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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Schadenfroh - Thursday, March 30, 2006 - link
I have been using my nvidia firewall for over a year without any problems.FinFET - Thursday, March 30, 2006 - link
From what I read "AMT enables IT staff to diagnose, repair, and manage remote PCs regardless of OS or system state."So is this basically like ILO (Integrated Lights Out) where I can have BIOS Level access to the machine, essentially IP-KVM?
If so does the current iteration of boards with NVIDIA ActiveArmor support this type of feature?
Gary Key - Thursday, March 30, 2006 - link
The NVIDIA nForce boards and software being designed for this stable image platform fully support WOL/PXE. This offering is basically an updated version of the WOL/PXE capabilities provided on the nForce Professional 2050/2200 boards with specialized driver and software support.
tokath - Thursday, March 30, 2006 - link
They don't support anything close to the level AMT but there is likely an option that will allow ASF to be enabled if the vendor wants it.AMT is not essentially an IP-KVM because you do not have direct access to the system, keyboard, mouse, video. Rather AMT requires a separate application such as LANDesk to allow you to control the more advanced aspects, when you access the system remotely without any extra software you can do simple things like turn the system on/off, reboot, view temps and check the OS state. Because the Intel LOM (PRO/1000 PM) that has AMT also supports IDE-R and SOL you can do some very useful things like boot from a remote CD to restore the system. Theoretically vendors can create custom software to do a lot more through AMT.
That said I sure hope NVIDIA LOMs will support ASF (preferably 2.0), there are alot of business that use ASF.