f'ing the puppy

Hmm, I haven't really been keeping up much with nvidia lately - they've obviously never really cared about OpenCL and what little effort they did for show seemed to disappear early 0-11. Oh and gmail suddenly decided they're developer updates were spam ... (they haven't mentioned opencl in any update for over a year).

Still, they make hardware that is capable of computing jobs, and they still seem to want to push their own platform for the job, so one must keep abreast - and if nothing else healthy competition is good for all of us.

I'd seen the odd fanboi post about how 'kepler' was going to wipe the floor of all the competition, and after all this time to see what has been released looks pretty disappointing. It's nice to see that they've tackled the power and heat problems, but this part is all about games, `compute' and OpenCL is left in the dust, behind even their older parts. And even then the games performance whilst generally better isn't always so. It looks like they skimped on the memory width in order to reduce the costs so they could be price competitive with AMD - so presumably a wider-bus version will be out eventually and is sorely needed to re-balance the system design.

I guess they've decided general purpose compute is still a bit before it's time, not ready as a mainstream technology and therefore not worth the investment. Well it's a gamble. Probably just as much a gamble as AMD putting all their eggs into that basket: although AMD have more to win and lose as for them it is all about CPU / system performance than simply graphics. Still, with multi-core cpu's hitting all sorts of performance ceilings AMD (nor intel for that matter) really has no choice and time will tell who has the better strategy. AMD certainly have a totally awesome vision, whether they can pull it off is another matter. Nvidias vision only seems to be about selling game cards - nothing wrong with that as money is what any company is about, but it's hardly inspiring.

I'm not sure how big the market is for high-end graphics-only cards. When reading fanboi 'enthusiast' sites one has to put in perspective that they are still a niche product, and most graphics cards in use are embedded or the lower-end of the price range. Comments from kids saying they're going to throw away their recently bought top-of-the-range amd/nvidia card now that nvidia/amd have a new one out are just ludicrous and simply not believable (and if they really do such things, their behaviour isn't rational and not worth consideration).