Displaying items by tag: nVidia

Well the world is abuzz with the news that *gasp* the Microsoft Surface tablet only comes with WiFi. For some reason this appears to be a big deal to many news sites that also have articles that list reasons why you should wait for the iPhone 5 and a few others. What I find interesting is that very few appear to remember that both Windows 8 and Windows RT will have the ability to utilize peripherals attached Via the included USB port.

When Microsoft announced the new Surface tablet we saw a lot of analysts comment on its form, features and more. What we did not hear a lot about until hours (and in some cases about a day) later was the impact that this would have on Microsoft’s partners. It was one of the first things that we thought about when it rolled out. Did Microsoft lets any of its partners know and what are they feeling right now.

Well the cat is out of the bag now and the winner is a new tablet called Surface from Microsoft. The thin (.5 inches) tablet was shown off today at the big event that Microsoft had planned for a long time. From the pictures we have seen it looks like a nice device 10.6 inches long with a gorilla glass display, full sized USB port, MIMO antenna for WiFi a track pad, 64 or 128GB of storage, and a built in kickstand. There is just one problem; Microsoft’s partners. By entering into the market like this Microsoft runs the risk of alienating their major partners for Windows based tablets.

There is a nice news story going around showing Linus Torvalds giving nVidia the finger over their support (or lack of support) for Linux. After watching the video and reading a few of the articles we have to say this about the whole story…. It is spot on, but it was not always that way. I can remember in the early days of the Opteron and Athlon 64 when nVidia (and AMD) had a pretty healthy Linux driver program.

At CES 2010 we watched as the “PC” world began to gear up for its onslaught into the tablet market. Many at the time were still claiming that Apple was going to hold the market simply because they had a very big foot hold (and still do). However as we watched press briefings from Asus, Lenovo, nVidia, AMD, and Intel we saw something very interesting; the move to tablets that make sense for everyone. We are not talking about the choice of OS here either.

nVidia has taken one step closer to being a major player in the smart phone market. This step is the culmination of their purchase of Icera specifically for their LTE technology. Back when nVidia first announced the purchase it was in direct competition to Qualcomm who is seen as one of nVidia’s major opponents. nVidia new they needed to either license or acquire the technology so that they could integrate a high speed cellular modem into their Tegra SoC for future products.

It looks like we might have done our Windows 8 coverage the wrong way around as we are now seeing a host of articles that are showing off the new look of the desktop, the Metro UI News, Sports and Weather apps and more. This is very odd as we have been talking about much this since the Build Conference. Still it is very possible that some of these sites are now listing these items in a new PR push for Microsoft. After all the most recent one we saw on the new Desktop Look had a direct quote from them on Aero and the “vista” look.

nVidia is moving to create their own cloud-based gaming solution using Kepler as their base. After what we saw with Lucid and even at the nVidia press conference at CES this year we are not surprised at all. Gaming is one of nVidia’s biggest investments and it only stands to reason that they would want to capitalize on this in one way or another.

Although we have to say that the actual news was still very cool we are a little disappointed that it appears we were wrong about the crowbar that nVidia sent in the mail to a group of websites. Late last night (well at least while we were sleeping) nVidia announced the launch of the GTX 690. This is the rumored dual GTX 680 graphics card that is supposed to catapult nVidia to the top of the heap.

Valve is one of those companies that just seems to work. They have a leadership and management style that supports creativity and free thinking. In fact during a recent interview Gabe Newell stated that they let people work on the things they feel are important and that is how new projects are created (it was funny to hear him say he often rolls his desk into the elevator to work with others).