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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

by 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.

by TillE 10y ago

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.