Jon Peddie Back Pages - It's all about the pixels

Stupid TVs

Posted by Jon Peddie on July 18th 2005 | Discuss
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CE companies better smarten up or they're going to hand the home entertainment market to the PC You know how dogs can hear high-pitched sounds, and how some of us have really sensitive noses (like me)? Well, I also have a pretty keen video eye and a sense of proportion. That's not a brag, it's actually more of a whine, because when you have sensitivities you tend to get abused a lot. And my acuities are being abused by stupid TV makers. How? I'll tell you how. Have you noticed how the public, and maybe you too, are just accepting that…

Integrated graphics will kill discrete

Posted by Jon Peddie on June 20th 2005 | Discuss
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FIGURE 1. Simple projection of Intel's IGP growth in market share. (Source: Jon Peddie Research) I've made a lot of predictions in my 20+ years here at JPR/A, and fortunately most of them have been correct, making profits for our clients and allowing me to keep my job. One prediction I made in 1998 as SGI was about to launch the Cobalt IGP (which they called Integrated Visual Computing, IVC, architecture) for their 320 and 540 workstations was that it was a harbinger of graphics processors for the future. Mistakenly, sitting at Dave Orton's desk (he was senior VP and in…

Enormous changes at the last minute

Posted by Kathleen Maher on June 6th 2005 | Discuss
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Apple's Switchers program takes a U-turn Well, the pigs are flying today. In the days before this issue was going to press, the news started breaking that Apple would be transitioning to Intel's x86 processors. Not any x86 processor, mind you, but Intel processors. No doubt we were not the only ones who greeted the speculation with a resounding, Piffle (or words to that effect). Obviously, as the rumors persisted and moved up the editorial food chain to The Wall Street Journal the story started growing legs. THIS YEAR IT'S TIGER, but Apple is hoping that Leopard is the real killer…

Is the third processor the third rail?

Posted by Jon Peddie on May 23rd 2005 | Discuss
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By now you have all heard of Ageia, the new company on the scene with a co-processor designed to run physics algorithms. It's a clever and novel idea, and one that has people excited. It also has its fair share of naysayers. No doubt it's not going to be an easy road for the company, but it follows interesting and successful footsteps of other co- or third-processor efforts. The first co-processor in PC land was the 80287 floating-point co-processor introduced by Intel in 1982, and quickly copied by AMD, Weitek, Chips & Technologies, and others. In fact, some of the copiers…

E3 games—it’s all about the puppy

Posted by Jon Peddie on May 9th 2005 | Discuss
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The games and videos of games we were shown at the press briefings by Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony, plus what was on the floor in the big stands like EA, Activision, Ubisoft, and others, had four things in common: • Very loud and overdriven subwoofers • Outstanding complex and beautiful 3D models of the world (in which the game is played) • Incredible and shocking violence and destruction • Ridiculous objectification of women and their chests Of all the major game developers and publishers, only Nintendo had a mix of games that truly were for everyone and not just young wanna-be…

Is the handheld market the PC revisited?

Posted by Jon Peddie on April 18th 2005 | Discuss
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We've all heard that the handheld market is just like the PC market was, and the analogy is based on processors getting more powerful and more applications being added to the platform. It's true that there are some similarities, and the handheld industry has benefited from some of the learning curves of the PC. Among the similarities between the PC and the HH are color bit-mapped screens. The introduction of color bit-mapped screens gave the PC market growth a kick and it had the same effect on the handheld platform. However, cameras had a tremendous kick in the sales curve for…

Games on handhelds – never happen

Posted by Jon Peddie on March 21st 2005 | Discuss
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That's how I was feeling. I had just finished "Doom 3." It took me a little longer than most folks because I interrupted myself to play "Half-Life 2" and then interrupted that to play at "Halo 2," having totally given up on "Far Cry." Don't expect to see these games on your phone any time soon. The graphics/art work and 3D models in "Doom 3" were, to say the least, spectacular. A little better than "Half-Life 2" and lots better than "Far Cry," despite all the hype about "Far Cry's" water (which was indeed good). "Half-Life 2" got my vote for…

JPR predicts the trends

Posted by Jon Peddie on January 24th 2005 | Discuss
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JPR's newest study, Handheld Multimedia Devices, is turning out to be one of our best-sellers. And the Consumer Electronics Show held at the start of every year in Las Vegas has been a perfect opportunity for us to conduct further research and to check out some of our assumptions. At CES we saw new products that confirmed some of our predictions. Here are just a few examples. Watching TV on a phone. We forecasted the TV mobile phone market to begin to take off in 2005 and were happy to see LG's slick new KV3600 go public. Additional examples will be…

Why do people like graphics so much?

Posted by Jon Peddie on December 6th 2004 | Discuss
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Graphics companies over time. We were sipping wine in Seoul, Korea, when my old friend, colleague, and client Neil Trevett of 3Dlabs asked, "Why do people like to do graphics so much?" He asked that after I had told him that I had identified 30 companies offering graphics processors in one form or another for handhelds (see table below). Neil and I both have gray hair now, and we started reminiscing about the waves we've seen in the graphics business. The first one was the graphics display terminal, which led to the workstation market. An adjunct to it was the simulation…

Life-changing developments

Posted by Jon Peddie on November 22nd 2004 | Discuss
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We're just recovering from PT/Expo Comm China 2004 conference, where 10 halls of screaming, dancing, photo-snapping skinny Chinese women flaunted their mobile phones, each one promising to change my life. One of the problems with being in this industry for a while is avoiding cynicism. It's not really that difficult because of the constant stream of truly innovative and novel things that get introduced every week, but the predictions and hype that are so often associated with them are a bit fatiguing. How many times a month have we been sent a press release or a demo and told that this…