NVIDIA Business Platform: A competitive desktop alternative to Intel?
by Gary Key on March 30, 2006 12:15 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Final Words
NVIDIA has spent a considerable amount of time designing, marketing, and implementing a stable image platform solution. Their strategy is unique and we believe that it fits well with their decision to target the small-medium sized business segment along with educational and government sectors in North America and Europe. Although their platform design and software partnerships would scale well in an enterprise level network, NVIDIA is not directly targeting this market yet.
We see one issue with this strategy currently and it is a lack of a stable image platform for the Notebook product group. Considering the penetration of notebooks into NVIDIA's target market at this time, we find the lack of a stable image product to be a handicap for NVIDIA's partners. We fully expect NVIDIA to launch a stable image notebook platform in the near future.
NVIDIA's success and experience in the workstation market from both a platform and graphics vantage point affords them credibility in these particular market segments. Their stable image platform partnership with AMD allows them access to the top performing processor lineup at this time along with excellent thermal and performance per watt capabilities.
We expect NVIDIA's pricing structure to be extremely competitive and with excellent performance capabilities, they should attract considerable attention during an IT organization's procurement cycle. Although their solution is well designed, we believe that it will be a difficult path to success in the US market at this time while they should enjoy immediate success in Europe.
Unlike Europe, the US market is more entrenched in staying with the same platform over a longer period of time while procuring those platforms from a select few Tier-1 suppliers. Although NVIDIA has considerable marketing clout and exposure with their graphics and workstation capabilities in the US corporate, educational, and government sector, we believe that most IT managers will be hesitant to switch platforms until NVIDIA has a proven track record with this program. We certainly welcome the competition that NVIDIA brings to this market space as it will only improve the pricing and offerings available to IT organizations.
Intel certainly recognizes this challenge and has already responded with the addition of the Conroe and Broadwater products to their 2006 Professional Business Platform. A decision we believe that will allow Intel to provide greater overall system performance whil matching or bettering the thermal capabilities of the current NVIDIA/AMD product design. Intel has also substantially upgraded their networking interface capability while improving Active Management Technology to better handle and isolate threats from incoming malware.
Although we do not have either platform to test at this time, we do look forward to comparing the two platforms this summer and providing a detailed hardware/software analysis on each solution.
NVIDIA has spent a considerable amount of time designing, marketing, and implementing a stable image platform solution. Their strategy is unique and we believe that it fits well with their decision to target the small-medium sized business segment along with educational and government sectors in North America and Europe. Although their platform design and software partnerships would scale well in an enterprise level network, NVIDIA is not directly targeting this market yet.
We see one issue with this strategy currently and it is a lack of a stable image platform for the Notebook product group. Considering the penetration of notebooks into NVIDIA's target market at this time, we find the lack of a stable image product to be a handicap for NVIDIA's partners. We fully expect NVIDIA to launch a stable image notebook platform in the near future.
NVIDIA's success and experience in the workstation market from both a platform and graphics vantage point affords them credibility in these particular market segments. Their stable image platform partnership with AMD allows them access to the top performing processor lineup at this time along with excellent thermal and performance per watt capabilities.
We expect NVIDIA's pricing structure to be extremely competitive and with excellent performance capabilities, they should attract considerable attention during an IT organization's procurement cycle. Although their solution is well designed, we believe that it will be a difficult path to success in the US market at this time while they should enjoy immediate success in Europe.
Unlike Europe, the US market is more entrenched in staying with the same platform over a longer period of time while procuring those platforms from a select few Tier-1 suppliers. Although NVIDIA has considerable marketing clout and exposure with their graphics and workstation capabilities in the US corporate, educational, and government sector, we believe that most IT managers will be hesitant to switch platforms until NVIDIA has a proven track record with this program. We certainly welcome the competition that NVIDIA brings to this market space as it will only improve the pricing and offerings available to IT organizations.
Intel certainly recognizes this challenge and has already responded with the addition of the Conroe and Broadwater products to their 2006 Professional Business Platform. A decision we believe that will allow Intel to provide greater overall system performance whil matching or bettering the thermal capabilities of the current NVIDIA/AMD product design. Intel has also substantially upgraded their networking interface capability while improving Active Management Technology to better handle and isolate threats from incoming malware.
Although we do not have either platform to test at this time, we do look forward to comparing the two platforms this summer and providing a detailed hardware/software analysis on each solution.
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nordicpc - Thursday, March 30, 2006 - link
MSI is shipping their K8NGM2-NBP board currently, as this link to Newegg will show: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82...">Newegg LinkBasically, all I can tell is that MSI dropped the firewire from the K8NGM2-FID and rebadged it. Hopefully the FID won't dissapear as firewire is actually pretty useful in the HTPC crowd where this board does very nicely.
Gary Key - Wednesday, April 5, 2006 - link
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_30667.html">http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_30667.htmlOlaf van der Spek - Thursday, March 30, 2006 - link
[quote]Also , NVIDIA offers the only hardware-based firewall solution for a stable image platform, with a unique anti-hacking technology that secures each PC from network intrusion. Hardware-based firewall technology protects PCs at the network layer from most virus, worm, and spyware attacks. Unlike software-based firewall solutions, ActiveArmor cannot be disabled by malicious code.
[/quote]
Isn't this just 'copy/pasted' from nVidia's propaganda?
If a virus is able to disable your firewall, you're screwed already, ActiveArmor or no ActiveArmor.
And as far as I know, it is possible to disable ActiveArmor in software.
BigLan - Thursday, March 30, 2006 - link
The 'active armor' stuff is pure BS. It's been broken on the nforce4 for a long, long time with no official comment from Nvidia. I don't know what type of corporation is going to adopt a platform which corrupts all zip file downloads.Shame on Anandtech for not calling nvidia out on this.
bob661 - Thursday, March 30, 2006 - link
Where are the results of your testing on these new platforms to support your accusations?JarredWalton - Thursday, March 30, 2006 - link
Going with this comment, remember that nForce 6150/6200 != nForce4. Something else I have to wonder: are those corrupt Zip files occuring for everyone, or just overclockers, or perhaps only on misconfigured systems? I don't know. I use a NAT/Router and don't bother with the NVIDIA Firewall stuff, but I suppose if a virus ever got loose in my home network I might be in for some trouble. Luckily, the only user on my network is me, and I'm pretty sure I know what I'm doing. Most businesses can't make that claim. :)How will this platform fare in reality? That's a good question. Obviously, it doesn't matter much if NVIDIA provides a "stable" platform if they don't get partners that properly support the initiative. I don't think that will be a problem, as there should be plenty of system integrators looking for some new ways to market/sell AMD platforms. It sounds decent on paper, at least, and they do have some good features
BigLan - Friday, March 31, 2006 - link
I saw it first hand on a dfi lanparty Ultra. Checksum offloading/active armor would corrupt every zip/archive file downloaded. This was on a fresh build with two identical systems. Since then, I've never turned it back on for any of the systems I've built. It would be nice if a large tech website did an investigation into it to maybe get nvidia to admit the problem was hardware, or fix their drivers. ;)Gary Key - Friday, March 31, 2006 - link
We have investigated this issue several times. We can recreate certain data corruption scenarios while utilizing P2P software, streaming multiple downloads, and then trying to decompress these same files concurrently. We were able to solve or greatly minimize these issues through driver changes or software configurations, though eliminating the use of P2P seemed to work best. ;-) NVIDIA has worked extensively with several of our readers who had issues and solved them. At this time we have one reader who is still having issues after working directly with NVIDIA but the communication cylce just started on his issue.
The latest driver sets from NVIDIA have made changes to the way ActiveArmor handles TCP checksumming in their hardware by offloading more to the CPU, which has increased CPU utilization rates but they are still lower than most Gigabit solutions. These changes have certainly cleared the majority of issues noticed by most users we have communicated with over the last month. The other issue we have noticed is in the initial installation of the ActiveArmor firewall software, some program settings are not correct or clearly defined based upon the system configuration, and this is an area that needs improvement from NVIDIA in the installation scripts. The lack of technical information in most user manuals for setting up ActiveArmor is also not acceptable in our opinion.
The next version of ActiveArmor software along with some hardware tweaks in the upcoming nForce 500 chipsets should solve any outstanding issues.
NVIDIA will be sending us a complete Stable Image Platform system shortly and we will put it through its paces while providing a short "How To" article on setting up or correcting issues within the ActiveArmor software suite.
Wesley Fink - Thursday, March 30, 2006 - link
With an announcement of a new program, we do depend on the press announcement and briefings for information on the new product. Until nVidia Business Platforms are available in June, this is the only way to bring this information to IT professionals. However, this review goes a lot further than that by comparing nVidia and Intel Business Platform programs.Gary also details, for the first time, information on the 2006 Intel Stable Business Platform which will include Conroe and Broadwater.
DanaGoyette - Thursday, March 30, 2006 - link
You mean BSODs whenever you install the NAM and data corruption if you enable network adapter offloading?
I have no experience with these, but Google will tell you that plenty of people do.