This could be the most significant development of the year, if it delivers
on it's promise. It would seem the long expected tight integration of PC to
just a couple of chips is nearly here.
http://www4.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q2/010604/index.html
Should bring down system cost considerably and the sound is supposed to be
considerably more advanced that 'Creative SB Live!'. It promises good 3D
accelaration, sound and all the goodies on one chip, with link to AMD only
CPU, this could :
Kill Creative's market
Kill Celeron, and make AMD/nvidia dominant in the budget - mid range
desktop & laptop market
I can't see how most system builders can pass up on this, especially as
Intel have pushed them about, with things like AMR options that nobody
wanted (add cost to mobo, but no profit in using the slot), the ppl in that
business I've talked to tend to loathe Intel, because of this and the
junkets they are pressed into attending.
Finally it could be very good (or very bad) for Linux, because they're
talking about an integrated driver architecture. In view of nvidia's binary
policy on it's video drivers, where they use same portable closed source
codebase for Win & Linux, to drive the GPU. In the worst case there'll be a
whole common class of new PCs out there with no or either binary only video,
sound, PCI and IDE support, rather like winmodems or GDI printers. I hope
their driver commitment wasn't as a result of the linux hype of the bubble
market, the XFree nv driver istn't that bad so they must be reasonably
helpful with documentation without NDAs.
Anyone know what's been coming out of nvidia on this score, or has it been
kept very well under wraps?
Rob
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