CeBIT 2008 Round Up - Video Cards continued
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nVidia has the same type of technology coming, but it is still a few months off. Being second in a tech race is right above not coming to the market at all as far as trends go, but nevertheless they will have this technology as well, soon enough. Their big offerings were a new graphics card and news about their purchase of Ageia Technologies.
First is the new graphics card. Slap two 8800 GTS die shrunken cores onto a single card, and voila, you have the 9800 GX2. I guess nVidia was feeling the heat from AMD with the 3870X2 card they have had on the market for some time. I don't think this is the way to go, having two separate cores on a single board to make your card faster, but it's all about being number one.
The other big happenings with nVidia were the recent buyout of Ageia Technologies, most notable for their PhysX card and physics software. Both AMD and nVidia have been saying that you're going to be able to run some amazing physics on your GPU as well as graphics, but nothing close to a release has surfaced. This is a major step forward for nVidia and I would say we will probably see something materialize this year with this. With all the promise that the PhysX card brought and the lack of games supporting it, I'm glad we are going to finally get some real physics going in games soon.
Conclusion
CeBit 2008 was an exciting time for us tech gurus. There were thousands of devices to look at or play with. Not every device was worthwhile or something that we could benefit from, and many of the devices weren't brand new, but there were a few products that were introduced and look very promising.
ASUS is a very busy company; their UMPC segment is flying high right now and really putting some elbow grease into their work. Other branches of ASUS are making me worried. I don't see a huge demand for bamboo computers, and why name a motherboard after wine?
OCZ's mind-controlled mice looked very futuristic. At first guess I would have thought that they would be available in 20 years, but OCZ says it's nearing mass production. They could revolutionize computing.
Finally both AMD and nVidia are hard at work with hybrid dual video card solutions. I hope that we will finally start to see physics mature rapidly over the next year, but we've been promised this before. This year was very exciting, and I can't wait to see what comes next year.
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