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Just in case you missed our live Webcast yesterday, Editors' Office Hours talked to CNET's Rich Brown, taking questions from the audience about all things related to 3D graphics cards.

From the latest in multi-GPU setups to the cheapest video card for playing World of Warcraft, we got a lot of probing questions from the viewing audience, all answered in Rich's typically knowledgeable, in-depth style.

If you're thinking of upgrading your video card or building a new gaming rig from scratch, you should definitely check it out.

A video card for PCs.

(Credit: Wikipedia)

The housing market is down the toilet, the stock market keeps tumbling, and unemployment rates are going up. It's all bad news. If you're looking for a little bright spot, however, I've got one for you.

According to a report out Monday from multimedia and graphics research and consulting firm Jon Peddie Research, the graphics processing unit, or GPU, market has been doing very well despite the economic turmoil.

JPR's numbers show that in the third quarter of this year, more than 111 million GPUs were shipped. During the same quarter last year, only 91 million GPUs shipped, and 94 million units shipped in the previous quarter. That's an annual increase of 22.5 percent and a quarter-to-quarter increase of almost 18 percent.

GPUs are generally used in industrial and medical systems, point-of-sale terminals, kiosks, digital signs, and especially PCs. Thanks to SLI and CrossFire technologies by Nvidia and AMD, more than a third of all PCs shipped today come with more than one GPU.

According to the report, this quarter, the three giant chipmakers are holding 97.8 percent of the market share, with Intel at 49.4 percent, Nvidia at 27.8 percent, and AMD at 20.6 percent. The other GPU makers, including Matrox, SiS, and Via/S3, share the rest of the market--a measly 2.2 percent.

Nonetheless, it's likely that the fourth quarter will not look the same as the last three, as AMD and Nvidia aren't expected to release any more new GPUs due to the large number of introductions they have done this year. In addition, AMD and Intel have stabilized their integrated GPU offerings.

Hewlett-Packard lists 24 laptop model variations affected by a widely reported Nvidia graphics chip defect. HP said the flaw has been a warranty issue since November of last year.

Some HP DV9000 series notebooks used potentially defective Nvidia graphics chip

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Dell made a statement Friday regarding the same graphics chip issue. Nvidia published a "Business Update" on July 2 that addressed the problem. The Nvidia defect is centered on a "weak die/packaging material" in certain versions of Nvidia graphics silicon used in laptops. The die refers to the chip itself and the packaging is what encases the chip.

HP has published a list of potentially affected systems that comprises Pavilion and Compaq Presario laptop models.

"HP has taken appropriate actions for any HP notebook products that use the known affected Nvidia chips," an HP spokesperson said Monday, responding to an e-mail query. "We initiated a customer program to address this issue in November 2007, and have notified registered customers who have notebook PC models that are included in this HP program.

"HP became aware of this issue when we began performing an investigation based on field performance data," the spokesperson said.

Pavilion dv2000, dv6000, and dv9000 and Compaq Presario V3000 and V6000 series are listed by HP as being potentially affected. Symptoms include no video on the computer LCD screen, no power and no active LEDs, and "the notebook does not start," according to HP's Web page that cites the problem.

"If you are experiencing one or more symptoms listed below, and your computer meets the product criteria listed below, contact HP to determine whether you are eligible for a free repair," the HP Web page states.

The defect is described by Nvidia in more detail here.

Technology Web site The Inquirer cited affected HP systems earlier this month.

Update on July 27 at 10:00 a.m. with additional information

Dell has issued a system update for a well-publicized problem with Nvidia chips.

The company said Friday it has posted BIOS updates for an Nvidia graphics chip glitch affecting laptop computers. Citing Nvidia information, Dell said the "affected GPUs (graphics processing units) are experiencing higher than expected failure rates causing video problems."

"The issue is a weak die/packaging material set, which may fail with GPU temperature fluctuations. If your GPU fails, you may see intermittent symptoms," the Dell blog said.

Dell said the symptoms include "multiple images, random characters on the screen, lines on the screen, no video." But added this caveat: "if you are already experiencing video-related issues like the...points above, updating the BIOS will not correct them. Dell will provide support for customers who have experienced GPU failure according to the terms of the system warranty."

Dell laptop systems potentially affected by Nvidia glitch with update file name

(Credit: Dell)

Dell is recommending that users flash their system BIOS. "Each of these BIOS updates...modifies the fan profile to help regulate GPU temperature fluctuations," Dell said.

New systems are shipping with the BIOS update, according to Dell.

On July 2, Nvidia said it would take a one-time charge of between $150 million and $200 million to cover "anticipated warranty, repair, return, replacement, and other costs and expenses, arising from a weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of its previous generation GPU and MCP (multi-chip package) products used in notebook systems."

Nvidia is in the throes of a minor meltdown. Its share price is collapsing as it grapples with widespread product defects, a resurgent Advanced Micro Devices, and a weak market.

It all started when Nvidia released a statement on July 2 saying it would take a $150 million to $200 million charge to cover the costs for repair and replacement of defective graphics silicon in notebook PCs. Though Nvidia didn't name any names, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and Lenovo, among others, use Nvidia graphics chips in their notebooks.

Then on Thursday, July 3, shares plunged $5.54, or just over 30 percent, and closed at $12.49. And share prices have continued to fall--though how much of the post-30-percent drop can be attributed to the weak stock market is not clear.

"There are two piece of news. One is the technical problem, the other part is that (Nvidia) isn't happy with where their business is going," said Dean McCarron, principal at Cave Creek, Ariz.-based Mercury Research.

Keener-than-usual competition is adding to product-defect woes. "Pricing has been more aggressive," McCarron said, referring to more competitive products from AMD's ATI graphics unit. "They did make some price adjustments on their GPU (graphics processing unit) products based on AMD being more competitive," McCarron said.

PC makers such as HP and Toshiba are also using more AMD-ATI graphics chips in notebook PCs, though the impact of this trend may be felt later rather than sooner. "I wouldn't necessarily look at it as being a tremendous share shift. We won't know until the end of the quarter. My suspicion is that (this quarter) a market share shift could be a small component," he said.

Beyond Nvidia's internal problems and the inter-company rivalry with AMD, McCarron sees a bigger issue looming that may affect not only Nvidia in a big way but AMD and Intel, too. "I am seeing some early signs that the market is weaker than forecast. China in particular seems to be much softer," McCarron said. This is a concern because China is now driving a lot of the growth, he said.

Stateside, an ill-timed Rambus lawsuit against Nvidia falls into the kick-them-when-they're-down category. Rambus, which makes a living--though not that successfully in recent years--suing other companies for patent infringement, has now set its sights on Nvidia. The Los Altos, Calif.-based company filed a lawsuit Thursday claiming Nvidia products with memory controllers for synchronous dynamic random access memory (SDR) and double data rate memory (DDR, DDR2, DDR3, GDDR, and GDDR3) infringe 17 Rambus patents.

But product defects will be the big issue that dogs Nvidia over the summer and weighs on its stock price. Here is an excerpt from Nvidia's 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on July 2. "While we have not been able to determine a root cause for these failures, testing suggests a weak material set of die/package combination, system thermal management designs."

McCarron said in some cases "you're getting enough mechanical stress that you're actually breaking the bond between the chip and the motherboard" which can cause a system with an Nvidia chip to fail.

Nvidia's second quarter business update, released Wednesday, was mostly bad news for the company. But there's potentially bad news for consumers, too. Nvidia revealed plans to take a $150 million to $200 million charge to cover anticipated repair and return costs arising from a "weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of its previous generation GPU and MCP products used in notebook systems."

The release goes on to explain that the cards aren't faulty on their own, but that the materials have demonstrated higher-than-normal failure rates in combination with other components in certain laptop configurations. (Clear as mud, no?) According to a follow-up from the IDG News Service, the problem is associated with the laptops' thermal design; Nvidia has reportedly provided laptop manufacturers with a driver that will cause system fans to start operating sooner in hopes of mitigating the problem.

Which manufacturers got the driver? Good question. The company seems determined to avoid listing the specific GPUs affected or the manufacturers whose laptops have shown problems. I've contacted Nvidia to see if we can get any more information, and I'll post an update when I hear back.

Meanwhile, let me know in the comments if you've had temperature-related issues with an Nvidia card in your laptop. Be sure to include your laptop model number--maybe we can find a pattern.

Update: I heard back from Nvidia representative Calisa Cole, who said that obligations to customers (i.e., manufacturers) prevent them from providing specifics about the models affected. But she did confirm the driver changes, saying, "We have switched production to a more robust die/package material set and are working proactively with our OEM partners to develop system management software to provide better thermal management to the GPU."

AMD announced today that its next-generation ATI Radeon graphics cards will be the first commercial implementation of GDDR5 memory. According to the company, the new memory will allow for faster, smaller, and cheaper graphics cards:

"The higher data rates supported by GDDR5--up to 5x that of GDDR3 and 4x that of GDDR4--enable more bandwidth over a narrower memory interface, which can translate into superior performance delivered from smaller, more cost-effective chips."

The benefits of GDDR5 memory also include increased accuracy in calculations by way of new error detection mechanisms and more power-efficient graphics cards, according to AMD.

This is all well and good, but without honkin' graphics card that sounds like a vacuum when you fire up Crysis, how will the others at the LAN party know you mean business?

(Source)

Jen-Hsun Huang doesn't pull any punches. And Intel is a favorite punching bag these days.

I had a chance to sit down with the Nvidia CEO as he described his company's philosophy and what sounds like the first volleys of a long battle with Intel.

Nvidia CEO and founder Jen-Hsun Huang

(Credit: Nvidia)

A quick backdrop: Nvidia is the largest graphics chip company in the world, with quarterly revenue in the $1 billion range. Although Intel and Nvidia seem to exist in symbiotic bliss inside many PCs, this doesn't reflect the two companies' business models, which are in many respects far apart.

Intel is a chip manufacturer. Nvidia is not; it's a fabless company. Intel supplies the central-processing unit (CPU), a general-purpose processor. Nvidia supplies the graphics-processing unit (GPU), a special-purpose chip.

Huang is relentless in driving GPU performance--and fearless when challenging Intel. This is admirable, if anything. Even the world's largest PC makers treat Intel with great deference--publicly--because the chipmaker is so instrumental in supplying and defining the core electronics in their PCs (And partly due to the fact that they use Intel advertising dollars).

But Huang will tear into Intel when he thinks it's warranted. And Intel may have reason to be worried about the content of Huang's candor. Despite Intel's colossal size and and clout, Nvidia--not Intel--supplies the defining chip for the most savvy computer users: game enthusiasts. They depend on Nvidia graphics chips to deliver the spectacular visuals of games like Crysis.

And few people will deny that computing is becoming more visual. The GPU is essentially a parallel-computing engine that is extremely efficient at running visual (and scientific) software--that is, many of the popular graphics, video, and photo applications now running on PCs.

Nvidia is set to challenge Intel in the mobile Internet device space. It is getting set to make a big platform play in tiny, fit-in-your-pocket devices with its APX 2500. This "system on a chip" will house everything that comes on a PC circuit board today. Intel is targeting the same market with its Moorestown processor, due in late 2009 or 2010.

One important note: because Huang had made so many references to Intel over the last few months, particularly at the financial-analyst day in April, the interview revolved around this topic. In some cases, I asked pointed questions about Intel and posed hypothetical--i.e. devil's advocate--scenarios. In other cases, Huang volunteered statements about Intel.

Huang has spoken forthrightly in the last few months about Intel. The obvious question is why.

"People thought that I had lost some of my patience with Intel recently. The fact of the matter is that they're out spouting things that are just not true. And I was just correcting that," he said.

"Intel is a big, powerful company," I noted to Huang. "And there aren't many people like you in the industry, who are so blunt about Intel."

His reaction: "Because they are Intel. Because they are a monopoly. Because they are a market-dominant player. They ought to be held to a higher standard. They shouldn't be able to say that other peoples' businesses are going to die."

Huang, here, is referring to a statement by an Intel executive who recently said current graphics technology (sometimes referred to generally as rasterization) will be replaced by another kind of graphics technology (sometimes referred to as ray tracing), on which Intel is working.

Intel has also been dropping more hints about its upcoming high-end graphics chip, called Larrabee, with relatively few specifics. I asked Huang if he thought there was a reason so few details had been given.

"Larabee is a PowerPoint slide," Huang said. "I haven't met a product on my PowerPoint slide that I don't like. You know, they're floating Larrabee out there just to put a shadow over us, cast a cloud over us. They've already slipped it two years from the time they talked about. They would love to slip it another four years and leave a cloud over me."

"Just to play devil's advocate," I said, "Intel sees the success of the GPU. So it has to crank up its skunk works and develop a fast GPU too (Larrabee). Then Intel, being Intel, has to fill its factories and sell these things. Again, I'm playing devil's advocate here."

Huang's immediate reaction: "You and I have a deal. If you're going to write controversial stuff about what I say, can you write what you just said? Here's what I believe: I believe that the entire world believes that what Intel does is build a factory, stuff that people don't want to buy, and then shoves it down its customer's throats. Just like you said."

Huang also spoke about how the PC industry is shifting away from the CPU-centric vision.

"We would love it if people would buy more GPUs, but the fact of the matter is, we don't have Intel's budget to tell you to buy something you don't need. We're going to let the market decide for itself," he said.

"Selecting the right GPU for the right CPU--and having these two processors collaborate. We call it the optimized PC design," he continued. "Notice, we didn't call it 'increase your GPU' design. Notice we didn't go 'buy more quad cores.' It's not a market benefit message. The optimized PC asks what your work flow is. Take the work flow, and benchmark it on the machine. And decide for yourself."

Huang had a few points to make about changes in PC marketing.

"The whole idea that the PC industry is good, better, best, faster microprocessors, more memory--that psychology of the PC industry is so yesterday," he said. "Not a single person believes it. Sony doesn't believe it. Dell doesn't believe it. HP doesn't believe it. God knows Apple doesn't believe it. Nobody believes it anymore."

Huang elaborated, saying that at the other end of the computing spectrum is the minimalist PC, which Nvidia's APX 2500 system-on-a-chip addresses.

"There's a movement toward 'I want the most minimal of PCs': the ThinkPad (X300)," Huang said. "In the future, if it's not thin like a sheet of paper, it's just too much. There should be no electronics. There should be just one tiny chip. And this computer ought to cost nothing. The display should be the most expensive thing. It's not about the CPU. It's not about the GPU. It's about the computer on the chip."

But Intel, and its capacity to integrate more and more of the PC's function into its chipsets, is never far from his mind. Huang gave a number of examples of companies--as smaller and smaller chip geometries have allowed more and more transistors to be packed into a single chip--that disappeared because they were integrated out of existence. (Think sound chip and multimedia chip companies as just a few examples.)

"Make me...list one single example where Moore's Law is not your enemy today," he said. "At this very moment, the only one we know of is the GPU."

Every year, Huang said, "we're making chips that are twice as big as the (year) before that. And every single year, we deliver an experience that is twice as good as the year before. And every single year, people say, 'It's not good enough. I want more. I want more.'"

Throughout it all, Moore's Law is still Huang's friend, he said.

"Notice in the case of CPUs, people are saying, 'I don't need that many gigahertz,' or 'I don't need that many cores,'" Huang noted. "(CPU makers) are going down that path. And that's why it's possible now to build an Atom CPU. At that point, the technology becomes good enough."

Huang said he is not trying to wish Intel away. He is willing to co-exist. But he doesn't believe that Intel is able to do this. This probably is his biggest beef.

"There are going to be two important processors in the system," he said. "A microprocessor that is used for all kinds of complicated, unpredictable sequential code. And a parallel processor, called a GPU, that is really dedicated toward doing very parallel, very heavy-lifting mathematical operations."

Huang refocused his attention on Intel.

"Intel cannot share the world with someone else. They want the world to have one processor. They don't want the world to have two processors, even if it's good for them. (The Nvidia chip) just happens to be so famous, and just happens to be so popular, and happens to be so delightful that it just really makes them upset. That's an anti-innovation feeling. That's a monopolistic feeling, right? You can't share the world with somebody else."

His attitude borders on paranoid. But in Silicon Valley, the credo "only the paranoid survive," put forth by former Intel CEO Andrew Grove, is followed by many.

"People have been predicting the demise of our company for 10 years now," Huang said. "Intel has been in the graphics business for 10 years. They've been predicting our death for 10 years. They'll be predicting our death 10 years from now."

Nvidia's hostility toward Intel is on a high boil these days. In its latest dig against the central processing unit (CPU) and the company that makes the lion's share of CPUs, an Nvidia VP said in a private missive that the CPU is dead and it has "run out of steam."

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang

(Credit: Rico Shen)

But wait. That's not what Nvidia really thinks. The message cited by the The Inquirer is "not a public statement," said Brian Burke, an Nvidia spokesperson. "The views in (Roy Tayler's) e-mail do not mirror the views of Nvidia." (The author of the message, Roy Tayler, is VP of content relations at Nvidia.)

But is the statement that far apart from Nvidia's public sentiment? "You need nothing beyond the most basic CPU," Burke said. Sounds like Nvidia thinks the CPU is, if not terminal, certainly fading.

(The CPU, or central processing unit, is the main processor in a PC. The GPU, or graphics processing unit, handles much of the visual content on a PC.)

This of course is news to Intel, the largest chip company in the world whose main business is making CPUs. "We believe that both a great CPU and great graphics are important in a PC. Any PC purchase--including the capability level of components inside it--is a decision that each user must make based on what they will be doing with that PC," said Intel spokesperson Dan Snyder.

To be sure, Nvidia and Intel have never gotten along famously. But the acrimony (mostly Nvidia's) started to build at Nvidia's fourth quarter conference call and carried over to the company's financial analyst day earlier this month, when CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang, alluding to comments from game developer Tim Sweeny, said "Intel is incapable of running modern games. Intel's integrated graphics just don't work."

But the crux of Nvidia's marketing message, vis-a-vis Intel, is focused on the graphics chip maker's perceived limitations of the CPU. In short, buy a high-end GPU, not a high-end CPU, and save money. During the earnings conference call, Huang cited the Gateway P series notebook as an example. One model has an Intel 1.6 GHz processor and a GeForce 8800 GPU. He said systems like this with a "higher-end GPU" and "lower-end CPU" are better optimized for today's users. "Relative to a notebook with a higher-end CPU and lower-end GPU, the Gateway FX is twice the performance and yet $200 lower cost."