Nvidia

Welcome back to the ongoing Speeds and Feeds coverage of Hot Chips 19 at Stanford. They give us comfy chairs and free Wi-Fi, so blogging about it is the least I can do. By the way, Dean Takahashi of the San Jose Mercury News is also blogging from Hot Chips, so you can get another perspective on the event here.

Session 2 is the first of two sessions of "Multi-Core and Parallelism" presentations. This one happens to be all about Nvidia. Session 3, up next, will include presentations about AMD's ATI Radeon HD 2900, Intel's 80-core "Tera-Scale" processor, the TRIPS project at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Tile Processor from Tilera.

The first presentation in this session, "The Nvidia GeForce 8800 GPU," is an overview of that chip. As I mentioned in my Siggraph coverage, the 8800 includes 128… Read more

Advanced Micro Devices plans to issue a critical security fix Monday afternoon for a flaw in its ATI driver, which currently could expose the Vista kernel to malicious attackers.

AMD's ATI, as well as competitors Nvidia and other graphics chipmakers, were cited as having poorly written drivers, which could allow malicious attackers to use the technology as an entry point for writing code to the Vista kernel, according to a recent article in the Inquirer.

AMD plans to release a new ATI Catalyst package this afternoon, said Jon Carvill, an AMD spokesman.

"The market recently discovered a potential … Read more

Nvidia painted a pretty picture in the graphics market during the second quarter.

The company's market share soared by 81 percent compared with a year ago, as it overtook AMD's ATI division and erased some of Intel's lead in the market for PC graphics, according to new data from Jon Peddie Research. Intel held 37.6 percent of the market in the second quarter, while Nvidia garnered 32.6 percent and AMD had 19.5 percent.

Intel holds the lead in graphics by virtue of its integrated graphics chipsets, which ship with low-end desktops and lots of … Read more

Nvidia apparently has an answer to AMD's Power Xpress hybrid graphics technology. AMD announced last December that its forthcoming Puma mobile platform (due in the first half of 2008) will introduce Power Xpress, which lets laptops switch between discreet graphics when plugged in and integrated graphics when running on battery power.

According to reports, Nvidia is working on a similar but slightly different dual-graphics solution it's calling Hybrid SLI. When running on battery power, Hybrid SLI, like AMD's Power Xpress, will run solely on integrated graphics. When connected to a wall socket, however, both the discreet graphics … Read more

Nvidia's going after a new market with a lineup of chips for the high-performance computing sector.

The Tesla chips can be plugged into a PCI Express slot to drop an additional 500 gigaflops (500 billion floating point operations per second) of performance into a scientific computing workstation. That's a lot of flops for scientists to use when modeling genomes or sizing up potential oil fields.

Nvidia also trotted out a Tesla workstation and server based on the technology. It's a bit of a departure for a company best known for its 3D graphics chips found in the … Read more

Buying a PC is always confusing, and chip companies aren't doing as good a job with some important customers as they might like, according to a new survey from In-Stat.

Even early adopters of technology are having trouble associating the right brand with the right company, said Ian Lao, an analyst with In-Stat and author of the report. Some brands, like Via's Eden, are only recognized by half of early adopters, he said. (I'd actually say that's pretty good for a company as tiny as Via).

The most well-recognized brand is still Intel's Pentium brand, … Read more

It was hard to tell which version of America's Next Top Model winner Adrianne Curry got more attention during Nvidia's GeForce 8800 launch event in San Jose, Calif., yesterday. Hard-core gamers drooled, hooted and hollered just as much for the digital version of Adrianne (pictured) created on the new graphics hardware unveiled by the company as they did for the real version, who took the stage shortly after the digital image appeared.

Curry, famous for winning a reality show (of sorts), was joined onstage by her new husband, Christopher Knight. You may remember him as everyone's favorite … Read more

For many years the idea of a "gaming laptop" was something of an oxymoron, unless you were into intense sessions of Myst or Spider Solitaire. These days, laptop GPUs can go head-to-head with all but the fastest desktop models, and laptops have even moved into the SLI era.

This week's Digital Life show was Nvidia's choice to unveil its latest mobile GPU, the GeForce Go 7950 GTX, which the company claims is the fastest laptop graphics chip on the market. It's immediately available in select systems, including the newest revision of Dell's high-end XPS … Read more

Nvidia stock perked up Wednesday on rumors Intel might buy the graphics chip maker to counter rival Advanced Micro Devices' acquisition of ATI Technologies, but Merrill Lynch analyst Joe Osha doubts the idea.

"We think it's wrong to assume that Nvidia must be a potential target for Intel just because AMD is buying ATI Technologies. What AMD wanted out of its deal was a workable platform strategy. Intel has that already," Osha said in a report published Thursday.

Indeed, Intel already has a strong business selling chipsets, the chips that support central processors, that have built-in graphics. … Read more