NVIDIA CC

[Dave Baumann]

Doesn't seem like they are going to spill any beans of major interest, so far the most interesting elements in terms of product / upcoming tech is a statement along the lines of “We’ll look for the first available opportunity to bring SoundStorm backâ€￾ and there was a hint of Integrated AMD 64 chipset sometime in the future – personally I would guess this to be 6200 based and I would assume would be announced after the real NV44 is done.

 

[elroy]

We’ll look for the first available opportunity to bring SoundStorm back

What are they waiting for, a written invitation??? Now that PCI-E is out there's nothing stopping them. Any ideas as to what they are looking for before they reintroduce it?

 

[kemosabe]

Dave,

What's your opinion on how NVDA will play things if R520 comes to market as rumoured in the first half of 2005? Any rumblings about a possible early release of NV50 or some stop-gap solution until NV50 is ready?

Also, what are your thoughts about NVDA's chances of making significant inroads in the consumer notebook market with the PCI-E transition early next year? They mentioned that all top-tier OEMs were getting on the MXM bandwagon and seem more confident in the competitiveness of their mobile platform.

P.S. Does Jen-Hsun sound genuine/believable to you on these CCs?

 

[Tim Murray]

What's your opinion on how NVDA will play things if R520 comes to market as rumoured in the first half of 2005? Any rumblings about a possible early release of NV50 or some stop-gap solution until NV50 is ready?

I thought this was NV47?

 

[kemosabe]

Fair enough, but do we know anything about NV47 that would allow us to intelligently speculate on whether it can compete with what we vaguely know about R520?

 

[Richthofen]

There were some really nice comments which i found interesting:

1)
the comments about probably bringing soundstorm back. According to Huang the demand for that sollution must have been pretty strong.

2)
nForce4 adoption and ramp up must be really strong growing. They are very confident about their chipset business. I guess they have between 40 and 50% of the AMD chipset market share and are growing that business.

3)
Despite the huge transistor difference between FX series and GF6xx series, the GF6xx series seems to be cheaper to produce for them.
You could guess from his comments that they want to get rid of their FX line as soon as possible. Not because it performs so badly ( in the low end that doesn't matter much) but because it seems to be too exepensive. They don't have much room for price cuts left there.

4)
This one was the most interesting for me. Huang seemed to be very confident regarding AMD that they will ramp up now pretty fast and will grow market share by some decent numbers in the quaters to come. Never heard Nvidia relatives beeing so positive about AMDs business outlook.
They (Nvidia) seem to expect some huge market share gains by AMD in the desktop and server business.

5) their goForce business is the fast growing one right now. They are trying to get a good position to profit from this marketplace when it starts ramping up and growing fast. The whole smartphone market will be interesting to follow.

 

[Evildeus]

So revenue = 515,6 Millions de $ and profit = 25,9 Millions de $ not a bad quarter, thanks to GF6*00.

 

[whql]

much of it came from increased xbox sales, which account for nearly 20%.

 

[chavvdarrr]

Fair enough, but do we know anything about NV47 that would allow us to intelligently speculate on whether it can compete with what we vaguely know about R520?

24 pipes

btw seeing that NV44 will have as much as 16MB dedicated local memory, it looks that its ready for motherboard integration , and should be quite cheap, these 16Mb will be used as frame buffer only, perhaps?

i forgot that dedicated could mean non-local

 

[Dave Baumann]

I think the memory will just be normal board memory - i.e. a very small local framebuffer:

VR-Zone[/url]]It contains a 6200 core with 16MB onboard memory. NV44 also sports a special memory architecture named "Turbo Cache" which basically utilize the system memory as the graphics memory with sizes ranging from 16MB to 128MB.

The NV44 chip itself is likely to be very similar to what has already been announced from the cut down NV43's for 6200, i.e. 4 pipes and no compression etc. I think the 16MB was just the amount of memory that was on the board, which will be used for fast local ram, and any other memory will be addressed from system RAM over the PCIe bus thanks to "Turbo Cache" (i.e. the same as ATI's "HyperMemory"). However, yes, this will be a useful thing for motherboards still...

 

[mczak]

We’ll look for the first available opportunity to bring SoundStorm back

What are they waiting for, a written invitation??? Now that PCI-E is out there's nothing stopping them. Any ideas as to what they are looking for before they reintroduce it?

They are really a bit late already imho. You can get dolby digital encoding already with intel-based boards (dolby digital live) nowadays. Granted, that's not soundstorm, and probably more a licensing deal than anything hardware-related, but it's probably THE feature which made soundstorm interesting.

 

[DSC]

http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=53402

Quote:
There is NO WAY to get hardware acceleration from software. Anyone who tells you so is just flat out wrong.

What software does, in plain English, is LIE to Windows and claim to support hardware features. It then bypasses all of the Microsoft audio stack and substitutes its own. This gives consumers the mistaken impression that they have hardware support. Let me assure you that they do not.

If you had low level debugging tools you could see that all that work is really still being done in software by the CPU. This "trick" is nothing more than enabling custom features in software and bypassing Microsoft. It does nothing to accelerate audio in any way.

http://www.sudhian.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=572&pid=2173

Enabling Dolby Digital Live increases CPU usage to an average of 15%, occasionally jumping to 17% and never below 10%. This translates into DDL taking up roughly 6% more CPU cycles compared to simple analog audio. Either way, CPU usage is still relatively high for analog and DDL.

Other solutions that implement Dolby Digital Live(previously known as DICE) is in SOFTWARE and not hardware accelerated like the Soundstorm APU does.

 

[MasterBaiter]

Yep although C-Media has some potentially nice solutions: http://www.cmedia.com.tw/product/CMI8768_plus.htm & http://www.cmedia.com.tw/product/CMI9880.htm

These both look like software solutions , so still not on par with Nvidias solution. I can only hope that Nvidia will get smart and release their own sound-card. That way the consumer, mobo makers, and Nvidia are happy.

Still doesn't look like Creative has a clue about support for encoding on their audigy cards... I don't see any mention of it here: http://world.altavista.com/babelfis...m/releases/welcome.asp?pid=11853&lp=ja_en :?

 

[Dave Baumann]

What are they waiting for, a written invitation??? Now that PCI-E is out there's nothing stopping them. Any ideas as to what they are looking for before they reintroduce it?

Actually, I'm wondering if this might be a sideways hint at an Intel chipset.

 

[MasterBaiter]

There have been sideways hints of an Intel chipset for more than a year now :?
I doubt anyones holding their breath for one @ this point especially considering that Intel's in quicksand (although they do have a scary amount of market-share)!

 

[Deathlike2]

Still doesn't look like Creative has a clue about support for encoding on their audigy cards...

I'd be just willing to bet they do most of their stuff in software... it's hard to call most Creative products... hardware accelerators... not that it doesn't help with hardware acceleration... but the drivers that come out seem questionable at times.

 

[jvd]

i dunno sound storm may have an up hill battle , i heard a new sound blaster line (based on new hardware ) will be out in the next year

 

[Arun]

Actually, I'm wondering if this might be a sideways hint at an Intel chipset.

In August 2003, an extremely reliable source told me that NVIDIA had a top-secret team working on an intel chipset. He described it as NVIDIA's most well guarded product in his few years at the company; he did try to get some information about it, but couldn't find anything worthwhile.
This led me to three possible explanations:
1) There was no such project and it was a huge bluff, part of NVIDIA's misinformation policy around that time (only assumed this one recently, seeing there wasn't any progress on an intel chipset tbh)
2) They were working on an intel chipset WITHOUT an intel agreement, and couldn't commercialize it. They were just experimenting, and in such a position it wasn't in NVIDIA's best interests to leak their position.
3) They were hoping to get the license soon, and the "project" really only was at the negociation stage. That would explain the lack of information.

Of course, this could all be wrong... And whatever work they must have done in that timeframe on such a chipset must have gone to the trashcan by now.

Uttar

 

[Dave Baumann]

There are a couple of reasons why I say that, and they are kinda interlinked.

For starters - there were those reports around the web of an HP presentation that had Intel and NVIDIA for Intel EM64T platform. When EM64T comes around, its very likely to require a new bus license; NVIDIA also has plenty of experience with AMD's 64-bit platform and Intel may look to leverage some of that with their 64-bit desktop platform. Given NVIDIA always likes to aim for the high end, its unlikely that they would want to create an Intel chipset without SoundStorm given that Intel already have some encode capabilities (having it at lower CPU utilisation, because theirs is fully hardware based, than Intel would also be a selling point for NVIDIA).

Now, the other issue they have presently is that they are only working on the AMD market at the moment. This has led them down the path of having a single chip chipset controller, which offers benefits for that single platform, but also means you areless likely to want to waste silicon on areas that may only be utilised on a small percentage of the platforms available; a single chip also means more time if you want to offer different options. You'll note that no other chipset vendor has followed NVIDIA's route yet, and thats down to one simple reason - all the other are presently dealing with both Intel and AMD markets and they get to leverage their "Media Communications Processors" (Southbridges) across two different platforms - this spreads the risk and also enables them to have more options by mixing and matching the Northbridges to various southbridge options on both platforms.

Should NVIDIA enter the Intel market then its likely that they will go back to making a two chip chipset, and it wouldn't surprise me if they did that for the AMD platform again. If this were the case the work put in can the be spread across both platforms and making a number of Southbridge options (some with SoundStorm, some without) dependant on the costs and targets for the vendor wants to aim the platform at.

 

[elroy]

What are they waiting for, a written invitation??? Now that PCI-E is out there's nothing stopping them. Any ideas as to what they are looking for before they reintroduce it?

Actually, I'm wondering if this might be a sideways hint at an Intel chipset.

Dave, I had wondered this myself a while ago and did think it a plausible reason. Intel probably wouldn't have liked it if nVidia released an Intel chipset before the release of the 9xx series, as a new SoundStorm would likely (? hopefully at least!) better the specs of Intel's HD audio, thereby combatting one of the selling points of 9xx chipsets. Now that the 9xx series is out it may not be such a problem.

I also wonder what effect the poor sales of the 9xx series are having on Intel's overall business. Assuming it is having a negative effect (i.e people staying with 865PE and Sxt 478), perhaps an nVidia chipset with SLI and SoundStorm capabilities would tempt more people to go the LGA775 route??? Just speculations, nothing more.