I'm not a fan of NVIDIA. Not being a gamer would be one reason.
But their video cards' refusal to support PowerStrip in the early HTPC days forever left a bad aftertaste...
Just a year ago it looked like NVIDIA is heading into oblivion.
And just like with VIA ten years earlier, this would happen courtesy of Intel.
The latter, controlling the biggest share of the CPU market, was cutting out NVIDIA from the chipset market.
And AMD bought ATI and had hardly any interest in helping its competitor.
Add the excessive heat dissipation disaster of the G84 and G86 line some two years ago and it looked like they won't be around for long...
Apple changed all that!
By striking gold in the revived markets of smartphones and tablets, Apple forced most of the big players to rethink their strategies.
First, Intel decided to end their litigation with NVIDIA and paid to make it go away (just like they did with AMD a year earlier).
Second, NVIDIA hit a jackpot with its Tegra2 chip (Tegra 1 was a non-event at best). The company video expertise added to the ARM architecture made many tablet manufacturers interested.
And possibly the most important announcement: next version of Windows will run on ARM, i.e. NVIDIA gets back into the computer CPU business completely avoiding Intel.
The irony of all this? Ars said it best
No good deed goes unpunished!
Diogen.
But their video cards' refusal to support PowerStrip in the early HTPC days forever left a bad aftertaste...
Just a year ago it looked like NVIDIA is heading into oblivion.
And just like with VIA ten years earlier, this would happen courtesy of Intel.
The latter, controlling the biggest share of the CPU market, was cutting out NVIDIA from the chipset market.
And AMD bought ATI and had hardly any interest in helping its competitor.
Add the excessive heat dissipation disaster of the G84 and G86 line some two years ago and it looked like they won't be around for long...
Apple changed all that!
By striking gold in the revived markets of smartphones and tablets, Apple forced most of the big players to rethink their strategies.
First, Intel decided to end their litigation with NVIDIA and paid to make it go away (just like they did with AMD a year earlier).
Second, NVIDIA hit a jackpot with its Tegra2 chip (Tegra 1 was a non-event at best). The company video expertise added to the ARM architecture made many tablet manufacturers interested.
And possibly the most important announcement: next version of Windows will run on ARM, i.e. NVIDIA gets back into the computer CPU business completely avoiding Intel.
The irony of all this? Ars said it best
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news...egra-kal-el-could-end-up-in-bizarro-world.ars
No good deed goes unpunished!
Diogen.
