FPS Action on the Web
Sick of wasting time at work with puzzle and word games?
Frag your cube mate instead!
Nvidia Buys PortalPlayer
The desktop graphics company aims to make it
big in small devices
Nvidia is poised to purchase PortalPlayer, a small-
device chipmaker that experienced tremendous
success as the primary supplier of chips for
Apple’s iPod. The $357 million cash deal will allow
the desktop graphics giant to diversify its business
and address the competitive threat it faces from
the recent merger of arch-rival ATI and AMD.
Nvidia has made some advances in the rap-
idly growing mobile market—it’s GoForce chips
grace mobile phones from Motorola, Kyocera, and
Samsung—but PortalPlayer gives the company
entrée into entirely new areas. Besides provid-
ing chips for a range of small devices including
music players, PDAs, portable game players, and
cell phones, PortalPlayer is responsible for the
technology behind Windows SideShow**. Available
exclusively through Vista, SideShow allows a sec-
ondary laptop LCD to display data whether the lap-
top is on or off.**
ATI Lends GPUs
to Science
Folding@Home, the distributed-
computing project sponsored by
Stanford University is about to
get a big boost from its partner-
ship with ATI. Since 2000, F@H
has been tapping the spare CPU
cycles of hundreds of thousands
of idle PCs to study protein fold-
ing and better understand the
causes of common diseases such
as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Now a new Folding client (cur-
rently in beta) similarly taps
the power of ATI’s x1900-class
cards. The fl oating-point capa-
bilities of the cards’ R580 GPU
make it supremely suited for
non-graphics related number
crunching, more so than a CPU.
According to Mike Houston, a
Stanford researcher involved
with the project, “We are getting
37 TFLOPS from 559 GPUs [as of
this printing]; that puts each GPU
at ~70X the performance of the
average Windows machine CPU
donated to the project.”
To join Maximum PC’s folding
team, download either the CPU or
GPU software from http://folding.
stanford.edu/ and register with
team 11108.JANUARY 2007 MAXIMUMPCRasterwerks has
built a first-per-
son shooter us-
ing Macromedia
Director that
plays in any
Shockwave-
equipped
browser. Play
it at http://tinyurl.
com/tzom.D
rawing upon the same psychic powers that
enabled me to predict the Cleveland Indians’ vic-
tory in the 2006 World Series and the San Francisco
49ers’ forthcoming triumph at Super Bowl XLI, here
are my predictions for 2007:AMD is enjoying a great run, but I foresee 2007
as the year when Intel begins regaining lost ground.
Intel’s Core 2 is a genuinely good processor core,
and Intel will use it to produce highly competitive
dual- and quad-core PC processors. But I’m not
counting out AMD. Its recent acquisition of ATI was
a bold move that shows AMD is still innovating and
keeping Intel guessing.A startup company currently in stealth mode
will publicly announce a new x86-compatible pro-
cessor in 2007. You might think that Transmeta’s
suicide charge would have permanently discour-
aged all the maverick CPU architects and investors
in Silicon Valley... but no.Something big will happen with Nvidia. The
company has reason to be nervous: AMD’s acquisi-
tion of ATI changed the landscape for graphics
processors, and both AMD and Intel are integrating
graphics more closely with the CPU. If Intel doesn’t
acquire Nvidia, then Nvidia must strike out in new
directions to survive.Microsoft’s release of Vista will prompt some
users to hoard Windows XP and perhaps even earlier
versions of Windows, such as Windows 2000 and
98SE. The reason: digital rights management (DRM).
When people discover that Vista is foiling their
attempts to use or duplicate copyrighted content—in
some cases, even when it should be legal—they
will revert to older versions of Windows that don’t
play Big Brother. Linux is an alternative, at least for
a while, but many folks are more comfortable with
Windows. With virtualization, it will be easier to keep
an older operating system installed on our machines.People who never considered buying a
Macintosh will change their minds when they
discover that Intel-based Macs are better Windows
PCs than some Windows PCs. Apple’s Boot Camp
makes dual-boot installations a breeze, and
third-party Parallels Desktop software can switch
between Windows and MacOS X on the fly. The Mac
Mini is scarcely larger than an external disk drive
and makes a great secondary system.Tom Halfhill was formerly a senior editor for Byte magazine
and is now an analyst for Microprocessor Report.Predictions
for 2007FAST FORWARD
TOM
HALFHILL09
Do the
masses want
to check email
on a second-
ary laptop
screen? Nvidia
hopes so.