NVIDIA's Bumpy Ride: A Q4 2009 Update
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 14, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
Is NVIDIA in trouble? In the short term there are clearly causes to worry. AMD’s Eric Demers often tells me that the best way to lose a fight is by not showing up. NVIDIA effectively didn’t show up to the first DX11 battles, that’s going to hurt. But as I said in the things get better next year section, they do get better next year.
Fermi devotes a significant portion of its die to features that are designed for a market that currently isn’t generating much revenue. That needs to change in order for this strategy to make sense.
NVIDIA told me that we should see exponential growth in Tesla revenues after Fermi, but what does that mean? I don’t suspect that the sort of customers buying Tesla boards and servers will be lining up on day 1. I’d say best case scenario, Tesla revenues should see a bump one to two quarters after Fermi’s launch.
Nexus, ECC, and better double precision performance will all make Fermi more attractive in the HPC space than Cypress. The question is how much revenue will that generate in the short term.
Nexus enables full NVIDIA GPU debugging from within Visual Studio. Not so useful for PC gaming, but very helpful for Tesla
Then there’s the mobile space. NVIDIA could do very well with Tegra. NVIDIA is an ARM licensee, and that takes care of the missing CPU piece of the puzzle. Unlike the PC space, x86 isn’t the dominant player in the mobile market. NVIDIA has a headstart in the ultra mobile space much like it does in the GPU computing space. Intel is a bit behind with its Atom strategy. NVIDIA could use this to its advantage.
The transition needs to be a smooth one. The bulk of NVIDIA’s revenues today come from PC graphics cards. There’s room for NVIDIA in the HPC and ultra mobile spaces, but it’s not revenue that’s going to accumulate over night. The changes in focus we’re seeing from NVIDIA today are in line with what it’d have to do in order to establish successful businesses outside of the PC industry.
And don’t think the PC GPU battle is over yet either. It took years for NVIDIA to be pushed out of the chipset space, even after AMD bought ATI. Even if the future of PC graphics are Intel and AMD GPUs, it’s going to take a very long time to get there.
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dan101rayzor - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
anyone know when the fermi is coming out?Zingam - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
Sometime in the future. It appears to me that it will be a great general purpose processor but if it will be great graphics processor is not quite clear.If you want a great GPU for graphics you won't be wrong with ATI in the near future. If you want to do scientific computing probably Fermi will be the king next year.
And then comes Larrabee and thing would get quite interesting.
I wonder who will release a great, next generation, mobile GPU first!
dragunover - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
I believe the 5770 could easily be transplanted into laptops with a different cooling solution and lower clocks and called the 5870M.dan101rayzor - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
so for gaming an ATI 5800 is the best bet? Fermi will it be very expensive? Fermi not for gaming?Scali - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
We can't say yet.We don't know the prices of Fermi parts, their gaming performance, or when they'll be released.
Which also means we don't know how 'good' the 5800 series is. All we know is that it's the best part on the market today.
swaaye - Monday, October 19, 2009 - link
It's always been rather hard to pronounce a part as "best". There's always an unknown future part in the works. And, even good parts sometimes have downsides. For ex, I can see a reason or two for going NV30 back in the day instead of R300 (namely OpenGL apps/games).I think it's safe to say that you can't go wrong with 58x0 right now. It doesn't have any major issues, AFAIK, the price is decent, and the competition is nowhere in sight.
MojaMonkey - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
I have a simple brand preference for nVidia and I use Badaboom so I'd buy their products even if price performance doesn't quite stack up. However there are limits in performance difference I'm willing to accept.I really hope the gt300 is a great competitive product as it sounds interesting.
One thought, given that PC gaming is now on the back burner compared to consoles maybe nVidia is being smart branching out into mobiles and GPU computing? Both of these could be real growth areas as PC gaming starts to fade.
neomatrix724 - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
People have been saying that PC gaming has been dying for years. Most of the GPU developments and technologies have been created for the PC first and then downstream improvements are what the console gets.I don't foresee the PC disappearing as a gaming medium for a while.
MonkeyPaw - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
I don't really see games disappearing from PCs either. However, consoles are very popular, and are a much more guaranteed market, since developers know console sales numbers, and that essentially every console owner is a gamer. Consequently, developers will target a lucrative console market (at $40-60 per game). This means their games have to run on the consoles well enough (speed and graphics quality) to be appealing. That doesn't necessarily kill PC gaming, but it does slow the progression (and the need for expensive hardware). This, along with the fact that many gamers don't likely play on 30" LCDs, means high-end graphics card sales are directed at a very limited audience. When I gamed on my PC, I had a 4670, since this would play most games just fine on a 19" LCD. I would never need a 4870, much less a 5870.So no, PC gaming isn't dead, but it's not the target market anymore.
atlmann10 - Thursday, October 15, 2009 - link
The point made earlier that PC Gaming has been dieing for decades, as an incorrect statement is true. I think we will see more personally, but largely in this nvidia has room to gain, that is in other things that gigantic PC graphics card though.The online gaming thing is much better than even the console market. Why you may ask? That is because of revenue stream, and delivery. With an online pc game you can update it weekly thereby changing anything you want to.
Yes, console is concentrated to a point because they know everyone will go out and buy a 45 dollar game. But the subscription thing is the killer. The gamer who plays an online game subscribes. Therefore the buy the 45 dollar game and give you another 15 at the end of the month, and then when you have an upgrade you have a direct pat to them as a distributor.
So then that customer that bought your 45 dollar game, and pays you 15 a month for access logs onto there game, there is a new update for 35 dollars do you want it? That user clicks yes proceeds to download it what have you done as a company? You have eliminated advertising completely for existing customers, you have also eliminated packaging, and distribution.
So then what did you have to do to produce that upgrade? We didn't do anything but development. So we cut our production and cost of operations in half. Plus they bought our new game or upgrade for the same price, even though it cost us 60 percent less to make, and pay us an automatic 15 a month as long as they play it.