently.

Just a short note to say that AMD confirmed with us today that its RV710 and RV730 mainstream and low end products will be available in September - just a month away. At least one of them (RV710) will be Hybrid CrossFire capable and despite the fact AMD were keeping mum about the details right now both should go up against Nvidia's recently launched GeForce 9500 GT and 9800 GT products. It should be a good month of choice for all looking to buy in the mainstream price bracket.

Fancy placing some guesses now? If the HD 3670 has 120 stream processors, will the HD4670* (a naming guess at this stage) have 240? 320? - a rebranded HD 3850? Will it be manufactured on the 55nm node like the rest?

It has been speculated elsewhere that both cards will feature 512MB or 1GB of graphics buffer memory - AMD made no apologies for this (wastefulness) today as it claimed it was a very common tactic to lure the uneducated public into buying your product because of this simple equation: more = better. Partners will be free to do what they like from the get-go so expect all sorts of clock speeds, memory quantities and cooling solutions across the field.

ATI's counter punch to the GeForce 9500 GT, RV730, is pictured in this article over at Hardware Infos. According to the site, RV730 will feature 320 stream processors (the same number of shaders as R600 and RV670) and a 750MHz core clock speed. The reference card will also ship with 512MB of GDDR3 memory tied to the GPU via a 128-bit memory interface.

http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsart … chid=20747

A cheap'n' cheerful tryout for TSMC's 45nm process tech? If it goes well, the old 38xx chip should clock 750 easily at 45nm while sipping the wattage. 128-bit interface definitely midrange; no point in 19x12 res here.

Mr. T wrote:

To all you guys at nVIDIA who knew about this problem yet remained silent, smurf you!  I'm happy that I dodged the bullet, though.

Maybe you didn't. This just keeps expanding.

A little digging revealed what this, and more, is all about, and it's far uglier than just the 'notebook' version. It seems that four board partners are seeing G92 and G94 chips going bad in the field at high rates. If you know what failures look like statistically, they follow a Poisson distribution, aka a bell curve. The failures start out small, and ramp up quickly - very quickly. If you know what you are looking for, you can catch the signs early on. From the sound of the backchannel grumblings, the failures have been flagged already, and NV isn't playing nice with their partners.

Why wouldn't they? Well, the G92 chip is used in the 8800GT, 8800GTS, 8800GS, several mobile flavours of 8800, most of the 9800 suffixes, and a few 9600 variants just to confuse buyers. The G94 is basically only the 9600GT. Basically we are told all G92 and G94 variants are susceptible to the same problem - basically they are all defective. Any guesses as to how much this is going to cost?

From the look of it, all G8x variants other than the G80, and all G9x variants are defective, but we have only been able to get people to comment directly on the G84, G86, G92 and G94, and all variants thereof. Since Nvidia is not acknowledging the obvious G84 and G86 problems, don't look for much word on this new set either - if they can bury it, it will drop their costs.

In the end, what it comes down to is that the problem is far bigger than they are admitting, and crosses generational lines, process lines, and OEM lines. Nvidia is quick to point the finger at everyone but themselves, but after a while, the facts strain those cover stories well past breaking point. There is a common engineering failure here - this problem is far too widespread for it to be anything else. The stonewalling, denials and partner gagging is simply a last-ditch attempt at wallet covering.

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/ … reportedly