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Looks like now is a great time for Intel's GPU Larabee to come out

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Shiggity

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The Business of Tech: Rough Times All Around For The GPU Crew

For barely 2 weeks in to July, it has been a surprisingly rough time for the GPU sector. Amid the already weak global and national economies, both companies have been feeling a great deal of pain on the business and financial sides of things. It's been an interesting month to say the least, so we'll waste no time and jump right in to the middle of things.

AMD:
AMD has had the better month so far, as their sole immediate problem is only that their stock has hit a 5-year low as of today. When you hear concerns about the liquidity of AMD, this has a lot to do with it. The company is struggling to keep its market capitalization above what amounts to a "quaint" 3 billion dollars; which for the sake of comparison is only a bit more than half of the 5.4 billion dollar price tag on ATI when they purchased them in 2006. And while this isn't an immediate problem for the company, it doesn't give them much leverage for raising further capital to combat their ongoing losses or much to work with in terms of employee stock-based compensation.


AMD's Q2 earnings are due out on the 17th, although AMD may wish this was not the case. It will be yet another losing quarter, it's only a question of how much. AMD is expected to lose around 200 million dollars, but with the brisk sales of the latest Radeon 4850 and 4870 parts there's a good chance that it could be better as long as there aren't additional unexpected CPU-side losses. Surprisingly, this would still be AMD's best quarter in the last couple of years. We'll have more on this next week once their earnings are out.


For those of you who have been following AMD's situation this doesn't amount to much in the way of new news, but it does highlight the fact that the company is running out cash and stock price to bleed. Should the company manage to hit rock bottom, not a lot of good can come from it.

NVIDIA:



Believe it or not, AMD may have the more enviable situation at the moment. NVIDIA's stock price is nowhere near their own record lows, but that hasn't stopped the company's stock from experimenting with the laws of gravity. The price has dropped by over 33% in a single day this month, illustrating just how bad things are for NVIDIA at the moment. Right now NVIDIA is dealing with these specific issues:


1) Q2 revenue is now expected to come in well below earlier estimates, prompting the company to issue an earnings warning that was the result of the steep drop in stock price. What should have been another profitable quarter for the company may now be their first loss in the last few years.


2) The source of #1 has a lot to do with their current product situation: The new GTX 2xx series is not selling as well or for as much as anyone predicted. The reviews and subsequent price drops tell the tale: NVIDIA's most expensive GPU yet simply doesn't perform well enough compared to AMD's latest parts to justify the price NVIDIA was targeting. What will be AMD's boon is NVIDIA's loss, a great deal of GPU profit.


3) Another black hole for revenue this quarter will be defective products. NVIDIA is expecting to lose some 200 million dollars on replacing defective products above and beyond the usual failure rates. They have not specified what exactly is broken and in need of replacement, but the best theory we've heard so far is that there's a substrate problem with some of their mobile GPUs, resulting in the chips breaking their own substrate at temperatures they should be able to handle. 200 million dollars buys a lot of chips, so this doesn't appear to be a small problem. The bigger loss however will be the loss of faith in the company from OEMs who will be repairing laptops using these defective chips.


4) Finally, just to add insult to injury, Rambus is suing NVIDIA. We've talked about the saga of Rambus before, and this is just the continuation of it. The courts have upheld their patents in spite of their underhanded scheming with the JEDEC, so now they're free to go after anyone and everyone involved with memory. NVIDIA is being sued for infringement due to their memory controllers on their GPUs and motherboard chipsets, stretching from their early SDR controllers to their latest GDDR3 controllers. Rambus is playing hard and fast, on top of monetary damages they're looking for an injunction against NVIDIA to keep them from shipping further infringing products, most likely to encourage the company to settle out of court rather than risk a crippling injunction. In either case the situation is an expensive one for NVIDIA, they'll have to spend a great deal of cash on defending themselves, and should they settle Rambus will undoubtedly ask for a great deal of cash too (along with a percentage of all GPU and chipset sales).


In the long term NVIDIA is still in a better position than AMD since they're not continually losing money hand over fist, but it doesn't mean that these problems won't have ramifications in the future. NVIDIA wouldn't be the first company to shift around its product lines or slow down their R&D efforts in order to make a quarter or two look better, although for obvious reasons we hope it does not come to that. This much bad news at once is certainly unprecedented for NVIDIA.



This generation of cards may be pretty good, but all these recent pitfalls will surely make the release of the next generation slower or worse. Pretty convenient for Intel to step into the GPU market eh.
 
LOL @ reading for x amount of months how ATI/AMD were never going to survive now they have two competetive cards out and intel are going to release a gpu in an undisclosed amount of time untested and all of a sudden nvidia are on the ropes.
 
LOL @ reading for x amount of months how ATI/AMD were never going to survive now they have two competetive cards out and intel are going to release a gpu in an undisclosed amount of time untested and all of a sudden nvidia are on the ropes.

AMD is bringing ATI down with them though, that's the thing.

Plus rumors of EVGA and XFX defecting from Nvidia right around this time? Pretty good timing again!
 
I still am not convinced Intel can compete with ATI and Nvidia on the high-end. That would be a sad day; Intel already determines the direction of computer hardware.


I am not one to ***** over plagiarism usually, but if you're gonna copy and paste an article at least give the source so we know if it's a reliable one.
 
I still am not convinced Intel can compete with ATI and Nvidia on the high-end. That would be a sad day; Intel already determines the direction of computer hardware.


I am not one to ***** over plagiarism usually, but if you're gonna copy and paste an article at least give the source so we know if it's a reliable one.

k...guess I forgot doesn't fly here.

The larabee will not compete at the high end for GPU's after it's first release, no way. It will scale incredibly fast though, that's what scares Nvidia and ATI to death.
 
I am a bit confused.

I the 2 major discrete GPU comapnies are having trouble making a profit, how is a good time for intel to come into the field?

On the one hand, I can see how one might say, here is the chance to knock them both out..

But in reality, if the best names in discrete graphics are having problems, why would a "relative" unknown think its a good time to start. Trying to get a piece of the rapidly shrinking pie?
 
I am a bit confused.

I the 2 major discrete GPU comapnies are having trouble making a profit, how is a good time for intel to come into the field?

On the one hand, I can see how one might say, here is the chance to knock them both out..

But in reality, if the best names in discrete graphics are having problems, why would a "relative" unknown think its a good time to start. Trying to get a piece of the rapidly shrinking pie?

Better than if ATI and Nvidia were posting profits.

The larabee could also do something unique that we don't know about yet, like possibly accelerating CPU tasks, since it is X86 based and built like a CPU.
 
Better than if ATI and Nvidia were posting profits.

The larabee could also do something unique that we don't know about yet, like possibly accelerating CPU tasks, since it is X86 based and built like a CPU.


Wouldnt that make it weaker then anything ATI/nVidia offers?
 
Wouldnt that make it weaker then anything ATI/nVidia offers?

The architecture may at first be a problem, but with the way CPUs are moving forward in the amount of cores, I think the architecture will eventually be what gives Larabee it's boost. And it would be very cool to see a "GPU" that could take on some of the background tasks while working on the desktop/surfing.
 
This is my personal thought on Larabee. So far I feel that Larabee wont be the most powerful gaming card on the market due to very minor rumors and the like. However to me what is the most promising thing about Larabee is that it will be a step up from CUDA and the like.

Programing apps to take advantage of Larabee will be easy as its the same as programing apps for a cpu due to x86, and you know intel will release development tools for it if they can think at all. Also like all gpus Larabee is extremely paralell and should be able to perform some tasks faster then a cpu. This way Larabee can take over for any task it is faster for in general computer use after programing comes out. I feel that if Larabee can do that well then they will have a far bigger market then the gamers. The platform that intel is developing on already is better then CUDA and Larabee isnt even out yet.
 
hmm i havnt been reading much about intels cpu/gpu solution larabee...claiming they will wipe the floor with standard gpu...but whats this about CUDA (physx programming if im not mistaken) if it is implented it will massively boost gpu performance...or am just becoming confused,.
 
CUDA lets GPU's do CPU tasks significantly faster / better.

I'm just excited for Larabee, more competition, and the first ever X86 based GPU. It's silly to think it'll even be close to Nvidia and ATI's high end.
 
CUDA lets GPU's do CPU tasks significantly faster / better.

so does that mean..significant FPS increase..makes crysis more playable..or this just more gimmickery by nvidia

AHHAHA...i was thinking that also..i mean im so used to seeing intel largely manufacturing onboard intel graphics..funny to comprehend them making a proper video card...but i hope the larabee works well as a separate gfx card...
 
While Larabee is an exciting prospect, if for no other reason than its different architectural approach, I think I'll reserve any high hopes for it until I see it in action. At this point, I'd honestly be happy if Intel would hurry up with the G45 onboard. I mean, really, that's their current specialty, lower-end integrated stuff, and they can't even get that out the door without major delays. That's not even counting the glacial driver support for the chips they already have out.
 
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