Controversial NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has aimed a bevy of criticisms squarely at Intel in a recent interview conducted by LAPTOP Magazine.
It is no secret that the increasingly ubiquitous netbook has become a bright spot in the otherwise depressed PC industry. With so many manufacturers looking to grab a slice of the pie, NVIDIA is making a play with their Ion platform which Huang hopes will trump the Atom’s current market position as “a low-cost PC that doesn’t work that well.”
Huang believes that the current Atom platform (chipset) is creating a user base that cannot capably run a wide selection of applications from AAA developers. “It doesn’t run anything well from Electronic Arts, it doesn’t run anything well from Adobe, it doesn’t run anything well from Microsoft,” he said. “So in a way, the Atom platform is creating an installed base of PCs that’s going to eventually hurt the PC software industry.”
NVIDIA believes that an increasingly frustrated population of users has been caught unaware. Huang asserts that a majority of the consumers have basic performance expectations and have become dissatisfied when they unwittingly buy into the Atom platform’s limited performance target.
“If I were to ask a million people, ‘what do you call something with a Microsoft operating system called Windows and X86 processor from Intel?’ I would think that 99.9999 percent of them, except for the Intel marketing person, would call it a PC,” he said.
Huang believes that this confusion is going to spell considerable success for AMD’s gamble with the Neo platform. Targeting a performance envelope at a step between the Netbook and the prohibitively expensive ultra-portable, AMD has married a potent chip to a capable IGP to give consumers the performance they expect.
“…AMD is one of the world’s most advanced graphics companies. They bought ATI, who has wonderful technology. When you couple that with an AMD processor, it would destroy the Atom platform,” Huang said of the Neo.
The interview also discusses VIA’s as yet unpopularized Nano processor, and the viability of NVIDIA’s MID-oriented Tegra platform.
Products featuring Ion components are in the wings but no launch dates have been revealed by any participating partners.
Articles RSS