Posted on Tuesday, September 07 2004 @ 23:10 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
APPLE ANNOUNCED its new range of LCD displays over a month ago now, and have begun shipping the 20-inch and 23-inch displays in volume. There are a fair few at the Apple store here in sunny SanFran, and also down the road at CompUSA. Beautiful they are too.
Those friendly CompUSA fellas spun us an interesting yarn, however, about the complete lack of 30-inch displays. If you're an Apple follower, you'll know that the 30-inch is the flagship display to accompany its G5 range of machines. Since it's running at such a huge resolution, 2560x1600, the display requires a dedicated graphics card - the GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL card, with dual DVI outputs to connect to the same screen.
But it looks like NVIDIA can't produce these cards. The Inq was told by some sources that NVIDIA hasn't got the cards working yet.
With 6800 Ultras in short supply on the PC, and the marketing machine telling everyone to buy 6800GTs, this special edition 6800 Ultra must be a niche of a niche of a niche - and possibly even less viable to produce. The board, which you can see at the Apple website, looks monstrously huge - we are talking Voodoo 5 6000 size here. It ain't cheap, and it don't appear to be easy.
Apple is well known for flirting with both graphics cards giants - its laptop range uses both ATI and Nvidia chips. If Nvidia can't deliver its end of the deal soon, it's unlikely it will get another stab at leading Apple technology for a while. Is Nvidia over-stretching itself, or is Apple just awkward to the core?
Source:
The Inquirer