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• CES 2007: VoodooPC introduces new Envy gaming notebook

  Las Vegas (NV) - VoodooPC introduced its newest product, the Voodoo Envy HW:201 notebook PC, today at CES 2007. The Envy HW:201 notebook features two Nvidia GeForce Go 7950 GTX GPUs running in Nvidia SLI mode and AMD Turion 64 X2 dual-core mobile technology. The ENVY HW:201 lets users choose between two NVIDIA graphics cards - the NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX with 512 MB of RAM for gaming or the NVIDIA Quadro FX 2500M with 512 MB of RAM for workstation tasks. The HW:201 also features a 20.1" high-resolution screen, which VoodooPC says is the biggest notebook display on the market. VoodooPC, which is now part of Hewlett-Packard following last year's acquisition, demonstrated the new notebooks at its booth within the massive HP domain of the exhibit hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. While I didn't get a chance to play any games on the Envy HW:201, I did have a chance to see how well the notebook displayed video on its large hi-resolution screen. The Envy HW:201 was playing "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," and the picture clarity was excellent. The ENVY HW:201, which measures 18.75" x 13.5" x 1.9", also boasts 320 GB of storage using two hard drives, as well as a Voodoo Envy webcam, Bluetooth and wireless A/B/G networking and the Voodoo Envy theater audio system. "We had this in our product roadmap prior to the HP acquisition," Rahul Sood, co-founder and chief technologist of VoodooPC. "We wanted to make a faster notebook with more power and storage for playing games and DVDs." Now that the acquisition has been completed, Sood says VoodooPC will take advantage of HP's technology, brain trust, and connections to make even more powerful and better designed notebooks. "Usually with notebook makers, you're stuck using the same parts as everyone else," Sood said. "That's not going to happen anymore. We're going to be able to leverage HP's technology. Plus, being part of HP has opened up some doors for us, so manufacturers are calling us now instead of us calling them. So we're going to create some deadly products very soon."

• Fast forward to November of 2007. AMD is in trouble and the natural call for Jen-Hsun Huang surfaced again. Approaching Ruiz and the gang with the attitude "what goes around, comes around" and "I want to buy you now" did not go well, we hear. But business is business and is never personal. There was no reason why the deal would not have gone through. All Nvidia needed was enough money to take the company AND the debt. A repeat of the 3dfx charade is not an option here. However, in order for that to happen, the only way to go was to get support from partners from AMD's eco-system and this is where the trouble apparently started. While Nvidia is achieving record success with sales, it has done so by weakening its partners. From a company that started selling GPUs with memory back in GeForce3 days (and threw Guillemot/Hercules out of the race), Nvidia turned into a company that now sells a complete card, and partners are nothing else but "sticker stampers". This crashed the profits of all the companies involved, and many disappeared. With Nvidia controlling the AIB market for both ATI and Nvidia products, Taiwan would rush into Intel's arms. Memories of what happened with 3dfx when an ex-Siemens CEO took over the company are still livid in the world of graphics card manufacturers. The second unfavorable factor is the debt-to-equity ratio. Nvidia has a lot of money in the bank, currently about $2.4 billion, but to eat up a company like AMD, it would have to cough up somewhere in tune of $10 billion, since AMD is $5.4 billion in debt. But with AMD on-board, any rumors that Nvidia is toast would be eliminated forever. Also, Intel would have to face Nvidia on almost every front of its businesses. Nvidia can easily diversify into a networking company (it bought a 3Com team ages ago, which is the reason for the brilliant "plug'n'play" connectivity in nForce chipsets), into a handheld company (APX 2500 is much more important than you might think at first), desktop platforms (Phenom+nForce+GeForce), mobile platforms (Turion+nForce+GeForce), workstation platforms (Opteron+nForce Pro+Quadro), server platforms (Opteron+nForce Pro+Tesla), HPC platforms (Opteron+nForce Pro+Tesla), etc. And, of course, with the recent purchase of Ageia, nothing would stop the company from implementing PhysX in every pore of its DNA. Sadly, Huang's fault is the fact that he believes in the value of a single company. Just like the company destroyed the 3dfx line-up and did not use the world's second IT brand (Voodoo, just after Pentium) to its full potential, we have no doubt that Nvidia would cannibalize ATI and basically screw up its chipset development, as well as the development of future Radeons. Instead of creating synergy, the company would probably lose valuable time in preparations for the arrival of Nehalem and Sandy Bridge from the CPU side, and Larrabee from the cGPU side.