An article at CNet from Peter Glaskowsky talks about some of the discussion at NVidia‘s recent “Analyst Day”. Most of it is run of the mill stuff about projections and hardware we’ve been hearing about for the last year or two. But two things stand out. First off is an acknowledgement of the recent financial slump that NVidia suffered, and why:
Nvidia has had a rough couple of quarters in the market, which CEO Jen-Hsun Huang blamed in part on a bad strategic call in early 2008: to place orders for large quantities of new chips to be delivered later in the year. When the recession hit, these orders turned into about six months of inventory, much of which simply couldn’t be sold at the usual markup.
Second is a confession about NVidia’s chip manufacturing capabilities:
White also acknowledged something that I’ve long assumed to be true: Nvidia receives “preferential allocation” on advanced process technology at TSMC. It’s logical that Nvidia should get the red-carpet treatment, having been TSMC’s best customer for many years, but I don’t recall hearing Nvidia or TSMC put this fact on the record before.
Later in the article it talks about Intel‘s upcoming competition, the Larrabee, and discusses the possibility that Intel’s recent announcement of integrated GPU/CPU chipsets with lower-end GPU capabilities may just be a legal test to see if anyone contests it with monopolistic practices.
GPUs and the new ‘digital divide’ | Speeds and feeds – CNET News.
