The main advantage of a pre-loaded OS...

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 02:19:20PM -0500, William Park wrote:
> Those super computers... well, I think you can count the number of sales
> on your hand.

There are a lot of machines out there with a couple of tesla cards.
Even Dell sells them.  They are a lot more common that you think.

Nvidia has realized that competing with intel in the chipset business is
a pain, given intel won't share that market, and when AMD bought ATI,
nvidia rightfully lost interest in the AMD market (which from a users
point of view is a shame because nvidia's chipsets were excellent for
the AMD CPUs).

In the mid to high end graphics market, nvidia is the leader, and there
is good money to be made there (unlike the low end, where you make almost
nothing and have to make it up in volumes).  Being able to reuse the same
designs as high end computing devices that sell for 10 times of what a
high end graphics card costs is just a bonus.  Being able to reuse some
of the design features in mobile chips that can sell by the millions
for cell phone and other mobile devices is going to be great for nvidia.
AMD/ATI can fight intel over the embedded graphics/chipset/x86 market.
Nvidia will happily take the high margin graphics business and go attack
the mobile market instead, and take $300 million a year from intel in
patent royalties while they are at it.

> But, none of those will be motherboard that I can play with.  I'm not
> going to pay $700 for a device with 32MB ram.

I don't think any of them have only 32MB ram.  Try 1GB on your typical
tegra device.  The mobile market is huge.  There is a reason intel is
trying to get into it with the atom, although I don't think they are
being that successful yet.  Even microsoft is starting to figure it out,
which is why they are saying Windows 8 will also ship in an ARM version.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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