Published in Graphics

Nvidia is scared of ATI?s success

by on06 February 2008

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Jensen, the Reds have executed, trigger an alarm


After almost two years, Nvidia launched a presentation where it wanted to educate analysts that R680, Radeon HD 3870 X2 is a bad, bad thing.

Our colleague, Charlie, from The Inquirer has posted an interesting e-mail that Nvidia has sent to financial analysts and you can read this fun part here.

However, the reality is somewhat different. This is the first time in two years that Nvidia did such a thing, as Radeon 3870 X2 is better and faster than anything that Nvidia has on the market. Nvidia will catch up and beat ATI with Geforce 9800 GX2, but it doesn’t look like Nvidia will ship this part before early March. If it executes, Nvidia will ship its card a month after ATI, and even then we were warned that the card will run much hotter than ATI's and that it won’t be widely available.

This doesn’t mean that ATI has won the war, but it got closer to Nvidia than ever in the last two years and this has made Nvidians scared.   

The real battle is the next generation, codenamed GT200 and R700, as it is not clear who wins this round. The second currently unknown fact is who will be the first to market, as this certainly counts. Both Nvidia and ATI’s chip are scheduled for early second half of 2008 but we’ve seen some delays before.

ATI is currently the only profitable and healthy part of AMD which bleeds cash on the CPU side and the graphics group of AMD is being treated quite well, as these guys are doing better than expected. Nvidia and Intel, on the other hand, are AMD’s technology partners, at least on paper, but in reality they are fearsome competitiors.

Shape up, Nvidia, the last thing you want is to lose to ATI now, when it is critically important to win in this hostile market.

Last modified on 11 February 2008
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