Charlie Foxtrot

Posts Tagged ‘fermi’

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.

In a surprising display, Nvidia faked the introduction of its latest video card, because it simply doesn’t have boards to show, because it didn’t get enough parts to properly make demo boards.  Notice that the three screws that hold the end plate on are, well, generic wood screws. Large flat -head Phillips screws. Home Depot-grade screws that do not sit flush. If a card is real, you hold it on with the bolts on either side of the DVI connector.   If you look at the back of the fake Fermi, [from this PC Watch picture], you can see that the expected DVI connector wires are not there, just solder-filled holes. No stubs, no tool marks from where they would be cut out. Basically, the DVI port isn’t connected to anything with solder, so they had to use screws on the plate.