Talking Heads: VGA Manager Edition, September 2010
The Graphics Card Survey: August 2010
This should be the first in what is a long series of surveys compiled from leading technical people in the graphics business. So, who is participating? Let us put it this way, if a company currently makes video cards, they are more than likely answering our questions. We are drawing from many VGA companies here, some of which are AMD- or Nvidia-exclusive.
Thus far, most of this quarter’s chatter has centered on GeForce GTX 460. Nvidia is back on the attack, but it is still missing a compelling DirectX 11 contender in the lower- to mid-level performance space. Perhaps even more present on everyone’s minds are Intel’s Sandy Bridge design and AMD’s Llano APU. Both companies promise their CPU/GPU hybrids will be “revolutionary,” “game changers,” and a way to “shake up market share.” We’ve all heard these clichés in quarterly earning calls and regular press briefings.
AMD and Intel have been on the marketing circuit, making sure everyone gets a sense that they can deliver integrated graphics at the performance levels demanded by mainstream buyers already sour on today’s mediocre solutions. In our opinion, AMD is more on a marketing warpath compared to Intel, making sure the buzz for Fusion dominates any discussion about the company. It has more to gain here, after all.
From these two topics we drew up four questions:
- AMD is currently benefiting from a visible gap in Nvidia’s discrete product portfolio. At the moment, it lacks Fermi-based DX11 products below the $200 GeForce GTX 460. In the next three months, do you expect to see Nvidia address the low-end to mid-range desktop graphic space with derivative DX11 products?
- CPU/GPU hybrid designs like Sandy Bridge and Llano potentially eliminate the need for a separate graphics card. Historically, integrated graphics have been inadequate for everything above productivity-oriented desktops. Do you think the integrated graphics processors in the first generation of CPU/GPU hybrids are powerful enough to replace low-end to mid-range discrete graphic solutions?
- Will there ever come a time when integrated graphics processors with programmable logic make discrete graphics cards unnecessary?
- As Intel and AMD integrate more functionality into their host processors, what opportunities remain for VGA vendors to add value or differentiate their products?
Ground Rules
We are inevitably dealing with sensitive topics here, including industry trade secrets, proprietary company strategies, and nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) pertaining to unannounced products. We want to make it clear that we fully support and believe in the purpose of NDAs and the preservation of industry secrets, as well as company strategies. These make our industry stronger, not weaker. For example, if Intel was able to change early in its Tick-Tock cycle to develop a product specifically to address the leaked specifications of an upcoming AMD processor, all of the investment capital from that leaked project becomes a sunk cost.
For this reason, information regarding industry trade secrets and proprietary company strategies is edited out, unless it's already considered common knowledge. It’s interesting information, of course, but it really doesn’t serve any purpose other than journalistic sensationalism. Information relating to specific products is generally withheld, minus a few exceptions. Information regarding specific product releases is edited to the quarter, rather than pointing at specific dates. First amendment and fourth estate aside, we are not bound by any NDAs pertaining to what our sources are telling us (NDAs usually come into play when the press gets samples close to the date of announcement).
Additionally, Chris and I have made the executive decision to withhold all participant names and the names of their respective companies for the following reasons.
- The identity of our participants serves no real purpose for the sake of the article. It is what they say that matters.
- Our participants now have the freedom to say whatever is on their minds, free from their company’s legal and media relation teams, without risking getting into trouble.
- We need this to be an ongoing survey. Anything that can get these people into hot water means an ongoing industry dialogue will be cut very short.
The anger that people showed towards Vista and it's horrible bloat should be directed to all major software companies. None of them have achieved anything worthwhile in a very long time.
Since the start of that idea, believed that IGP on the processor die could serve to offload math operations and complex transformations from CPU to IGP, freeing CPU cycles for doing what is intended to do.
Many years ago Apple made somewhat similar to this with their Quadra models that sported a dedicated DSP to offload some tasks from the processor to the DSP.
My personal view on all this hype is that we're going to a different computing model, from a point that all the work was directed to the CPU and making some small steps making that specialized processors around the CPU do part of the work of the CPU (think on the first fixed instruction graphics accelerators, sound cards that off-load CPU, Physx and others).
From a standalone CPU -> SMP ->A-SMP (Asymetric SMP).
But great read.
I agree with Snort and silky salamandr, we are held back by developments on the software side. Maybe because developers need to take backwards compatibility into consideration. Just take games for example: developers would like to keep the minimum and even recommended specs down so that they can get more customers to buy. So we see games made tough for the top-end hardware but, thru tweaks and reduced detail, can be played on a 6-year old Pentium 4 with a 128mb AGP card.
From a business consumer standpoint, and the fact that I work for a company that still uses tens of thousands of Pentium 4s for productivity related purposes, I figure that adoption of the GPU/CPU in the business space will not happen for another 5-7 years AFTER they launch. There is simply no need for an i3 if a Core2 derivative Pentium Dual Core or Athlon X2 could still do spreadsheet, word processing, email, research, etc. Pricing will definitely play into the timelines as the technology ages (or matures) but both companies will have to get money to pay for all that R&D from somewhere, right?
I meant nvidia and ati dedicated low end GPUs
1 - Tom's start a pool on wich questions do we want to ask?
2 - I kinda hoped to hear something about what's next. We know about NDA's, but it would be nice to hear if AMD have intention to adopt new features like a proprietary 3D solution or what both AMD and Nvidia think about how a next generation VGA should do (or wich architecture should it have) to be successfull on todays perspective.
Basically, they need something that blows the 5770 out of the water and costs the same or less... because AMD will lower the 5770 prices when that happens, so it can't perform on par.
oh, and the 100% pie chart for question 1 is too funny.
the whole motherboard can be redesigned to give 800W to the cpu socket if necessary.
The problem is that a given piece of silicon can only dissipate so much heat, regardless of what functions are creating it. This remains true no matter how much you shrink the process. If you increase the area over which that heat is generated / dissipated, you either increase the size of the die to the point where the likelihood of manufacturing defects increases dramatically (e.g. look at Fermi's yields), or you use separate dies and/or chips; i.e. break some functions out, in this case into a discrete graphics solution. Unless or until heat dissipation becomes a non-issue, this is why the hybrid solution will always remain at least one generation behind.
If I was to use this information to cast further into the future, I think that Corser had it about right: our computers are becoming more and more discretized, and this will be put to use by software much more readily, allowing for a single processor that works well for photoshop utilizing only IGP, but then when paired with an appropriate discrete card, splits processing between the units and allows a smooth gaming experience.
I'm all for this, more parts means easier and more modular upgrades instead of the one-size-fits-all approach; it also allows for cheaper and easier repairs!