Tag: nvidia

nVidia Files Countersuit Against Intel

March 27th, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Hardware No comments - Tags: , , , , ,

intel-logo_270x178

nVidia has responded to Intel’s dispute last month, which saw Intel wishing to take nVidia to court regarding Intel’s “Nehalem” (Core i7) processors and nVidia’s right to manufacture i7 motherboards.

nVidia had no other choice, according to company CEO and president Jen-Hsun Huang:

“Nvidia did not initiate this legal dispute, but we must defend ourselves…Intel’s actions are intended to block us from making use of the very license rights that they agreed to provide.”"

The dispute concerns a joint agreement by Intel and nVidia in 2004, which gave nVidia the legal right to manufacture motherboards for Intel’s processors. Last month Intel decided to sue nVidia, stating in their lawsuit that the 2004 agreement didn’t include Intel’s Nehalem processors.

nVidia adds PhysX to the Wii

March 19th, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Hardware One comment - Tags: , , , ,

nvidia_logo

Now that sounds rather ridiculous.

The Wii, arguably with the hardware of a last-generation console (with brilliant motion-sensing capabilities), isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think of nVidia’s process-intensive and super-realistic PhysX platform. The PhysX engine allows developers to create very, very realistic physics simulations. Either way, nVidia has provided a PhysX SDK to Nintendo Wii developers as “a key to our cross-platform strategy”.

It’s rather ironic however. The PhysX platform is designed to execute on nVidia GPUs (as a GPU can do a lot more processing than a CPU, making it idea for physics-work), but this only works on PCs. On consoles, such as the Wii and PS3, which nVidia also recently made it’s PhysX API available to, will still need to use the CPU for all the physical processing involved.

“Based on all the processing cores in the GPU, we can do a lot more processing on the GPU than the CPU. That doesn’t mean the CPU isn’t a great place do processing but we can just take more advantage of an Nvidia GPU,”

Seems like second-guessing the decision to promote the API on consoles to me.