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NVIDIA says it will win back performance leadership this year

by Scott Bicheno on 14 August 2008, 20:22

Tags: NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

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A year ago NVIDIA could do no wrong. Its sole competitor in the discrete graphics business - AMD - was struggling to produce a GPU that could compete. Consequently NVIDIA based products were selling like hot cakes and NVIDIA was making piles of cash.

What a difference a year makes. AMD very much got its act together with the 4800 series of GPUs and just this week put its two best ones together on one PCB (printed circuit board) to produce the HD 4870 X2, which has reclaimed the overall graphics performance leadership after a long period of NVIDIA dominance.

As if that wasn't inconvenient enough, Intel is getting ready to make its first foray into discrete graphics in the form of Larrabee in a year or so's time. Intel is over 20 times the size of NVIDIA by market cap, so this is not to be taken lightly. The icing on the cake, of course, is the money NVIDIA is having to put aside to cover its die/packaging problems.

As is standard practice with most companies when faced with a competitive threat, NVIDIA is not wasting any time in pointing out the advantages it believes it still has over its competitors. As well as the formal announcements NVIDIA made, coincidentally it claims, on the day of the 4870 X2 launch, this also included a lot of briefing of us journos.

While we stress there's nothing intrinsically wrong, or even exceptional, about highlighting the failings of your competitors to the press, we do think this type of briefing is explicitly designed to influence what is reported and is therefore a matter of public interest. For that reason we sought an exclusive interview with NVIDIA to find out precisely what its views are on its competitors and NVIDIA obliged.