Nvidia is currently working on a next-generation switchable graphics solution which was confirmed a while ago by Nvidia's top management. Nvidia admits that its first implementation of switchable graphics was not the nicest and neatest solution (Hybrid-SLI), but promises that its next-generation works really well and that it will give the company many design wins.

Several big Nvidia supporters such as ASUS, Acer, Dell and many others have asked Intel to get Nvidia 40nm chips inside of its designs. Thus far, we were told to expect many Calpella platform designs to have Nvidia graphics.

Nvidia has been involved in a chipset licensing dispute with Intel for quite a while now, and every now and then Nvidia spinners tend to remind us of this fact.

In a statement for TG Daily, Nvidia spokesman Brian Burke told the world plus dog that Nvidia chipsets were always full of innovative features and that they were better than Intel's own cream of the crop. Burke cites the increasingly popular Nvidia ION chipset for nettops and netbooks as an example of Nvidia's superiority.

Nvidia recently released its first desktop drivers to support the OpenCL standard, beginning with Geforce 195.39 beta. These drivers are dated October 27, 2009 and feature improved SLI and multi-GPU support for several recent popular titles and include over 200 various bug fixes.

In particular, the drivers add support for the OpenCL 1.0 specification on all Geforce 8-series or later GPUs supporting CUDA. The drivers also add support for CUDA Toolkit 3.0, which will be made available to developers sometime within the next few weeks.

In a chat with Hexus, AMD's Senior Manager of Developer Relations, Richard Huddy said that Nvidia is apparently abandoning the gaming market to some extent.

Huddy compared Nvidia's and AMD's strategy, saying: "it appears NVIDIA is in a kind of sneering mode towards game players at the moment," adding that it was possible to diversify without abandoning gaming. He went on to say that gamers are good people and "well rounded individuals." We're not sure whether he was referring to their physique or character.

Fermi, Nvidia's GF100 40nm DirectX 11 chip is selling great even though Nvidia still has to officially launch it. Sources confirmed that Nvidia is taking pre-orders like there is no tomorrow, but at this time Nvidia offers no guarantees when the chip will hit the market. Everyone expects shortages due to heavy demand from day one.

The original schedule of late November might skip in the first week(s) of December, but from what we learned over the last few days, it was always late November to first days of December.

AMD partners are working on a dual-core R800 card, codenamed Cypress and from what we learned, the card should launch in late November. Samples are in the works and cards are in development and the Radeon 5970 should be the brand for the top card, but since we are not aware of any boxes with this brand, this can easily change.

We were surprised to see that customer oriented AMD has decided to leave its all DirectX 9 supporters hanging. According to AMD's support site, its DirectX 9 cards won’t be officially supported under Windows 7.

LED backlighting squeezed in 14mm ultraslim

Oh joy of joys, Acer's PR people have launched an LCD screen with 8,000,000:1 contrast. We're really not sure how they got to 8 million, but nonetheless the Slim Line S243 is a very interesting screen.

It's based on a TN panel, but it features LED backlighting, allowing for a very thin, 14mm design and low power consumption. In fact, Acer is promising just over 17W of consumption, which is quite a bit lower than on similar size CCFL panels. Brightness is rated at 250cd/m2 and the 2ms response time should be fast enough for anyone.

Boffins claim that there is life in the HDD technology yet with the costs falling and drive sizes increasing. A new study claims that by 2020, hard disk drives will likely be less expensive on a cost per terabyte basis than any of the competing technologies. The study gives the thumbs down to boffins who are developing nonvolatile memory (NVM) technologies, saying it is unlikely to replace HDDs within the next decade.

Multiple sources are suggesting that R800, the card codenamed Hemlock, is going to come out in late November.

Samples are already out in the wild and, as expected, the TDP is definitely exceeding 300W. Once it launches, this card will finally take over the performance crown from Nvidia's Geforce GTX 295, but there is a big chance that ATI's performance leadership might only last a few weeks, since Nvidia is still planning to launch its Fermi card in 2009.

HD5950 and HD5970 cards will certainly assure the top spot for ATI.