Sunday, December 7, 2008

NVidia follows Apple's stance to wait and see on netbook growth

It's not only Apple now who want to wait and see on how the "nascent" netbook category will grow and evolve, but it seems that Apple CEO Steve Jobs' words are affecting NVidia as well.

NVidia officials on last Tuesday reiterated the company's interest in the mini-laptop space but said it would wait for the market to mature before jumping in, according to a PC World report. "We're not saying we're not interested; it's a matter of how the market will evolve," said Marv Burkett, the company's chief financial officer. He even used the same "evolve" word like Steve Jobs did...

But then Michael Hara, vice president of investor relations at NVidia revealed a little bit of NVidia's strategy for future netbooks: "Most netbooks today contain Intel's Atom processor and are not capable of handling video games or multimedia effectively, ... Netbooks could have integrated graphics in the future to better handle graphics."

NVidia has already prepping up an integrated CPU-graphic chipset for laptops which is slated for release in next year along with the Tegra system-on-chip for smartphones.

While on the Intel side, the chip giant spokesman George Alfs told TG Daily that all products planned for 2H 2009 would still arrive in 2H 2009, and Intel will delay its Havendale CPU+GPU processor by one quarter into 2010. Havendale will be Intel’s first processor with a heterogeneous multi-core structure, integrating a GPU on the CPU die.

AMD is also reporting that its long awaited Fusion processor has been shifted from a 45 nm to a 32 nm process and delayed into 2011 as a result. Dang! We've been hoping to see processor war once again between Intel vs. AMD, where prices are hoped to drop by it.

Looks like we're gonna stuck to see netbooks being powered with Intel Atom processor for another year to come...

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