X-bit labs

News Glance: The Essential Commentary on the Week’s Hottest News

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 07/09/2004 | 04:52 PM ]

We combined the hottest events for two weeks and now ready to share with you some exclusive details along with comments. Let’s have an in-depth talk about the ramp of PCI Express, Shader Model 3.0, NVIDIA’s SLI technology and transition to 64-bit computing.

Table of contents:

• Introduction
  
• PCI Express x16 Ramp: ATI Technologies Captures the Market
  
• OEMs Prefer ATI Technologies, says ATI
  
• PCI Express Market: Small, but Growing
  
• Leading GPU Makers Ready with PCI Express
  
• Intel and AMD Ship x86-64 Chips, Transition to 64-bit Years Away
  
• “Unimportant” AMD Technology Found Inside Intel’s Products
  
• No Mainstream 64-bit Software to Come Soon?
  
• NVIDIA SLI: a Technology to Stay or Last-Minute Decision?
  
• Performance at Any Cost!
  
• Mainboards Question
  
• ATI Technologies, Alienware React on SLI
  
• Kentron Wants End-Users to Choose QBM
  
• NVIDIA Shows Off the GeForce 6800 Advantage: Shader Model 3.0 Exposed
  

Introduction

Even though the news are rather pale these days, some things are happening and if you can dig deeper, you will certainly find some interesting background and probably will be able to make certain predictions of the future.

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Today we take a look on the ramp of PCI Express graphics and mainboards. After we started the survey of our sources, we discovered an extremely interesting detail – major OEMs prefer ATI’s PCI Express graphics cards, which may be an indication of NVIDIA’s PCI Express strategy fiasco, at least now. Another two things that concern NVIDIA in this coverage are the SLI technology along with Shader Model 3.0.

We also have something interesting about Intel’s last-minute jump on x86-64 bandwagon that resulted in inability of Microsoft’s operating system for x86-64 systems to function on machines powered by Intel’s latest breed of Xeon processors. In addition, we think again about Kentron’s Quad Band Memory technology to realise whether the technology has future or not.