News for Friday, 20 February 2009

Both companies have now engaged in a battle which will have to be settled by the justice. Intel announced to have launched a legal action in Delaware concerning the cross-license agreement signed with NVidia. The founder claims that it did NOT include the technologies linked to the Core i7. In other words, Intel does not want NVidia to develop any chipset for the forthcoming Core i7, and this will become true if the founder wins its action. However, it would restrict the choice of customers for Core i7 compatible motherboards...
NVidia officially reacted via its CEO Jen-Hsun Huan who claimed that Intel has initiated such legal action because NVidia is currently offering the best chipset solution. He also mentioned that it could be linked to NVidia's leadership position in GPGPU.
Intel is most likely acting in such way to preserve its monopoly while slowing down the current success of NVidia with its GF 9400 M chipset as well as the impressive Atom-dedicated ION platform. If Intel does not have to fear any strong competition from AMD for the coming months, it is obvious that the battle will be intensive around chipset and GPGPU. If the current legal action can block NVidia's future products, it could bring the company's market share to the same level as before the release of the GF 9400 M, and interfere with the launch of the Ion. For sure, the European commission is probably looking at such legal action is order to collect proof of Intel's monopoly in such field.

Apple experienced the worst sales in January over the last three years. Sales of Mac declined by 6% in USA in volume, and by 11% in values. This is a bad news if one considers that during the same period of time, PC sales increased by 2% driven by mini PC and netbook success.
Some analysts consider that Apple is suffering from its high-price schema while customers are currently looking for low price for computer. They also should not forget that all desktop models from Apple are currently at the end of their life cycle. Let's expect that such figures will push Apple to finally release upgrade for the iMac, Mac mini and Mac Pro at the best and most competitive price. Cupertino might also finally release a true Mac-netbook as the market is currently the only one in growth phase.

ChangeWave Research released the last update of its consumer PC purchasing survey aiming to evaluate customer satisfaction. Once more, Apple got the crone with 81% of customers, who purchased a Mac during the previous 90 days, said they were very satisfied. The second one is ASUS, driven by the success of its mini PC with 67% and Acer with 61%. Other key players in the computer market are Sony (56%), Dell (55%), Toshiba (52%) and Lenovo (50%)
If some Mac users are complaining about the quality of the recent Apple's-branded products, it seems that they remain higher than those from competitors.

An executive from Adobe, Russell Williams, indicated in an interview that the GPGPU will not dramatically boost performance of the CS4, yet.
If he confirmed that the future revision of Adobe Creative Suite will take advantage of the GPGPU, this solution will not be the revolution expected yet, so one should not dream of a miracle or of a huge performance gain. The reason is not linked to the GPU but rather the speed of the bandwidth of the interconnection wit the GPU. It is currently evaluated to be around 600 MB/s while one would need to get around 3 GB/s in order to fully benefit from GPGPU potential. So if one tries to overload the GPU by assigning too many tasks to it, one could then end up with a fennel phenomenon and a potential lost in performance.
So, Adobe is currently only working on speeding up display by the GPU, as the required bandwidth is then much lower than heavy raw computing tasks, as the GPU can directly deal with it, without having to send them back to the CPU. He then discussed about 2 important technologies to come in a near future: Larrabee from Intel and Snow Leopard from Apple. SO, one should not expect for experience huge performance gain in term of computing, but rather impressive and/or improved 2D/3D rendering by the use of GPGPU. To fully benefit from the GPGPU at the raw computing level, one will need to get the GPU and the CPU together and fully interconnected via high-speed technologies, a bit the solution chosen by Intel with the future Nehalem...

Hereafter is a photo, supposed to unveil the future Mac mini:

If true and not a fake, the new Mac mini would feature 5 USB ports, 1 Firewire 800, 1 DisplayPort as well as one mini-DV. For sure many Mac users are waiting for such model to finally come and replace the current outdated model. However, one should