4 ms·

I'm not really ready to call Nvidia the new Intel. Nvidia seems like such a volatile company and I have no idea why. I just feel like I could wake up tomorrow a

I'm not really ready to call Nvidia the new Intel. Nvidia seems like such a volatile company and I have no idea why. I just feel like I could wake up tomorrow and they could be gone.

okreallywtf 10y ago
Care to elaborate? I don't follow them closely but they have seemed to be consistently on top of the GPU market for some time now, at least in the gamer/enthusiast market.
- mschuster91 10y ago
  Just look at how fast AMD fell. Everyone thought they 'd profit big time from Bitcoin... I remember that I couldn't buy an AMD GPU for weeks in any store in Munich, because everyone and their dog bought them as BTC mining rigs. And then, couple of months later? ASICs entered the field and prices for used AMD GPUs fell through the floor. The same can happen to NVIDIA, especially when Intel decides to launch something inside their CPUs that is "good enough" for many people.
  - TillE 10y ago
    The vast majority of Nvidia GPU sales are to gamers. Intel has been trying to build a "good enough" iGPU for years and years, with almost zero progress relative to their contemporary discrete GPUs. Even the best current GPUs can't handle the inevitable future high-res VR. This is going to be a stable business for a while yet.
    - mschuster91 10y ago
      > Intel has been trying to build a "good enough" iGPU for years and years, with almost zero progress relative to their contemporary discrete GPUs. Intel hasn't had real pressure to innovate for years. They watched the battle and fall of NVIDIA/AMD, and in the meanwhile enjoyed good sales of CPUs for all the cloud computing. Now, they have intense pressure to innovate - as in the server space ARM is going to eat them up, due to the superior power efficiency, laptop/desktop sales are down (again, because a four-year old computer works just fine if you upgrade its RAM to accomodate Chrome). Intel needs something mind-blowing and that quick. And NVIDIA too, casual gamers are shifting to console (where AMD has quite a customer base) and mobile (where Samsung/Apple with ARM are in the lead). I haven't seen any performant Intel or NVIDIA mobile SoC solution yet.
      - llukas 10y ago
        You think casual gamers buy high margin items like GTX 1080 to power their Rift/Occulus?
        mschuster91 10y ago
        The Oculus itself is still 600€, plus another ~1-2k€ for a powerful enough computer. Sorry, I don't see this as a sustainable market vision.
      - petecox 10y ago
        > mobile (where Samsung/Apple with ARM are in the lead). I haven't seen any performant Intel or NVIDIA mobile SoC solution yet. Nvidia does have the Tegra, for the Android tablet market. Interesting that they've ceded Windows on ARM (aka the rumoured Surface Phone) to Qualcomm - I would have thought Denver's code-morphing architecture would be better suited to emulating x86 instructions than a Snapdragon 835.
        mschuster91 10y ago
        > Nvidia does have the Tegra, for the Android tablet market. Which isn't used anywhere except a couple of tablets according to Wikipedia. Samsung, inarguably leader of the high-class Android manufacturers, uses either its own SoCs or Qualcomm. Many cheaper phones use Mediatek or Allwinner chipsets.
        dogma1138 10y ago
        It's used for it's automotive products. It's not used because most likely NVIDIA never really wanted to push it, it checked the water a bit with a few 1st and 3rd party tablets/android gaming consoles but this always looked more like to recoup some investment on the side while developing the SOC than an end goal. The lessons learned from Tegra allowed NVIDIA to build the best (or at least the most powerful) automotive integrated solution currently on the market and at least as far as software compatibility and performance go they have no real competition.
  - drewg123 10y ago
    And note that it's not that hard. Google, who are not really known as a chip company, designed the TPUs: The result is called a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a custom ASIC we built specifically for machine learning — and tailored for TensorFlow. We’ve been running TPUs inside our data centers for more than a year, and have found them to deliver an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning. This is roughly equivalent to fast-forwarding technology about seven years into the future (three generations of Moore’s Law). (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/05/Google-supercharges-machine-learning-tasks-with-custom-chip.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/05/Google-supercha...) That sounds like a custom ASIC for this purpose. And if Google can do it, so can Intel.
threeseed 10y ago
Sorry but no. Nvidia (a) owns the high end deep learning space right now, (b) has shown with the Nintendo Switch arguably the future of gaming, (c) by abandoning PS4 etc they are moving to higher margin businesses. For me they are looking pretty damn good.

I'm not really ready to call Nvidia the new Intel. Nvidia seems like such a volatile company and I have no idea why. I just feel like I could wake up tomorrow and they could be gone.

okreallywtf 10y ago

Care to elaborate? I don't follow them closely but they have seemed to be consistently on top of the GPU market for some time now, at least in the gamer/enthusiast market.

mschuster91 10y ago
Just look at how fast AMD fell. Everyone thought they 'd profit big time from Bitcoin... I remember that I couldn't buy an AMD GPU for weeks in any store in Munich, because everyone and their dog bought them as BTC mining rigs. And then, couple of months later? ASICs entered the field and prices for used AMD GPUs fell through the floor. The same can happen to NVIDIA, especially when Intel decides to launch something inside their CPUs that is "good enough" for many people.
- TillE 10y ago
  The vast majority of Nvidia GPU sales are to gamers. Intel has been trying to build a "good enough" iGPU for years and years, with almost zero progress relative to their contemporary discrete GPUs. Even the best current GPUs can't handle the inevitable future high-res VR. This is going to be a stable business for a while yet.
  - mschuster91 10y ago
    > Intel has been trying to build a "good enough" iGPU for years and years, with almost zero progress relative to their contemporary discrete GPUs. Intel hasn't had real pressure to innovate for years. They watched the battle and fall of NVIDIA/AMD, and in the meanwhile enjoyed good sales of CPUs for all the cloud computing. Now, they have intense pressure to innovate - as in the server space ARM is going to eat them up, due to the superior power efficiency, laptop/desktop sales are down (again, because a four-year old computer works just fine if you upgrade its RAM to accomodate Chrome). Intel needs something mind-blowing and that quick. And NVIDIA too, casual gamers are shifting to console (where AMD has quite a customer base) and mobile (where Samsung/Apple with ARM are in the lead). I haven't seen any performant Intel or NVIDIA mobile SoC solution yet.
    - llukas 10y ago
      You think casual gamers buy high margin items like GTX 1080 to power their Rift/Occulus?
      - mschuster91 10y ago
        The Oculus itself is still 600€, plus another ~1-2k€ for a powerful enough computer. Sorry, I don't see this as a sustainable market vision.
    - petecox 10y ago
      > mobile (where Samsung/Apple with ARM are in the lead). I haven't seen any performant Intel or NVIDIA mobile SoC solution yet. Nvidia does have the Tegra, for the Android tablet market. Interesting that they've ceded Windows on ARM (aka the rumoured Surface Phone) to Qualcomm - I would have thought Denver's code-morphing architecture would be better suited to emulating x86 instructions than a Snapdragon 835.
      - mschuster91 10y ago
        > Nvidia does have the Tegra, for the Android tablet market. Which isn't used anywhere except a couple of tablets according to Wikipedia. Samsung, inarguably leader of the high-class Android manufacturers, uses either its own SoCs or Qualcomm. Many cheaper phones use Mediatek or Allwinner chipsets.
        dogma1138 10y ago
        It's used for it's automotive products. It's not used because most likely NVIDIA never really wanted to push it, it checked the water a bit with a few 1st and 3rd party tablets/android gaming consoles but this always looked more like to recoup some investment on the side while developing the SOC than an end goal. The lessons learned from Tegra allowed NVIDIA to build the best (or at least the most powerful) automotive integrated solution currently on the market and at least as far as software compatibility and performance go they have no real competition.
- drewg123 10y ago
  And note that it's not that hard. Google, who are not really known as a chip company, designed the TPUs: The result is called a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a custom ASIC we built specifically for machine learning — and tailored for TensorFlow. We’ve been running TPUs inside our data centers for more than a year, and have found them to deliver an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning. This is roughly equivalent to fast-forwarding technology about seven years into the future (three generations of Moore’s Law). (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/05/Google-supercharges-machine-learning-tasks-with-custom-chip.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/05/Google-supercha...) That sounds like a custom ASIC for this purpose. And if Google can do it, so can Intel.

threeseed 10y ago

Sorry but no. Nvidia (a) owns the high end deep learning space right now, (b) has shown with the Nintendo Switch arguably the future of gaming, (c) by abandoning PS4 etc they are moving to higher margin businesses. For me they are looking pretty damn good.