Nvidia Editors Day
Non-NVIDIA Gossip & Final Thoughts
Intel Centrino Chipset Shortage?
It looks like Intel has a chipset shortage issue going on with their 855GM chipset. It seems that ODM’s such as Quanta and Compal (Who make 40% of all notebooks) have been getting all the chips and second tier notebook manufacturers are left out in the cold right now. For those who are not familiar with Quanta and Compal think Dell and Gateway as they supply the chassis for them and other builders. The “smaller” companies such as ASUS, Wistron, and AOpen have to wait for the orders to be filled for “the big dogs” before they can get chipsets. This is not good for DIY users as ASUS and other Tier two notebook makers actually supply whitebox notebooks direct to the consumer. This is yet another glitch in DIY notebook building concept. We made a call into Intel to get a comment on this situation and they had this to say: “Demand has been higher than anticipated, but we’re meeting our supply commitments to our customers. — we expect to meet all demand in Q1.” It should be pointed out that in Q1, 2005 Intel is said to be launching their Alviso and Sonoma mobile chipsets. I’d hope by the time the next generation chipsets come out that demand can be met for the previous versions!
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Corsair Memory To Lunch New Products?
After many months of speculation it seems that Corsair will be launching several new products this month. Early this week they launched a Flash memory product line, but that is not all they have planned. Many months ago we found out that the Corsair/Delphi contract for the HydroCool 200 was up and wasn’t resigned for various reasons. Corsair said they were staying in the watercooling business, so expect a new design from a new supplier. Since the Corsair/Delphi contract expired its also safe to assume that the HydroCool is EOL and are being cleared out. This new Corsair watercooler models will no longer be called HydroCool, they will be known as just down right “COOL“. This new internal water cooling series will contain hardware from companies like Swiftech and Delphi and then be bundled by Corsair. The most shocking news from the memory side of things is a new performance memory series! Corsair already has the ever popular XMS and XMS Pro series, but is coming out with a series that has more bling-bling. Expect these to be soon be rolling off the assembly lines in Fremont. We asked Corsair about SLI memory modules, but they just laughed for some reason!
Nathan Kirsch’s Thoughts:
The past year has being really exciting for Nvidia as their suffering mobile line has a chance to start all over thanks to PCIe and MXM coming into play. It doesn’t come to often that the hardware companies get to hit the “reset button” and have another try at the market! The battle between MXM (NVIDIA) and Axiom (ATI) seems over as ATI has been producing MXM cards with their chipsets and the first generation Alviso boards have MXM cards in them.
On the desktop side Nvidia also made up some of the ground it lost during the past two years with the introduction of the Geforce 6 series. One of the reasons the Geforce 6 series cards are doing so well is thanks to fp32, pixel shader 3.0, and better cooling solutions over the previous Geforce FX series. Hardcore gamers also like to have the ability to upgrade their single card to a dual card SLI system if they ever want more graphics performance. Although this was released in 2004 it will take until 2005 to see if SLI was a success or not as the desktop SLI boards are just now reaching consumers.
Hope you enjoyed our brief look into what the major topics of discussions were amongst peers in the hardware industry — Till next time!
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