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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Rindis - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
"People have been saying that PC gaming has been dying for years."Decades, actually.
thermaltake - Saturday, October 24, 2009 - link
I too believe that many are overstating that PC gaming is dying. Comparing the hardware alone, PC graphics cards upgrade from less than a year, how long have the PS3, Xbox 360 been around? Game consoles are far inferior compared to PC hardware, and it shall always be the case. PC 3D graphics would always be better than that of the game consoles, yet they claim that PC game is dying?dragunover - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
Since it ever came out?Truth is, it's something like global warming. People use it to their advantage, take it way out of proportions, and no one knows where the real data is. I know for a fact that one of the reasons is that people simply don't have the money to buy a good pc. For this reason, free to play games with very low-level hardware entry like runescape, crossfire, war rock, combat arms, etc., etc. are actually there in the first place.
I for one know that many developers have used it just because they can't be assed to make a product - they won't be seeing any bigger paychecks because of it, so they'll FUD it up. *cough ID software john carmack cough cough* - Which I'd like to add doesn't seem to work in anything related to computer gaming in the past generation.
Zingam - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
The previews of Fermi so far describe it as the greatest GPGPU but they don't even try to describe it as good graphics processor. And if you take into account what NVIDIA has said in the past about GPUs, things get quite unclear and interesting.dmv915 - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
Thank goodness for significant barriers for entry into a market. Who knows where Nvidia would be now.Unpas - Sunday, December 27, 2009 - link
Thank god that we have a console market kept alive by artificial breathing since the PC-gaming came along. Im so happy to see the world revert back into the middle ages with a new console only every 4-5 years, and then the same shitty graphics in every released game from then to the next shitty console comes out. Of course this way is the new way. Its the future for innovation and technology. Companies dont have to compete with eachother. Perfectly socialistic or fascistic, or just plain stupid.