Nanotech - The Circuits Blog

Intel is about to roll out some pretty impressive mobile processors, finally bringing its "Nehalem" Core i architecture to the mainstream mobile space. So, what can we expect from Apple?

First, a little recent history. Apple, so far, has elected not to use the Core i7 quad-core mobile processors announced back in September in its MacBook Pro line. Which isn't that surprising. The first crop of laptop i7s barely qualify as mobile processors: they have a desktop-like TDP (thermal design power) of 45 watts that wreaks havoc on battery life.

That said, as an example of what an Apple rival has chosen to do, the Hewlett-Packard Envy 15 now offers both the i7-720QM (1.6GHz, 6MB cache) and i7-820QM (1.73GHz, 8MB Cache)--both quad-core Core i7 processors.

A big imponderable is whether Apple will adopt a future 32-nanometer version of the quad-core mobile i series for the 17-inch MacBook Pro. Presumably, this would have a lower TDP and be more amenable to Apple.

Now, for some armchair analysis. Arrandale: One of the burning questions (at least among some in the tech media) is whether new MacBooks will use Intel's "Arrandale" mobile Core i series of processors. Arrandale is significant for two reasons: it is part of Intel's 32-nanometer chip roll-out and is the first instance of Intel combining the graphics function with the main "CPU" processor. This results in better overall power efficiency and integrated graphics performance that "doesn't suck" anymore, as some observers have put it.

One school of thought is that Apple will not use the processor. If there is any truth to that rumor, that makes for a head-scratching scenario since Arrandale will be the pillar of the mobile Core i3 and i5 lineups. A likely scenario is that Apple--one way or another--chooses to attach Nvidia or ATI discrete graphics processors to Arrandale, or a facsimile thereof.

Nvidia or ATI: And speaking of Nvidia and ATI, instead of trying to second-guess Apple on all of the possible graphics chip permutations, the easier question to ask is: which graphics chip supplier will prevail this time around? Nvidia--despite defects in some of its past offerings--has been dominant over the last year or so across the MacBook lineup. Will this continue? Or will Apple strike more of a balance between Nvidia and ATI?

Remember, that Apple is touting the general compute function of the graphics processing unit, or GPU, in OS X Snow Leopard. "Now a new technology in Mac OS X Snow Leopard called OpenCL takes the power of graphics processors and makes it available for general-purpose computing," according to Apple ad copy. (Translation: using the GPU more like general-purpose CPU.) Are Nvidia and ATI OpenCL equals?

MacBook Air: And what, pray tell, will happen to the MacBook Air? Which is coming up on its second anniversary in January. I won't venture a guess (not yet at least), though I have a personal interest in this subject since I have been using an Air since February 2008.

Blu-ray: And finally, next-generation optical drives. Will MacBook Pros finally get Blu-ray? Maybe. There seems to be some pessimism about Apple adopting Blu-ray, as reader comments (and threads on other forums) suggest.

Apple, in all of its wisdom, will provide the answers to these questions soon enough.

Updated at 6:05 p.m. PST: adding Blu-ray discussion.

On December 17, Intel will preview new processors for laptops, among other chip technologies.

The preview is significant because it will be Intel's first chance to show off its ready-to-ship, commercially viable next-generation 32-nanometer technology. Almost all Intel processors are currently built on a 45-nanometer process. Generally, the smaller the geometry, the faster and more power efficient the processor is.

Intel's Core i series of processors will be the focus of the San Francisco event that will serve as a venue to preview and demonstrate products to be rolled out at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. The "Nehalem" microarchitecture that powers the Core i chips was introduced in November of last year and is considered a major step up in performance over previous architectures. To date, Intel has shipped the high-end Core i7 for gaming machines and mid-range Core i5 processors.

Intel is expected to preview the first Core i3 processors--some, including the 2.93GHz i3 530, have appeared on retail sites already--as well as updates to the Core i5 series.

One of the most anticipated processor technologies is "Arrandale." This will be the first mainstream Intel laptop processor to put two processor cores and a graphics function together in one chip package, resulting in better overall power efficiency. And the new built-in graphics technology is expected to offer materially better graphics performance than current Intel graphics.

Arrandale will eventually come under the Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 brands, though initial versions are expected to appear as the Core i3 and i5.

Intel is also expected to make a push to get its Turbo Boost technology into more Core i5 and i7 processors--including Arrandale i5 models. Turbo Boost speeds up and slows down individual cores to meet processing and power-efficiency needs, respectively.

Separately, Intel is also getting ready to roll out new Atom chip technology for Netbooks, commonly referred to as "Pine Trail." That is also happening later this month.

Buoyed by Netbook sales, shipments of Intel graphics chips surged and Advanced Micro Devices gained on Nvidia in the third quarter.

Third-quarter shipments of graphics processors jumped 21.2 percent over the second quarter, according to market researcher Jon Peddie Research. Graphics chips drive the images produced on PC users' screens.

A total of 119.45 million units were shipped in the third quarter, exceeding the record 111 million units that shipped in the third quarter of 2008, according to Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research. "So the market has caught up with, and exceeded, last year's highs. The crash of fall 2008 is now behind us," he said in a statement.

The third quarter exceeded a robust second quarter. "Q2 was already a great quarter clearly signaling the holidays will be robust for PCs and the industry in general," Peddie said.

AMD gained on discrete graphics chip leader Nvidia in quarter-to-quarter growth.

(Credit: Jon Peddie Research)

AMD showed the biggest jump in quarter-to-quarter growth at 30 percent, followed by Intel at 21 percent. But Intel dominates raw shipments. "Intel shipped the most parts at 63 million, over twice as many as its nearest competitor Nvidia," according to Peddie, who said Intel had a 53 percent share of the market in the third quarter. Nvidia was second with 24.9 percent, followed by AMD with 19.8 percent.

Surging Netbook shipments are behind the big Intel numbers. Integrated graphics in notebooks, which includes Netbooks, increased 27 percent over the second quarter. Integrated graphics are built into supporting Intel silicon called chipsets.

"Netbooks will remain popular but they will not have the high market share they had during the recession when they were just introduced. Rather, consumers are expected to 'buy up' in the next quarter," according to Peddie.

Fourth-quarter shipments may not be as strong as the third quarter, however. "The channel is full...That suggests that while Q4 is typically a good quarter for PCs, the quarter-to-quarter growth in Q4 may not be as robust as Q3. Graphics are a great leading indicator. The graphics go in before the PC is built or shipped," Peddie said.

Sony said that a small percentage of Vaio laptops with Nvidia graphics chips may experience problems and the company offered to provide an extended warranty to cover the cost of repair. This follows similar statements by Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell.

Sony Vaio VGN-AR series laptop

(Credit: Sony)

Nvidia first disclosed the problem with its graphics chips in July 2008, saying at the time that graphics processors manufactured with a certain material set were failing in the field at a higher than normal rate.

In a Sony eSupport USA notice dated August 3, the company said: "Sony, in cooperation with Nvidia, has been looking into any possible effect to Vaio notebooks with Nvidia graphic processors. Until recently we had not identified any Vaio models that were affected by this issue."

The statement continues. "However, after closely monitoring the situation, Sony has now determined that a very small percentage of Vaio computers with the Nvidia graphics chips may experience this issue. These PCs may exhibit distorted video, duplicate images or a blank screen due to a failure of the Nvidia graphics chip."

Nvidia said that some notebooks with its chips continue to have "failure" issues, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday.

In the Form 10-Q filing, Nvidia stated that though it does not continue to see "abnormal failure rates" in systems using Nvidia products," some notebooks are still affected.

Specifically, Nvidia said: "We continue to not see any abnormal failure rates in any systems using Nvidia products other than certain notebook configurations. However, we are continuing to test and otherwise investigate other products," Nvidia said, adding, "there can be no assurance that we will not discover defects in other MCP or GPU products." (MCP stands for Media and Communications Processor; GPU stands for Graphics Processing Unit.)

On July 2 of last year, Nvidia announced it was planning to take a one-time charge to cover costs associated with problems with materials used in certain versions of its laptop graphics chips. Subsequently, a $196 million charge was recorded in the second quarter of its 2009 fiscal year to "cover anticipated customer warranty, repair, return, replacement and associated costs" with the problem.

In the 10-Q filing, Nvidia cited a "balance of $145.7 million associated with incremental repair and replacement costs from a weak die/packaging material set." and "$31.2 million for the three months ended April 26, 2009 in payments related to the warranty accrual associated with incremental repair and replacement costs from a weak die/packaging material set."

Nvidia paid or incurred $50.3 million against the original "warranty accrual" in its fiscal third quarter and fourth quarter 2009, such that the remaining balance of the "bump-crack accrual" (defect) was $145.7 million at the end of its fiscal fourth quarter, according to Nvidia.

Nvidia is also grappling with insurance companies over payments to PC makers for GPU failures, according to reports.

As early as 2007, Hewlett-Packard listed laptop models affected by the graphics chip glitch. In August 2008, Dell also listed affected models. And Apple said in October that it would repair faulty graphics chips.

In the 10-Q filing, Nvidia also stated (some cases were cited in previous Nvidia filings) that "in September, October and November 2008, several putative consumer class action lawsuits were filed against us, asserting various claims arising from a weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of our previous generation MCP and GPU products used in notebook systems."

Most of the lawsuits were filed in federal court in the Northern District of California, but three were filed in state court in California, in federal court in New York, and in federal court in Texas, Nvidia stated. "Those three actions have since been removed or transferred to the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division, where all of the actions now are currently pending."

Some of the lawsuits, such as "Inicom Networks, Inc. v. NVIDIA Corp. and Dell, Inc. and Hewlett Packard," include Dell and HP.

Micron Technology is entering the graphics memory business, going up against heavyweights Samsung and Hynix.

Micron is targeting its memory at the upper mid-range of the graphics chip market

(Credit: Nvidia)

Micron, which recently vaulted to the No. 3 spot in global sales of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), is now aiming at the market for DRAM chips used with graphics processors from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices' ATI graphics unit.

The market for DRAM used with graphics processors is about 4 percent of the bits shipped into the DRAM market, according to Micron. DRAM is typically used as the main memory in PCs. This type of DRAM is also referred to as Synchronous DRAM, or SDRAM.

"Our upcoming 50-nanometer technology is very competitive when it comes to power consumption and performance," Robert Feurle, Micron's VP of DRAM marketing, said in a phone interview Thursday.

"I think it's a good point in time to begin discussions with big enablers Nvidia and AMD and get started with some design-ins," Feurle said.

Micron is making its debut with Double Date Rate 3 (DDR3) memory. This is the same type of memory used for the main memory of currently shipping PCs, which have gravitated from DDR2. In the future, Micron will look at making more proprietary graphics memory, referred to as GDDR3 and GDDR5. "No decision has been made yet but we're looking into that very seriously," Feurle said.

Initially, Micron is targeting the "upper mid-range" of the graphics processor market.

Micron says its DDR3 has a distinct power consumption advantage over GDDR3: standard DDR3 can go down to 1.35 volts. "GDDR3 is still running a 1.8 volts. We have a giant power savings advantage," he said.

Micron is targeting memory with speeds of 1600MHz "to get started with and going up from there," Feurle said.

The DRAM market overall has seen sliding sales, falling 20 percent in the first quarter from the fourth quarter and 44 percent from the year-earlier period, according to iSuppli. The problem is overcapacity, which has most notably brought Taiwan memory makers to their knees. In that country, some manufacturers have faced possible bankruptcy.

"Micron now has renewed its competitive vigor, mainly due to its acquisition of a 300mm fab from Inotera in Taiwan," iSuppli said recently. Fab refers to fabrication facility or factory.

On Thursday, Nvidia reported a first-quarter loss, as revenue fell 42 percent from last year. But the graphics chipmaker said inventory was easing.

The company announced a net loss of $201.3 million, or 37 cents a share. Last year in the same period, the company posted a profit of $176.8 million, or 30 cents a share.

Revenue was $664.2 million, down from $1.15 billion for the same period last year. This was better than the analysts' average estimate of $534.4 million, however.

Adjusted net loss was 9 cents a share. Analysts had expected a loss of 10 cents a share, according to Reuters estimates.

"We made good progress managing expenses and significantly reducing inventory," said Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia, in a statement. Inventory decreased from 144 to 64 days sequentially. Revenue grew 38 percent sequentially from the previous quarter.

Chip giant Qualcomm said that it is seeing a pickup in chip demand. Separately, two chip industry research firms said graphics chips shipments rose in the first quarter.

Qualcomm indicated on Monday that it is encouraged by demand. "We're feeling more comfortable looking forward...We're happy to see chip demand up," CEO Paul Jacobs said during the company's second-quarter earnings conference call. "We're happy to see inventories stabilizing, reaffirming the device demand, we have very strong operating cash flows," he added.

The world's largest maker of cell phone chips had revenue of $2.46 billion, down from the $2.61 billion posted in the same quarter last year, and posted an operating loss of $10 million, reflecting a $748 million charge for litigation settlement related to the settlement and patent agreement with Broadcom.

The sentiment expressed by Qualcomm's CEO adds weight to comments made by Intel earlier this month in its first-quarter earnings conference call. "I believe the worst is now behind us from an inventory correction and demand-level adjustment perspective," Intel CEO Paul Otellini said on April 14.

Reports from market research firms were also positive. On Tuesday, Jon Peddie Research, which tracks the graphics chip market, said shipments were up 3.3 percent from the fourth quarter, "breaking an eight-year seasonal trend that dictated negative sales from Q4 to Q1."

Peddie attributed this, however, to going from nothing to something. "In Q3 and Q4 of 2008 the channel stopped ordering GPUs (graphics processing units) and depleted inventory in anticipation of a long drawn out worldwide recession. But, no recession, no matter how severe, results in zero sales. The world continued to turn and the consumers continued to buy, albeit they bought less," Peddie said in a prepared statement.

Also on Tuesday, Nvidia released information from Mercury Research, another firm that follows chip markets, which said overall graphics chip shipments were up 3.8 percent from the fourth quarter of 2008. The uptick was attributed to improved desktop sales.

Peddie added this cautionary statement. "Things probably aren't going to get back to the normal seasonality till Q3 this year, and we won't hit the levels of 2008 until 2010."

Updated on April 27 at 8:20 a.m. PDT with additional information about DirectX 11 and correcting for Intel comments at bottom.

Graphics chips will be tapped to accelerate more tasks in upcoming versions of Apple's and Microsoft's operating systems, according to Nvidia.

Apple's upcoming Mac OS X Snow Leopard will tap into the compute power of graphics processors

(Credit: Apple)

In an interview Friday with Sumit Gupta, product manager for Nvidia's Tesla products, Gupta described how new programming environments will tap into the latent compute horsepower of graphics processors to accelerate software in Apple's upcoming OS X Snow Leopard and Microsoft's Windows 7 operating systems.

Graphics chips aren't just for games anymore. The trend toward general-purpose graphics processing is defined by an acronym that doesn't exactly roll off the tongue: GPGPU. But the essence of General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units is pretty simple: use the scores--or even hundreds in higher-end chips--of processing cores inside GPUs to speed tasks that, in some cases, would be done much less efficiently by the central processing unit (CPU).

This is where OpenCL (Open Computing Language) comes in. OpenCL is a programming environment for "heterogeneous" computing. That is, computers using a mix of multicore CPUs and GPUs. Microsoft's analogous programming environment is DirectX.

Apple says this about OpenCL on its Web site. "Another powerful Snow Leopard technology, OpenCL...makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit."

Today, on a PC or a Mac, the CPUs made by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are adept at handling general operating system tasks. For instance, handling the sequence of things that must happen after the user clicks on an icon to start an application on their desktop.