Jon Peddie Blogs

First thoughts on CES and tablets

Posted by Kathleen Maher on January 10th 2010 | Discuss (1)
Categories: Blogs, The Market
Tags: nvidia apple marvell tablets entourage asus ebooks publishing ces

CES has dawned bright and clear. The crowds have come and there is interest in buying – or at least that’s how it’s looking now. Plenty of news is coming out of CES, but in the PC world, tablets are consuming the attention of the buyers in the aisles as well as reporters, and we’re pretty fascinated as well. For the past couple of years, Amazon and Sony have helped make a convincing case for the eBook as people are not only buying the devices, they’re downloading and reading more as well. In fact, according to a December report from the…

So long 2009, don’t let the door hit you in the behind

Posted by Kathleen Maher on December 15th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, General Interest
Tags:

To put together this list of notable events for 2009, I went back over old issues to see what we were talking about. What struck me besides the fact that a lot of really great stuff actually happened was that you can almost hear a continuous whine through the copy (mostly mine)—I’m tired, I don’t want to do this any more, when is it going to get better?  In the future, would you please tell me to just shut up and get on with it? I’d appreciate it. The thing is, it really wasn’t such a bad year in terms of…

Intel Will Never Buy Nvidia

Posted by Jon Peddie on December 9th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags:

Someone just sent me an email and asked if I thought Intel might buy Nvidia now that Larrabee is dead. I would have just answered it and then disregarded it if I hadn’t gotten a phone call asking the same dumb question. Intel won’t buy Nvidia for the following reasons: Larrabee isn’t dead - there will be a Larrabee graphics chip, based on x86 architecture. There will be a whole family of Larrabee chips. Wishful thinking won’t make Intel or its ambitions go away. The company has, and continues to make, huge investments in the graphics technology and space. Intel believes…

Larrabee past, present, future

Posted by Jon Peddie on December 6th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags: intel amd larrabee cpus gpus

“Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we hoped to be at this point in the project,” said Intel spokesperson Nick Knupffe. “As a result, our first Larrabee product will not be launched as a standalone discrete graphics product.” (December 4, 2009.) After three years of bombast, Intel shocked the world by canceling Larrabee. Instead of launching the chip in the consumer market, Intel will make it available as a software development platform for both internal and external developers. Those developers can use it to develop software that can run in high-performance computers. The following is an excerpt from an…

Nvidia and Starting the Next Age of Super Computing

Posted by Jon Peddie on October 7th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags: nvidia opencl directx cuda compute fermi

“I believe that we need something big and new every four years or so.” – Jen Hsun Huang Nvidia has been planning to be in the super computer business for the past three years. The company has had stellar growth since the internet melt down in 2001, and it has come to dominate almost every market it has entered, but Nvidia is now facing limited growth opportunities in its classical markets and new competition. Its main rival for graphics chips ATI has renewed itself with a winning and very challenging price/performance product design and positioning. Nvidia’s integrated chip business is declining…

Different strokes: AMD and Nvidia’s approaches are diverging in more ways than one

Posted by Alex Herrera on October 6th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags: nvidia gpu ati opencl amd cuda compute directcompute gforce

It’s often hard in this business to draw clear lines separating two vendors’ technologies or products, as often they tend to converge on common solutions, the result of tackling the same problem with the same vision and set of priorities. And while it wouldn’t be right to say the latest generations of GPU technology from Nvidia and AMD are apples and oranges — they aren’t — the two companies are both very consciously differentiating themselves, both with respect to the goals that are shaping their technology decisions and in how they’re packaging up that technology to deploy products. GPU-compute representing different…

Marking 101 - Increasing Your Product, Service Street Cred

Posted by Andy Marken on September 17th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, Content Creation
Tags: facebook social networking twitter buzz myspace products marketing marketplace communications

When our kids were growing up, they asked us what we did…really?? The answer changes … constantly. Over the past 20 + years in the PC/CE/communications marketplace, we’ve had to learn and relearn our job 40-50 times. Every time the industry changes, every time the communications avenues shift; life/opportunities change. Since the Internet (recently celebrated its 40th anniversary) and Web came into their own; editorial and promotional outlets/targets have shifted…dramatically. We all read the same studies, the same reports—WOM (word of mouth) is the most effective marketing/sales tool available. Yet PR people – at the cattle prodding of management – constantly…

Siggraph!

Posted by Jon Peddie on August 10th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: General Interest, Show reports
Tags: graphics siggraph rendering jon peddie

For a recession, in an off-the-beaten-track southern city, in the dead of summer, Siggraph had a robust turnout, My guess was that about 18k pixel-loving souls made the trek, but the actual count was a little over 11k. I saw a lot of old friends, some from Japan, some from Redmond,  some from Holland, France, and Finland – so the show was enough of a magnet for some people to make that kind of time and money investment in these challenging economic times. The emerging technologies had its usual array of wacky wonderful weird things; one of the most impressive was a huge feathery…

Chaos in stereovision land

Posted by Jon Peddie on May 28th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, The Market
Tags:

This is moment of great opportunity I’ve been attending and speaking at stereovision conferences for the past year or so. As a matter of fact, I just spent three days in Paris at the Dimension3 Conference and Expo where there was a lot of great information shared by people actually trying to make stereovision work. As it turns out I have a lot to say about the subject having worked in and with stereo for several decades. As I and others have reported there are conflicting proposed standards in the cinema, for the TV, the PC, and handheld devices. All four…

A Theory of Wiivolution

Posted by Ted Pollak on May 28th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, Games
Tags:

The Wii SD; Factors for Success. There’s no question that the Nintendo Wii SD (the current standard definition Wii) has been a huge success. With sales of over 50 million units, it has almost single-handedly changed the video game industry by drawing people to gaming that probably would not have made the shift with the other offerings on the market. The more obvious factors that Nintendo had going for it were a very large and devoted fan base and the revolutionary controller. Nintendo’s ultra-fan base, consisting of some 20 million gamers, are people with such rabid brand enthusiasm that they are…