In Old Taipei, Nvidia gets a roasting while Larrabbe warms up

IF YOU THINK old Taipei is hot in early June for the unavoidable Computex rounds, try the same place in late July, just before the regular typhoons: 37 C or 100 F sharp heat all day, with humidity to match.

So, we kept our regular monthly hop short, just a few days. Even that was enough to hear plenty of complaints, sob stories and hints of decisions to come (read: Larrabee).

While most vendors are happy with the Nehalem platform roll-out, But Nvidia's decision to demand the use of the Nforce200 PCI-E bridge-cum-egg-boiler to enable SLI on the X58 is making Taipei's high-end enthusiast mobo designers even hotter under the collar. The chip is apparently by far the hottest spot on any such mobo, far exceeding the Nehalem CPU or the X58 TylersburgDT North Bridge.

So, just as we thought that simpler North Bridge without memory controllers and need for overclocking would mean less need for exotic chipset cooling, the Nforce200 comes back with its "check out my pipes" attitude.

Quite a few boards had to be redesigned from the ground up, according to the engineers we spoke to - the only advice we could give these hapless chaps was not to sacrifice the original designs and risk further delays, or at least keep the non-NV and NV board SKUs separate. Why?

First, the HD4870X2 in a paired Crossfire configuration, rather than two 55nm GTX280 shrinks in SLI, might be the right recommended highest-performance match for the X58 Nehalems at intro anyway.

Second, any delays due to the Nvidia bridge add-on would be really bad for the board's sales, certainly if they miss their matched launch date with the Nehalem roll-out - you don't want to miss those money-splurging 'early birds', do you?

Talking about Nvidia and graphics, the vendors seem to be particularly unhappy about the GTX260 for some reason - how about, say, not making any dosh out of it? A few of them are still particularly sore about their i nventory-related losses from the previous round of NV GPU chippery, and some who were affected really badly, like Gainward, already have one foot in the red camp - if they had a third foot, it could land in another new - pretty big - camp soon, too.

Most vendors would be happy to sell more GTX280 units, especially custom designs, if there were enough to sell - and do look forward to the GT200b 55nm shrink in a month or so, even though it will still be next to impossible to fashion dual GPU cards with it.

Still, it should be able to rule the single-GPU market till end of this year, even with just GDDR3 memory. The 55nm G92b, the one in the 9800GTX+, was also reasonably well received for the segment between mid-range and high-end, as long as there are no new inventory rehash shenanigans with number spins there.

There are also customised cooling and memory versions of the G92b coming at the GTX+ level, some with 1GB RAM and better cooling.

On the ATI side, watch out for the customised designs for both HD4870 and HD4850, including more than one single-slot design for the former. The HD4870X2 will wait a while for the custom stuff - maybe a single slot Sapphire Atomic vapour chamber contraption will be the answer there.

Asus' super short HD3850 Splendid HD bundle is the star - very cheap, with all HD video enhancement hardware built in, and the graphics card on an MXM: means upgradeable.

The vendors are also a little slow in rolling out Displayport: seems the take-up wasn't nearly as fast as thought, and many cards still don't even have HDMI. So it is still mostly up to - Taiwan-designed - DVI for now. Still, custom cards are the preferred choice for vendors' sales force, both on Nvidia and, increasingly, ATI sides.

Talking about ATI, the vendors generally aren't too happy about AMD's graphics arm either. However, the general feeling is that, for this year, ATI's share in the high-end and mainstream GPU market will only grow. Not to the 50-5 0 level probably, but quite a bit forward still. The Taiwanese are very happy to support multiple competitors, ensuring better service after all.

And talking about multiple competitors, there weren't any unhappy faces at the mention of Intel Larrabee. Even the fans of incumbent GPU chippers acknowledge that Larrabee is surely not an empty threat. We have a confirmation that two of the larger graphics card vendors there are pretty much 100 per cent on to offer these right from Day One.

One of the reasons - if we put the performance and compatibility aside - is the major business model refresh that will let the card makers provide a far higher degree of design flexibility and added value - i.e. profit margin - on the Larrabee-based cards. The penny-pinching Taiwanese component businesses need that definitely in today's era of nanometre-wide margins. µ