Jon Peddie Back Pages - It's all about the pixels

How big is your monitor?  And how many do you have?

Posted by Webmaster on May 11th 2012 | Discuss
Tags:

There’s a lot of assumptions running around in this PC industry, based on hearsay and tidbits of data. We just finished running some tests on Nvidia’s new dual-GPU AIB, the GTX 690 (see p. 11). Nvidia wasn’t very happy with our first results, and told us we were being CPU-bound by doing the tests at HD. Aside from the counter-intuitive comments (after all, isn’t that exactly what a GPU is supposed to do—eliminate CPU limitations?), it also raises the question about what the potential buyers of this $999 AIB have on their desks. I suppose it is reasonable to expect that…

I have new respect for EA–It didn’t come easily

Posted by Jon Peddie on April 30th 2012 | Discuss
Tags: market gaming tablets games ea

I started out the week trying to run some tests on few machines, something that is frustrating enough without unwanted or unexpected obstacles thrown in your way. When I tried to run Battlefield 3 on a laptop, I had to log into Origin first; annoying but not too much different from trying to run a Steam game. However, I was told I couldn’t run the game on the laptop, the reg code was already used I fired off a WTF email to a few people and made sure it would get to folks at EA. EA reacted and we had a…

The easy life; R&D is the key

Posted by Jon Peddie on April 17th 2012 | Discuss
Tags:

Of the great companies I've been fortunate enough to come into contact with, there is one common denominator: R&D investment. Nvidia’s CEO made a comment in a meeting recently that no super computer company could (or ever did) match the R&D investment his firm makes. Former Cray manger and now Tesla CTO at Nvidia Steve Scott echoed those words. Meg Whitman who recently took over HP gets it—R&D is important and she’s raised the bar and the spending. HP used to one of the leaders in R&D and it looks like Whitman is going to try and restore that glory. (Though…

Moore’s Law, it ain’t just for the rich–Or is it?

Posted by Jon Peddie on March 29th 2012 | Discuss
Tags:

{image_1}Mopping up; that’s what we used to call it when we would go to the next process size and integrate some of the peripheral components. It was also called jellybean removal. Companies like National, ST-Micro, TI, and SMSC hated it because every time there a mop-up they lost business for some jelly beans. Recently Microsoft did it in the Xbox 360, taking the Power PC, the ATI Xeonos from 65nm to one SoC in 45nm. In the process they eliminated a power consuming front-side bus, and lowered cost and power consumption. Also in the near past Intel combined the GPU and…

Waiting for the inevitable? No company is too big to fail, not even Apple

Posted by Webmaster on March 16th 2012 | Discuss
Tags:

How long do you think it will take for Huaweai to overtake Qualcomm, TI, Nvidia, or ST-Ericsson? How long before ZTE to surpass Alcatel-Lucent, Alvarion, or Cisco? Or how long will take for Samsung to overtake Apple? Is it inevitable, or is such speculation just doomsday talk? Remember when we thought DoCoMo would take over the world? Or Samsung surpass Intel? Can growth rate be a reliable predictor of the future? Not very often, but it is tempting to accept the intercept points as inevitable; and in the case of notebooks and desktops the prediction (based on the curves) was correct.…

The undocumented danger of Imagination deficit disorder

Posted by Jon Peddie on March 1st 2012 | Discuss
Tags:

Im·ag·i·na·tion—noun, the faculty of imagining or of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses. The single thing that separates the losers from the winners, besides dumb blind luck, is imagination. Some call it vision; others hard work, but the truth is the companies that died, did so because the CEO and his or her lieutenants just didn’t have enough, or maybe any imagination. You’ve all heard the dumb things some great people have said —there’s only a market for maybe 100 computers, 64kB should be enough, and there’s no reason for any individual to…

Inflection points—they really do happen

Posted by Webmaster on February 16th 2012 | Discuss
Tags: market mobile tablets

Andy Grove is credited with applying the term inflection point to business. In his book Only the Paranoid Survive, Grove said that Inflection Points provide huge strategic advantages to the companies capable of moving on them. Intel has continued to embrace the strategy and everyone else would like to. Today, everyone uses the term inflection point as if they invented it. Most of the time when you hear some marketing or PR flak toss out the “I” word you roll your eyes up and think, oh boy here we go again—stop the revolution, I want to get off. And anytime a…

AS CES goeth, so goeth the industry

Posted by Webmaster on February 3rd 2012 | Discuss
Tags:

For those of you who went to CES this year, you should have recovered by now. And if you suffered through 2011, you should be seeing some little rays of sunshine and hope for the on-coming year. And if you accept my premise about CES being a leading indicator, then you should feel pretty good about 2012. I first proposed CES as a leading indicator about eight or nine years ago. If you look at the following chart which covers the past ten years you can see definite correlations. What I think the data really represents is the manufacturers and dealers…

The morning after pill

Posted by Webmaster on January 12th 2012 | Discuss
Tags: gpu market ces tablets computers

Did you ever wake up the morning after having had too much fun the night before and wonder if anyone got the license plate of the truck that ran over you? Everyone has, even if they won’t admit it. Well 2011 was like that for a lot of folks. After the melt down in 2009, 2011 was a lot like stone skipping only to end up with a deadening and disappointing plop. I haven’t heard anyone say they’ll miss it. It’s been wose than partying all year and then having to pay the piper. Instead, it was a kind of okay…

The Last Editorial of 2011

Posted by Webmaster on December 27th 2011 | Discuss
Tags:

It’s been quite a year for all the com­puter segments from mobile phones and tablets to game consoles, PCs, servers, and supercomputers. Mobile phones with two and four cores running at a GHz or higher were introduced during the year, tablets and phones got thinner, phones got bigger and they got higher resolution displays and full HD capability. Game consoles got S3D, and PCs got thin and light notebooks, all-in-one desktops and killer powerful game machines. Servers got four to sixteen core processors, GPU-compute sub-systems, and Japan’s K Computer hit 10.5 PetaFLOPS and Oak Ridge said their Titan will exceed 20…