AMD : nomination d'un directeur financier.  
 
(CercleFinance.com) - AMD a annoncé jeudi la nomination de Thomas Seifert en tant que directeur financier en remplacement de Robert Rivet, récemment promu au poste de directeur opérationnel et administratif.
 
'Thomas est un membre reconnu et talentueux de l'industrie avec la richesse d'expérience et de savoir-faire nécessaires pour faire face à la gestion des activités et des finances d'un fabricant de semi-conducteurs à un moment où le secteur traverse une passe difficile et où la concurrence s'intensifie', explique Dirk Meyer, le PDG d'AMD.
 
Thomas Seifert était jusqu'à présent directeur général adjoint et directeur général de Qimonda, un fabricant de mémoires ayant déposé son bilan.  

Est-ce aussi une façon pour le caméléon de préparer le terrain pour cette nouvelle architecture qui sera lancée bientôt avec pas moins de trois modèles? Wait and see...

Fermi is also going to be great at accelerating stuff in Snow Leopard and Windows 7--not to mention a great gaming chip, according to Bill Dally, chief scientist at Nvidia who spoke during a conference call with analysts on Thursday.

We are paying a bit of a compute tax in that we launched a part where a lot of the consumer compute applications haven't really taken hold yet. But over time as more consumer computer applications are developed that take advantage of our compute (consumer) features...I think it's going to give us a big leg up," he said.

And being an Nvidia chip, games are a big target market. "Fermi adds value to games by doing exactly the same kind of scientific simulations that we use to predict climate and to understand the genome and other things," according to Dally. "A great example of that is our PhysX package that basically does physical simulations to make games appear more real."

He also explained why the chip was billed as a supercomputer chip initially and not a gaming chip. "It's a zero-sum game. You have a certain amount of die (chip) area, a certain power budget. It is the case that we put a bunch of die area into double-precision floating point, a bunch of die area into ECC. And for gaming graphics applications, those give less returns than they do for the scientific applications," he said. Double-precision floating point operations are used heavily in scientific computing. ECC, or error correcting code, is a technology that can correct data errors on the fly.

And Dally explained how Fermi can be scaled down to lower-end chips used in the gaming and consumer segments. "We're not talking about other (chips) at this point in time but you can imagine that we can scale this part by having fewer than the 512 cores and by having these cores have fewer of the features, for example less double-precision," he said.  
 
All the Fermi products, including gaming and professional workstation chips, will be announced "pretty close together." Chips are expected sometime in the coming few months.

Nvidia Corp. has confirmed in a brief media interview that it will be able to cut-down the Fermi-G300 graphics processors in order to address certain specific markets and price-points. The move is natural for all graphics chips designers, but this time Nvidia openly admits that many of implemented capabilities will hardly offer benefits for the consumer right away.

At its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) last week Nvidia specifically noted that it paid a lot of attention on boosting double-precision floating point computational performance on its Fermi-G300 chip (about 750GFLOPs) and thus will be able to address new several new markets, e.g., high-performance computing. However, DP performance is rarely needed by average consumers on the desktop or laptop markets. Obviously, in order to create power efficient version of Fermi for notebooks or low-cost desktops, Nvidia will have to sacrifice some of its capabilities.

Mr. Dally, who did not explain how it is possible to reduce double-precision floating point performance without decreasing single-precision point speed, something which is needed by video games. In fact, Mr. Dally’s comment may imply that non-flagship Fermi derivatives will have not only be slower in terms of performance, but will be seriously different in terms of implementation.

Officially Nvidia promises to start sales of Fermi products in 2009.

Nvidia's mainstream Fermi arrives in late Q1
 
Launching in March if all goes well
 
Nvidia's mainstream market version of its GT300 / Fermi chip is scheduled for a Q1 2010 launch. This is not particularly good news for the company as ATI is already shipping its mainstream card based on the Juniper chip at pricing around €130 / $169 for the more expensive parts. Of course, we are talking about the HD 5770 and HD 5750 that both started shipping yesterday.  
 
In perspective, Fermi will be released as a performance chip card, a high-end single chip card, and a dual-GPU card that might launch a few weeks later.
 
When it comes to entry level and mainstream segments, we will most likely have to wait until around March, if not even later. Despite the huge flexibility of Nvidia's Fermi GF100 architecture, it still takes time to derive slower performing chips from the original design.
 
We have a feeling that ATI might capture a much bigger piece of the DirectX 11 market than anyone expected due to being first to the market and shipping months before its competition. Both of these factors are very beneficial for raking in good sales numbers. While Nvidia’s mainstream cards might end up faster, they will unfortunately come a month behind the competition.

Nvidia partners order huge quantities of Fermi chips  
 
Partners anticipate high success rate
 
Nvidia partners have high hopes that the company's GF100 / "GT300" / Fermi chip will end up as the excellent seller many enthusiasts have been hoping for and have already ordered some huge quantities of it.  
 
The reasons behind such risky decisions is quite clear. The GT200 family is not as widely available anymore and it seems probable that someone at Nvidia messed up with 55nm wafer orders. We assume this mainly because Nvidia didn’t expect to have such strong demand in Q3 and Q4 and therefore partners are hoping that Fermi can remedy the situation.
 
On another note, supply partners have to be the early birds with their orders because once Nvidia shows its Fermi supply to the entire seller market, the waiting line to get chips might already be too long. It is not that Nvidia partners have much of a choice though, as the GT200 series is slowly being discontinued and Fermi is supposed to fill the gap.  
 
Nvidia and its partners believe that Fermi should destroy Radeon HD 5870 and HD 5850 sales, but this is only after it starts shipping. Not to mention, this strongly depends on the supply quantities that Nvidia can deliver. Until then, ATI will be making quite a lot of money on its 58x0 and 57x0 series.

charlie
 
Last I heard a few days ago, the second spin of Fermi hadn't taped out yet. This means ~6 weeks till they get a new hot lot or three back, which would put things at Dec 1 or so. Even if they could get production silicon back in 4 weeks from there (almost impossible), they would not have anything to launch for this year.

Back on GPU Technology Conference, we were told that the company will launch a GeForce-based product "end of October" and "early November", but that seemed 2-3 weeks too early for Fermi, GT300/GF100-based desktop cards.