News for Friday, 19 March 2010

By refusing to license the technology required for developing controllers/chipset for its Clarkdale and Arrendale CPUs, Intel prevents NVIDIA to access the market where its last product, the GeForce 9400M has been a hit and most likely pushed Intel to react in such a way. While this story will find an end in front of the court, NVIDIA has to find a new market as its chipset can only be found on AMD CPU-based hardware.

So, NVIDIA announced the end of its R&D teams dedicated to chipset development, and the creation of new department dedicated to the design and development of Tegra chips. This is now a team composed of 650 people that will be working on such chips, consider by NVIDIA CEO as more power than the A4 developed by Apple. With such move, NVIDIA will not be in direct competition with Intel, as the founder does not really work hard on developing ARM-based CPU; for the time being...

If though we thought that the standard USB 3.0 would not manage to take off since it did not have the support of Intel and especially since it was not present in its chipsets of 2010.  Today, a good number of PC manufacturers, portables and offices machines, add on the mother board of their products a controller able to add USB 3.0. The leading controller of this adaptation is manufactured by NEC.

NEC announced that they have already sold 2 million since September 2009. The demand is increasing, NEC announced that the monthly production of this chip would be pushed as of the next month to 2 million units monthly. Now when Intel decides to support this standard, there will be already many millions of computers all over the world which will support it and certainly more, since other chipmakers will not miss taking advantage of this hole.

According to Digitimes, Intel is having problem to deliver enough units of mobile Arrendale Core i3/i5/i7 to computer manufacturers. The problem seems to be linked to some companies, such as Acer that placed orders for huge amount of chips, probably betting on a quick economic come-back after the gap. So, Intel would have decided to favor its main/largest customers first, answering other orders later when production would have fully ramped up. It remains unclear if this is the reason why we are still waiting for the update of Apple MacBook and MacBook Pro models based on Core ix. It is possible that Apple and Intel are not as close as it used to be 2 years ago, and the founder decided to deal first with Acer and Co than with Apple... same thing could apply for the delay of the new Mac Pro...

Sony announced to be working with Intel and google in order to improve internet contents on its current and futures TV models. Google would be working on a dedicated OS derived from Android, aka Google TV software. The remote control featuring a keyboard would be designed and manufactured by Logitech. 

Such information could push Apple to (finally) update the Apple TV or bring a true new version in order to boost sales and turn this hobby into a success, as without a fully functional Apple TV Apple and the iTunes Store will be kick out from the emerging and juicy online video market.