What happens if you sell cars, and the new model is coming at the time when your stock is full of old models? Well, what will happen is that you will put a nice sticker on it, advertise same standard features as “new ones”, “only in this special edition”, offer discounts and so on. You will also put a nice spin on what’s in the news and there you go. In the world of IT, we had the same thing happening over and over again. Nobody is immune to this basic car strategy, that being AMD with its renaming of Radeon X1K parts into “HD 2000” (for low end and notebook parts”… etc.
Here comes Nvidia. The company is manufacturing GeForce 9600 chips in 55nm process, and the problem is that competing Radeon 4600 series is well, selling like hotcakes. The answer: GeForce 9600GT Green Edition (seriously, why the heck is this product not named 9600GE or just 9600 Green… who comes with these names, daamit?).
Anyways, 9600GT Tree Hugging edition is nothing else but lowering the voltage by 0.1V while keeping the same clock. In that way, Nvidia could even brand GeForce GTX260 and 285 and call them Green… but of course, if there wasn’t for all that clockspeed raising to get the performance lead over Radeon 4870. Still, GeForce GTX285 is a nice power saver… if you can call 200W eating card a power saving one.
Funky part is, nobody is reporting about materials used in production of graphics cards. AMD, Intel and Nvidia can say whatever they want, but massive majority of their chips is produced using Lead and other hazardous materials. Certain CPU manufacturer may have announced lead-free production, but it is only in selective lines and yeah, in order to build a computer with their lead free component, you need to buy two or three more chips from them that contain lead. And other “nicely-named” elements. IT industry is not green, sans the color of substrate used on 99.9% of flip-chip packages (FC).
