News Intel says no to Nvidia's Ion

SOAB. I really want a new router/firewall/media server, and Atom+Ion would have fit my bill.

 

I think you've misunderstood how this platform is formed, but the advantage is that you get a super-low power draw platform that can accelerate HD video in a very small footprint.

 

The cpu doesn't do any HD video acceleration. All that is in hardware and it's in the video hardware. Intel is jut jamming market with ATOM to mess with Via. Via spent all the time developing and making products for the super small PC market and intel just wants to mess with it.
Nettops are going to happen. They aren't going to have any sort of windows on them cause windows will try to use expensive license to make them uncompetitive with desktops. Intel is going to have go from being so powerful that they can bully dell around to being so powerful they can bully Russia, china, and japan around. They are going to have to do this bullying with advertising dollars which will drain them all through the depression.

 

I think the best solution would be for intel to grab a small licensing fee from invidia and per sale

 

Well no, because it they do sell the two separately then there's nothing anti-competitive about it, and if Intel sells the package at a really really good price (I've still yet to find out) then it's just protecting its own business like any "bundle" offer.

John - Intel and Nvidia already have a cross licensing agreement with the front side bus allowing Nvidia to make MCPs/MCHs for Intel CPUs.

 

Wasn't the VIA Nano CPU better than the atom anyway?
Would it be hard for Nvidia to make the ION platform support the VIA CPU?

 

So are they going to dust off their old sales deals. We'll sell ya 10,000 atoms for 20 dollars each if you buy 20,000 8088's for 10 dollars each?

Well you know they will arrange it so that you get stuck with chips you either are forced to throw away to give the consumers what they want or keep putting out this nonsense stuff the computer industry keeps throwing on the channel. You could buy a 2.5inch full height hard drive that read from 8 heads on 4 platters at once and smoke 15k rpm enterprise drives. Hooked up to miniitx boards that had tiny processor socket, single chip computer, 1 pci slot and a pcix1 slot with a single upgradeable gpu socket. Or bigger 64 bit multicore version of same thing on microatx board with 4 gpu sockets.

If the video card makers are going to turn the computer into gGPU machines they need to put their processors on a Pin Grid Array package and bring in all the cooling and integrating advantages that comes from having everything intense on the motherboard plane. Video card makers need to stop with all the ultra parallelism and get sane number of cores and work on clock speeds.

Whatever happens there's going to be a war between cpu and gpu as cpu's go 16 and 32 core and gpu's go from 128 core and slow back down to 64 and 32 core and fast. If AMD and ATI can cooperate in the war and VIA and S3 can cooperate in the war. Well with Intel and Nvidia off trying trying to pimp slap each other the computer industry is going to get loud, noisy and screwed up while those 2 merged companies go off and silently kill them. However it ends up people are going to end up with way way way more computer than they will ever need as the software catches up.

Even crazy people with heads buried in computers will wake up and smell the economy in 1 more month. What happens after that. Who knows.

 

No, my guess is more like - buy the kit for $30, but the CPU alone is $20. That means a 9400M has to be $10 to be competitive but it's gonna be hitting more like $20-30, which is still reasonable, but instead of a $60-70 total board cost, you're now looking more like $100. For a netbook/nettop part though that makes it uncompetitive for most cost sensitive applications.

I've read the Atom die is so small it costs Intel just $4-6 a pop to make one, but obviously that doesn't count for all the additional costs (R&D is huge and they effectively made an entirely new CPU which would have taken some $$$).

 

so if they won't let nvidia pair the atom with a good chipset, are they actually going to release a decent chipset for the atom to go with? i was thinking about getting an atom desktop board, but i don't want an old and crappy 945 board with VGA-only graphics.

 

Why does 9400M have to be $10 to be competitive? It does alot more than Intels chip. I guess AMD and nvidia are just going to have to put so much graphical horsepower in on board graphics that consumers expect and demand it.

Don't believe that R@D cost junk. They have all these layouts stored in computers and all they have to do is cut and paste and then layout whatever external changes need patching up. Via's C series is just the old Cyrix layout shrunk and patched up to deal with how those ac characteristics deal with everything else in the computer. Not exactly an easy task but they don't start from the ground up and they haven't started from the ground up since 4 bit processors. All the computer power available today and all the work done to make the tools to make laying it out easier. That's all been done.

When total markets were 1 million pc's and alot of work had to be done for improvement the please don't margin squeeze us thing worked. I'm thinking margin squeezing is gonna happen. In 200 million and 1 billion pc markets with shares so large that nobody can control them all. People are going to have to focus their efforts or spread out so thin that they suck at everything they do. Then it will go totally GM where the camaro can't have x amount of horsepower because it competes against the corvette and well... A house divided against itself soon falls and everybody has to keep their house small enough to keep the divisions from occuring.

So i guess all ya can do is watch the computer industry kick it's own butt while trying to define the sense of self (be it competitors or customers or allies etc) that is doing the kicking. It's going to be interesting to watch.

 

Corporate warfare, a curious thing indeed. Intel is watching out for itself for sure. Even though it may come across as selfish a bit. Perhaps they have plans to combine the atom with a newer chipset. It would be in their better interest to do so (to remain competitive).

All well... I already have a netbook with said older chipset and prolly wont bother with a newer combination anyway. I cant be spending hundreds of dollars every time a company sneezes out a new product.

 

can someone explain what gGPU is, i got left out side when the memo was sent out..

 

I'd prefer Intel to not giving nVidia any chance to get their Ion platforms on the Atom. They deserve that because they're so high of themself. I wonder who's got whooped in the *ss now?

 

mGPU = motherboard GPU. It's exactly the same as IGP.

That doesn't even make sense - why stop consumer choice and a more feature filled chipset? It doesn't affect the Atom, it only offers an alternative.

If you don't like Nvidia (as reading from your other posts, this is evident), don't buy it.

 

Video cards have things in them called shaders. As the shaders get more and more sophisticated they become more and more capable of solving general tasks. Nvidia series 6 and 7 cards have shader 3.0. 8 and 9 cards have shader 4.0 which is direct x 10.

The new shader 4.0 cards have complete enough instruction sets to be able to solve alot of problems efficiently. So gGPU is using "generalized" graphics processing units as computers.

Like your computer with a radeon 3850 or 3870 video card or a 9800GT or GTX is capable of reencoding a video 20 times faster on the video card than on the CPU.
But technology is like that scene from Ace Ventura where he's letting the slinky walk down the stairs and it fails at the very end and the guy insists that the have to go and he snidely replies. "Sure let's do all the things YOU want to do first."

So before this technology can improve our day to day lives we have to build supercomputers for academia so they can sell us drugs that cost 10 thousand dollars a month and buy big huge energy pig computers so the pentegon can have secret unfunded supercomputers and "advertising" service providers can stuff profiled ads at us everywhere we go. Once all that is done we'll get really cool addictive games that chain 50 million people at a time to a virtual world for years on end.

I'm crying at the heart touching wonderfulness of all that is being created right now. It's going to be so wonderful and uplifting to all of mankind.