Graphics

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel Executive Vice President David "Dadi" Perlmutter sat down for an exclusive interview with CNET Monday at the Intel Developer Forum here to discuss the technologies that will define the world's largest chipmaker over the next 12 months. Permlmutter hit on the company's Sandy Bridge chip, tablets, and competition from the satellite of ARM processor makers.

Q: What are the marquee features that differentiate Sandy Bridge from its predecessors? (Sandy Bridge is Intel's new microarchitecture that will eventually span its laptop, desktop, and server processors and is due to appear in chips and systems … Read more

Recent Microsoft and Intel primers on Internet Explorer 9's accelerated graphics point to snappier Web browsing.

Microsoft will launch the beta of the upcoming Internet Explorer browser on Wednesday at an event in San Francisco as competition from Chrome, Firefox, and Safari has spurred Redmond to beef up its graphics acceleration, among other improvements. And Intel is slated to introduce its Sandy Bridge chip architecture, with features enhanced graphics silicon, at the Intel Developer Forum, which begins on Monday.

In a blog posted on Friday, Microsoft spelled out what it says are the merits of "full vs. partial acceleration," while Intel, in a new video, is claiming IE9 acceleration on its Core i series of chips--which will include new Sandy Bridge processors.

Graphics chip-based acceleration (Microsoft calls it "hardware acceleration") shifts some tasks from the main processor (CPU) to the graphics processor (GPU). Mainstream GPUs pack in dozens or even hundreds of processing cores. While each GPU core delivers a tiny fraction of the processing power of a CPU core, combined, they can tackle certain tasks much more quickly and efficiently than a CPU. Intel, for its part, has improved the built-in graphics on its Core i series of processors and will integrate its fastest graphics function yet onto the CPU in its upcoming Sandy Bridge processor.

In the Microsoft blog, Ted Johnson, program manager lead for Web graphics at Microsoft, explained the merits of a "fully-hardware accelerated display pipeline that runs from their markup to the screen."

In March, Johnson explains, Microsoft released the first IE9 Platform Preview with GPU-powered HTML5 turned on by default, enabling hardware acceleration on "everything on every Web page" including text, images, backgrounds, borders, SVG (scalable vector graphics) content, and HTML5 video and audio.… Read more

Nvidia's chief executive officer is emphatic that his company has a strategy for building processors beyond its mainstay graphics chips.

During an interview with CNET, Jen-Hsun Huang addressed an issue with the company's chips and spoke about ongoing Intel litigation.

On Thursday, Nvidia reported a second-quarter net loss of $141 million, or 25 cents per share, worse than the net loss of $105.3 million, or 19 cents a share, a year earlier. The graphics processing unit (GPU) supplier--whose chips are found in PCs from Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Acer, Sony, and Toshiba--cited muted demand for consumer graphics chips and economic weakness in Europe and China, which drove consumers to lower-priced products. Nvidia products typically are targeted at the upper end of the market.

In the earnings announcement, the company addressed a longstanding issue--and ongoing financial burden--centered on a defect in some of its earlier GPUs and chipsets. The problem was first cited by Nvidia in July 2008 when it announced a charge ranging from $150 million to $200 million to cover costs to repair and replace GPUs and chipsets due to "weak die/packaging material" in older laptop products. "Die/packaging" essentially describes the chip. Nvidia also announced additional charges after July 2008.

On Thursday, Nvidia said it recorded an "additional net charge" of $193.9 million related to the same problem. "The charge includes additional remediation costs as well as the estimated costs of a pending settlement of a class action lawsuit related to this matter," the company said in a statement. Combined with the $282 million of net charges announced previously, the total net charge related to the issue comes to $475.9 million, the company said.

I asked Huang Thursday if he thought the problem was now largely… Read more

To quote the iconic 1960s drummer Buddy Miles, the graphics chip market is "going through them changes."

As Nvidia falters, Advanced Micro Devices' ATI graphics unit is on the rise, spurred by "radical" shifts in the market, according to Mercury Research, which tracks the market for GPUs or graphics processing units.

"AMD surpassed Nvidia this quarter in overall shipments...(and) is now the leading supplier of standalone GPU and of notebook standalone GPUs, and the second largest supplier of graphics solutions overall," the Mercury Research report says. Intel is the longstanding No. 1 supplier because it includes the graphics function in its chipsets, which accompany its processors, and more recently is building the function into the central processing unit or CPU.

There are, of course, good reasons why AMD knocked Nvidia out of the No. 2 spot. AMD is gaining in laptop share just as the total mobile graphics market surpasses the total desktop graphics market for the first time, according to Mercury. In particular, AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5000 series (used in both laptops and desktops) saw a "a huge burst" in shipments in the second quarter, Mercury said.

And the composition of the mobile GPU market is changing. "The mobile integrated graphics CPU market...has surpassed both the mobile standalone graphics market and the mobile integrated chip set market for the first time." Translation: the CPU now subsumes the function of the GPU, due to Intel's newest mobile silicon based on the Core i3 and i5 processors. These chips take the GPU function--which had been separate--and combine it with the CPU.

How does AMD fit into this change? Its graphics chips… Read more

Advanced Micro Devices passed Nvidia in graphics chip shipments in the second quarter, according to a report from a marketing research firm on Wednesday, adding to Nvidia's woes.

AMD's ATI graphics unit took 51 percent of the standalone, or "discrete," graphics chip market compared to Nvidia's share that was just shy of 49 percent, according to Mercury Research, a Cave Creek, Arizona firm that tracks graphics chip shipments. This is a sharp reversal from the same period a year ago when Nvidia had about 59 percent of the market and AMD had just under 41 … Read more

Nvidia on Wednesday slashed its revenue projection for the company's second quarter, citing a significant sales shortfall and increasing costs.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based graphics chip supplier said it expects revenue for its second quarter ending August 1 to be lower than the guidance provided with the company's financial results for the first quarter. Nvidia supplies graphics processing units, or GPUs, to all major computer makers, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Apple.

Total revenue is now estimated at $800 million to $820 million, compared with the range of $950 million to $970 million provided on May 13, the … Read more

The Motorola Droid X, which debuted this week to mostly a chorus of accolades, gets its zip from silicon provided by Texas Instruments.

Inside the rival to the Apple iPhone 4 is a new TI OMAP 3630 chip, a big upgrade from the 3430 silicon used in the current Motorola Droid. TI got almost a two-fold speed spike from the new OMAP 3630 chip via design modifications and by moving to an advanced 45-nanometer manufacturing process, according to Brian Carlson, OMAP product line manager at Texas Instruments.

"We increased both the graphics and processor performance by over 80 percent," Carlson said in a phone interview, adding that the new process along with chip design tweaks allowed TI to also lower power consumption between 30 percent and 50 percent, depending on what the user is doing.

"The first thing you'll notice is that the Droid X is much snappier, much faster. Web browsing is one of the key areas. Running a (graphics intensive) Web page, comparing the Droid to the Droid X, it goes from about eight seconds down to below five seconds," he said.

Carlson also explained that other factors come into play beyond reaching the 1GHz milestone. "It's not just about the gigahertz. It's about your memory subsystem. Our memory bandwidth and how we feed these (processing) engines make an incredible… Read more

Nintendo has selected new graphics technology from Japan-based DMP in its highly anticipated Nintendo 3DS portable game machine.

The Nintendo 3DS, due next year, can produce 3D effects without the need for special glasses--what DMP describes as "naked-eye 3D stereovision"--and was a big hit at E3 2010 last week. It will succeed the Nintendo DS.

Nintendo explored other graphics chip options from suppliers such as Advanced Micro Devices' ATI unit, ARM, Imagination Technologies, and Nvidia, according to Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie research, writing in a blog.

Founded in 2002, DMP has had a goal to … Read more

Intel on Tuesday provided more color to its plans for supercomputing chips that would eventually compete with offerings from Nvidia. Intel said it will provide further details next week at a supercomputing conference.

In the wake of Intel's cancelation of the "Larrabee" graphics chip project in December of last year, Intel is now focusing on an analogous project targeted at supercomputers, a market that is generally referred to as high-performance computing or HPC.

"We are...executing on a business opportunity derived from the Larrabee program and Intel research in many-core chips," Bill Kircos, an Intel … Read more