Charlie Foxtrot

Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Hot on the heels of the Larrabee fiasco, Intel continues to take a beating on the graphics front, this one for PineTrail.  After the promise of more performance, comes the sad reality.

“Those hailing the Pine Trail as a godsend to netbooks graphics ultimately misconceived what the GMA 3150 controller could do. Compared to NVIDIA’s ION platform (currently the only way to get good graphics on a netbook) it is completely out of its league, and only looks good compared to the original Atom’s GMA 950.”

Graphics performance hasn’t really changed with Pine Trail. ION will continue to deliver 5-10x faster performance than Pine Trail systems. If you care about watching video on YouTube or Hulu, want to edit videos or convert them to your smartphone, or play mainstream games, ION netbooks and nettops are the best choice. Pine Trail provides a very limited experience. Too bad for netbook buyers.

“And this gives them the ability to take easy, cheap, sloppy routes for chip development, while also hurting the consumer by trying to prevent a product like the Ion 2 from making its way to netbooks. Plain and simple like the early 2000s: a complacent Intel is a bad Intel.”

Despite Intel’s actions, we have innovative products that we are excited to introduce to the market in the months ahead. We know these products will bring with them some amazing breakthroughs that will surprise the industry.  An Intel CPU and an NVIDIA GPU make a great combo.

Alienware made a splash at CES with the Alienware M11x, a CNET Best of CES 2010 winner.  It is a tiny laptop full of GPU horsepower.  They took a sub 12-inch laptop and equipped it with a powerful GeForce GT 335.  Mad gaming.  Good battery life.  Only $799.  15-inch power in 11.6-inch package.

“In terms of performance and form factor alone, the M11x is an amazing machine, but when you pair that with its alluring starting price of just $799, it is tough to beat.”

I’ve seen it billed as the world’s smallest gaming rig and world’s most powerful sub 12-inch laptop.  Another world’s first, made possible by NVIDIA technology. Check it out in this video for the scoop or take a tour with Laptop Magazine.

GPU Computing is the use of the massively parallel architecture of the graphics processing unit (GPU) as a computational engine that can be programmed with high level languages and APIs. Fact is, More and more processing is being moved from the CPU to the GPU.  We already have a great roster of applications that run on the NVIDIA CUDA architecture that consumers love. Video has been the killer application for the GPU, and a number of new video applications are able to tap into the computing power of the GPU.  Adobe has added support for GPU computing to their popular CS4 Suite, Flash 10.1 and their Mercury Playback Engine. Now Microsoft is adding Office 2010 to the list.

“Microsoft has published the hardware requirements for the upcoming Office 2010 Suite, and people noticed one surprising addition: A DirectX compatible Video Processor.  Over at the TechNet blog, Microsoft explains why:

If your computer has a GPU, it lets us perform graphics rendering tasks (like drawing charts in Excel, or transitions in PowerPoint) in the GPU instead of in the CPU, which parallelizes work and speeds up performance. This is particularly relevant for users of PowerPoint 2010, which will introduce some awesome new graphics and video integration features (more info at the PowerPoint team blog).”

CPUs are an important component of the PC. However, too often PCs ship with insufficient graphics processing power and the result is an unbalanced PC that can’t run the applications you want. For the best experience, you should buy a PC with the right balance of CPU/GPU horsepower.