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Is NVidia King Of The GPU Arena?
Nvidia’s desktop GPUs accounted for nearly 80 percent of all sales in the segment in Q2 2015, its highest market share ever.
According to beancounters at the market research firm Mercury Research the GPU market is slowly dying.
The latest quarter was a decrease of 11 percent from Q1 2015 and a year-on-year decline of 21.7 percent so Nvidia is the undisputed king of a much smaller kingdom.
Mercury Research notes that the notebook GPU segment also witnessed a decrease to the tune of 34.1 percent year-on-year, mainly due to the continued improvements in the iGPU segment.
However when comparing both number of GPUs sold to partners and a four-quarter average of sales, Nvidia is the Windows and AMD is the FreeBSD.
AMD is dependent on its latest Radeon 300 series of cards to claw back something but at the moment it is looking like Nvidia is unstoppable.
Nvidia has continued to amass more sales over the course of the last year, and with its Maxwell-generation cards now available across all price tiers, it is unlikely has much to worry about from AMD.
Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/is-nvidia-king-of-the-gpu-arena.html
Will nVidia’s Quadro Debut In August?
Nvidia appears to be readying new members of its professional Quadro range of graphics cards in time for the August SIGGRAPH 2015 event.
According to VideoCardz the latest Nvidia graphics driver for the Quadro range of graphics cards includes a telltale text string revealing Nvidia’s dark satanic intension.
The new driver adds support for:
NVIDIA_DEV.13F0.1152.103C = “NVIDIA Quadro M5000″
NVIDIA_DEV.13F1.1153.103C = “NVIDIA Quadro M4000″
NVIDIA_DEV.13F2= “NVIDIA Tesla M60″
At the same time last year Nvidia revealed details of the Quadro Kxx2 and since SIGGRAPH 2015 scheduled to start on 9th August (runs until 13th Aug, takes place in downtown LA) it looks like the latest Quadro graphics cards will be also launched.
Of course driver strings do not reveal much detail however the Quadro professional graphics range will be based upon the Maxwell architecture GM204GL graphics processor. We are expecting a 256-bit GPU with a a 4GB or 8GB frame buffer versions.
Then there is the Tesla M60. This GPU based general purpose computing product is expected to be based upon a fully-fledged GM204 GPU with 8GB of GDDR5 memory.
Will nVidia Drop Its Prices
Nvidia is about to release a range of price cuts in a bid to see off AMD in the longer term.
While the price cuts have already happened in the US, in the EU Nvidia’s GTX 980, GTX 980Ti and Titan X are still kept high because people were buying them at the prices the Green Goblin was asking.
In the US where competition between AMD and Nvidia is tighter, the prices dropped by 10 per cent. Ironically since Europeans are more loyal to Nvidia in the high-end graphics cards market the outfit decided they could continue to pay.
According to Kitguru the new R9 Radeon 300 series appears to have upset the apple cart. The cards have been launched at similar prices or lower than Nvidia’s top tier products. Apparently Europeans were thinking of going cheaper since the Green Goblin did not seem to admire their loyalty.
It could force AMD to drop its prices as it can’t remain competitive selling top-end graphics at prices higher than Nvidia’s while having weak selling figures in non-US countries.
It will force AMD to sell its freshly launched Fury X at prices lower than planned, and for such a new card this move damage AMD. Nvidia was expected to drop prices of course, but only for its lower-end products like the 700 or 600 series.
Does nVidia See Trouble Ahead?
GPU maker Nvidia is seeing trouble ahead, thanks to a slump in PC sales and a strong US dollar.
The company’s astrologers and tarot card readers have Nvidia predicted lower-than-expected revenue for the second quarter either that or someone is going to meet a tall dark stranger.
Nvidia also reported first-quarter revenue and profit below what the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street estimated.
Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said that there had been a fall in demand from OEMs and PC market which is softer than an Apple fanboy’s bottom.
Worldwide PC shipments fell about 6.7 percent to 68.5 million units in the first quarter, and are expected drop 4.9 percent during the year.
Rival chipmaker AMD reported a steep fall in first-quarter sales last month and said it expected weak demand for PCs to continue for some time.
Nvidia was also hurt by the strong dollar, which has risen about 9 percent. The outfit does a lot of its business in US dollars which has made its GPU gaming more expensive.
The outfit forecast second-quarter revenue of $1.01 billion, plus or minus two percent, below the average analyst estimate of $1.18 billion.
The company’s net income fell to $134 million in the first quarter ended April 26.
Revenue rose 4.4 percent to $1.15 billion, but missed the average estimate of $1.16 billion.
Samsung Moves To Block nVidia
Samsung has moved to try and block the sales of Nvidia chips in the US.
Samsung has filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission as part of patent war which appears to have broken out between the two chipmakers. Samsung claims Nvidia infringed several of its chip-related patents and for making false claims about its products. This is effectively counter-suing after Nvidia filed a suit against the company in September making more or less the same charges.
Nvidia accused Samsung and rival Qualcomm of infringing patents on its graphics-processing unit (GPU). Samsung, which had filed the lawsuit in a US federal court on November 4, is seeking damages for deliberate infringement of several technical patents, including a few that govern the way semiconductors buffer and use data.
The ITC complaint also named computer-parts manufacturers Biostar Microtech and Elitegroup. These things run and run and usually wind up with a settlement where both sides agree to keep the details quiet. The ITC is often used as leverage in such cases because it deals with things a little quicker and a product embargo to the US can be seriously damage a company’s wealth.
Will Sprint Cut It’s Staff?
August 26, 2014 by admin
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Sprint’s new CEO Marcelo Claure addressed employees for the first time and promised price reductions are coming very soon, according to a report.
Sprint didn’t deny the report of Marcelo’s comments. A spokesman also confirmed Friday that Sprint is “focusing on providing the best value in the market.”
According to the account of Claure’s comments, he told workers, “We’re going to change our plans to make sure every customer in America thinks twice about signing up to a competitor.” The report, which first appeared in LightReading.com, also said that “very disruptive” rate plans are coming this week.
Sprint didn’t dispute Light Reading’s report, but a spokesman said Sprint is not commenting on “any potential pricing plans before they are announced.”
The spokesman, Doug Duvall, said Marcelo held his first all-employee town hall meeting before a standing-room-only crowd. He added: “He shared his passion for his family, work and soccer team and his commitment to leading Sprint. He discussed Sprint’s challenges and pledged to get Sprint ‘back in the game’ by focusing on providing the best value in the market, completing our network build and optimizing Sprint’s cost structure.”
By confirming Sprint wants to offer the “best value in the market,” it’s pretty clear that Sprint, the third-largest U.S. carrier, will soon wage a price war with the T-Mobile, the fourth-largest U.S. carrier that has quickly been gaining on Sprint.
Analysts recently said Sprint’s recent “Framily plan” isn’t competitive in the market, which former CEO Dan Hesse acknowledged in late July before his departure on Monday.
The Sprint Framily plans costs $160 a month for 4GB of data, but comes with overage charges and won’t allow tethering. Meanwhile, T-Mobile has a family plan offered through September that costs $100 a month for four lines and 10GB of data, although each line is limited to 2.5GB.
Hesse had earlier described subscriber plans Sprint was testing that have tiers of data and unlimited data.
According to Light Reading, Claure also told employees that price cuts are needed because Sprint’s network isn’t at the level of performance and reach that it should be. “When you have a great network, you don’t have to compete on price,” he reportedly said. “When your network is behind, unfortunately you have to compete on value and price.”
nVidia Releases CUDA
Nvidia has released CUDA – its code that lets developers run their code on GPUs – to server vendors in order to get 64-bit ARM cores into the high performance computing (HPC) market.
The firm said today that ARM64 server processors, which are designed for microservers and web servers because of their energy efficiency, can now process HPC workloads when paired with GPU accelerators using the Nvidia CUDA 6.5 parallel programming framework, which supports 64-bit ARM processors.
“Nvidia’s GPUs provide ARM64 server vendors with the muscle to tackle HPC workloads, enabling them to build high-performance systems that maximise the ARM architecture’s power efficiency and system configurability,” the firm said.
The first GPU-accelerated ARM64 software development servers will be available in July from Cirrascale and E4 Computer Engineering, with production systems expected to ship later this year. The Eurotech Group also plans to ship production systems later this year.
Cirrascale’s system will be the RM1905D, a high density two-in-one 1U server with two Tesla K20 GPU accelerators, which the firm claims provides high performance and low total cost of ownership for private cloud, public cloud, HPC and enterprise applications.
E4′s EK003 is a production-ready, low-power 3U dual-motherboard server appliance with two Tesla K20 GPU accelerators designed for seismic, signal and image processing, video analytics, track analysis, web applications and Mapreduce processing.
Eurotech’s system is an “ultra-high density”, energy efficient and modular Aurora HPC server configuration, based on proprietary Brick Technology and featuring direct hot liquid cooling.
Featuring Applied Micro X-Gene ARM64 CPUs and Nvidia Tesla K20 GPU accelerators, the new ARM64 servers will provide customers with an expanded range of efficient, high-performance computing options to drive compute-intensive HPC and enterprise data centre workloads, Nvidia said.
Nvidia added, “Users will immediately be able to take advantage of hundreds of existing CUDA-accelerated scientific and engineering HPC applications by simply recompiling them to ARM64 systems.”
ARM said that it is working with Nvidia to “explore how we can unite GPU acceleration with novel technologies” and drive “new levels of scientific discovery and innovation”.
nVidia Outs CUDA 6
Nvidia has made the latest GPU programming language CUDA 6 Release Candidate available for developers to download for free.
The release arrives with several new features and improvements to make parallel programming “better, faster and easier” for developers creating next generation scientific, engineering, enterprise and other applications.
Nvidia has aggressively promoted its CUDA programming language as a way for developers to exploit the floating point performance of its GPUs. Available now, the CUDA 6 Release Candidate brings a major new update in unified memory access, which lets CUDA applications access CPU and GPU memory without the need to manually copy data from one to the other.
“This is a major time saver that simplifies the programming process, and makes it easier for programmers to add GPU acceleration in a wider range of applications,” Nvidia said in a blog post on Thursday.
There’s also the addition of “drop-in libraries”, which Nvidia said will accelerate applications by up to eight times.
“The new drop-in libraries can automatically accelerate your BLAS and FFTW calculations by simply replacing the existing CPU-only BLAS or FFTW library with the new, GPU-accelerated equivalent,” the chip designer added.
Multi-GPU Scaling has also been added to the CUDA 6 programming language, introducing re-designed BLAS and FFT GPU libraries that automatically scale performance across up to eight GPUs in a single node. Nvidia said this provides over nine teraflops of double-precision performance per node, supporting larger workloads of up to 512GB in size, more than it’s supported before.
“In addition to the new features, the CUDA 6 platform offers a full suite of programming tools, GPU-accelerated math libraries, documentation and programming guides,” Nvidia said.
The previous CUDA 5.5 Release Candidate was issued last June, and added support for ARM based processors.
Aside from ARM support, Nvidia also improved Hyper-Q support in CUDA 5.5, which allowed developers to use MPI workload prioritisation. The firm also touted improved performance analysis and improved performance for cross-compilation on x86 processors.
nVidia Launching New Cards
We weren’t expecting this and it is just a rumour, but reports are emerging that Nvidia is readying two new cards for the winter season. AMD of course is launching new cards four weeks from now, so it is possible that Nvidia would try to counter it.
The big question is with what?
VideoCardz claims one of the cards is an Ultra, possibly the GTX Titan Ultra, while the second one is a dual-GPU job, the Geforce GTX 790. The Ultra is supposedly GK110 based, but it has 2880 unlocked CUDA cores, which is a bit more than the 2688 on the Titan.
The GTX 790 is said to feature two GK110 GPUs, but Nvidia will probably have to clip their wings to get a reasonable TDP.
We’re not entirely sure this is legit. It is plausible, but that doesn’t make it true. It would be good for Nvidia’s image, especially if the revamped GK110 products manage to steal the performance crown from AMD’s new Radeons. However, with such specs, they would end up quite pricey and Nvidia wouldn’t sell that many of them – most enthusiasts would probably be better off waiting for Maxwell.
Baidu Acquires App Maker
July 26, 2013 by admin
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Baidu Inc, China’s top search engine, plans to purchase app store 91 Wireless for $1.9 billion to strengthen its position in the country’s highly competitive mobile computing sector.
Baidu will buy a 57.4 percent stake in 91 Wireless, one of China’s earliest appstores, from NetDragon Websoft Inc for $1.09 billion, and the remainder from other shareholders, both companies said on Tuesday.
“It’s good for Baidu because if you look at mobile, currently apps are more popular than mobile sites because Internet download speeds are slow. So with the acquisition of this appstore, Baidu can work more closely with the apps developer and be able to enhance further their search capabilities,” said Elinor Leung, an analyst with CLSA in Hong Kong.
China’s mobile Internet market is expected to double to about 300 billion yuan ($48 billion) in 2014 from 150 billion yuan in 2012, with the number of active mobile Internet users rising to 749 million from 521 million during the same period, according to research firm Analysys International.
NetDragon’s shares lost as much as a fifth of their value on Tuesday and were down 18 percent at HK$19.74 at 0305 GMT (11.05 p.m ET)
NetDragon also said in a statement that it would scrap the planned spinoff and listing of 91 Wireless on Hong Kong’s secondary Growth Enterprise Market if the acquisition is finalized.