Intel turned personal in their battle against NVIDIA’s Ion earlier this week, with the release of a “Competitive Position Guide” that systematically attempted to undermine the HD-capable netbook graphics chipset. Now NVIDIA have struck back with their own document, somewhat obviously titled “NVIDIA response to Intel claims on Ion”, in which they address each of Intel’s criticisms.
Further fuel on the new iMac rumors this week, culminating in this supposed snap of Apple marketing materials that lists “High-performance NVIDIA graphics” among the specifications of the 20- and 24-inch machines. The company’s all-in-one desktop range is considered long overdue an update, with predictions circulating since October of last year that Apple would bring the iMac into line with other models by adding NVIDIA’s latest graphics chipsets.
However Apple themselves denied any update was coming, claiming that their holiday lineup was solid. According to some reports, resellers are low on stocks of the current iMac models, and education Apple sales teams have been given permission to offer special pricing on what remains.
Intel have taken their netbook chipset fight against NVIDIA into print, with the release of the “NVIDIA Ion Competitive Position Guide”. The document attempts to address several aspects of Ion which, Intel claim, make it a sub-par compared to their own chipsets. One such reason is the fact that Ion is a development of the existing MCP79M/NCP7A chipset family, rather than a brand new product, with Intel conveniently forgetting that their 945GSE chipset is close to four years old itself.
VIA have announced the S3 Graphics Chrome 540 GTX, which they’re calling the world’s most-connected high-definition video card. The card has HDMI, DisplayPort and Dual-Link DVI connections, together with an integrated Dolby 7.1 digital surround sound processor and 256MB of GDDR3 memory.
A leaked Intel slide seems to clear up some of the netbook chipset confusion from over the past month or so, by setting out a number of scenarios where the newer N280 1.66GHz Atom processor is not necessarily paired with the GN40 chipset. According to the slide, Intel are offering OEMs the choice of either the N280 processor with the existing 945GSE graphics chipset – which they describe as suitable for a “mainstream netbook”, and has a TDP of 8W – or the N280 with the GN40. Intel class that latter pairing as suitable for an “enhanced media netbook”, but it brings with it a significant power-requirement jump to 16.5W TDP.
Full-sized slide after the cut
Fujitsu’s AMILO Sa 3650 notebook has a clever solution to the ultraportable graphics problem: an separate video card, the External Graphics Processor (XGP), that can be plugged in for a pleasant burst of ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3870 with 512MB memory. Thing is, they also dropped the ball in making the XGP only work with external displays. Handy when you’re at your desk, but useless if you want to crunch some video while on the move. Thankfully the company is now preparing to release a driver that will let you access the boosted graphics performance on the Sa 3650’s own 13.3-inch display.
Apple have removed the NVIDIA driver update posted to their support site at the start of the week, and are yet to explain its disappearance. The software was intended to fix ongoing performance issues with the new Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI adapter required by its latest unibody MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air laptops if they are to work with large-scale monitors. It also promised improvements in HD video performance. However early feedback from some Apple users suggests that the update actually made things worse rather than better.
NVIDIA has today unveiled the industry’s first low-profile professional graphic card, shrinking their Quadro series GPU fitting for a small form factor computer, with the introduction of a quad-display capable Quadro NVS 420.
If last week we were hypnotized by slick smartphones and tiny “Digital Lifestyle PCs“, then this week let’s try to focus at least a little on something that might affect a whole lot more of us. AMD announced their latest notebook graphics platform, the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4000 series, along with the promise that gamers could expect twice the performance of the previous-generation HD 3000 series. It’s also the first to support GDDR5 RAM, as well as having support for Microsoft DirectX 10.1.
NVIDIA’s recently shrunken 55nm GT200 GPU has found its way into the GeForce GTX 285 and GTX 295 video cards, and those cards have ambled onto The Tech Report’s testing bench. Each card takes advantage of a different aspect of the new GT200 version: the single-chip GTX 285 benefits from the increased speed, while the dual-chip GTX 295 uses the smaller die to fit two GPUs onto one card.
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