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I have a feeling eventually Nvidia will, like Intel, de-prioritize the consumer market in favor of the much more profitable server/machine learning market.
by mtgx 10y ago
I have a feeling eventually Nvidia will, like Intel, de-prioritize the consumer market in favor of the much more profitable server/machine learning market.
- hatsunearu 10y agoPerhaps, but the desktop gaming market is still growing and is a huge part of NVIDIA's income.
- kanwisher 10y agoI'ved thought that but the per unit volume is huge. Every game console, phone, tablet, PC needs a GPU. Even low-end devices are expected to run games. Thats billions of units, albeit at lower margins
- zokier 10y agoAnd practically every game console, phone, tablet and vast majority of PCs are running integrated GPUs. Integrated GPUs that are not nvidia. Unless NV gets into the licensing market, the growth potential for them seems somewhat limited.
- paulmd 10y agoMost of those aren't NVIDIA, though. Ironically, most of them actually use AMD's IP (the "Adreno" GPU, which is an anagram of "Radeon") that they sold off to Qualcomm in 2009. Which was yet another terrible call made by AMD management in that timeframe. (although who knows if Adreno would have blown up in the same way if it had AMD mismanaging it) Even more ironically, Adreno also used tile-based rendering that NVIDIA ended up adopting in the Maxwell architecture and AMD is adopting in the Vega architecture. It's a nice way to boost your power efficiency, which is critical to battery life in mobile devices. Turns out since we're past Dennard scaling, packing more transistors on a chip now makes it hotter. So if you want it to go faster, you need to cut the power down in other ways. And thus, desktop GPUs are starting to look an awful lot like mobile GPUs... (which is yet another reason why AMD's general-purpose compute-oriented GPU architectures are losing so badly in the desktop graphics market. RX 580 pulls twice the power of a GTX 1060 for the same performance...)
- AlphaSite 10y agoOnly in furmark, for non power virus work loads it's ~20w more on average.
- paulmd 10y agoNo, in gaming it's literally twice the power consumption of a GTX 1060. https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/RX_580_Nitro_Plus/28.html https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/RX_580_Nitro_Pl... Many other aftermarket 580s are similar. For a sense of perspective here, that's roughly the same amount of power as some aftermarket 290Xs used. Or roughly 60 watts more than a GTX 1080. And that's GPU-only, not a total system load. https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/R9_290X_Direct_Cu_II_OC/22.html https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/R9_290X_Direct_Cu_I... Polaris 10 is a reasonably efficient chip when you don't push it too hard. AMD - and their AIB partners - are pushing it way, way too hard in a desperate attempt to eke out a 2% win over the 1060. It isn't worth a 50% increase in TDP to get an extra 8% performance. (and unlike the RX 480 - there is no reference RX 580 design, it's a whole bunch of these crazy juiced-up cards)
- coldtea 10y agoCitation needed for the "much more profitable" part.
- ben174 10y agoThey've done quite well on the Nintendo Switch. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/heres-much-nvidia-will-make-off-nintendo-switch-200925921.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/heres-much-nvidia-will-make-o...
- kakarot 10y agoNah. This is NVIDIA. They will just continue to focus on both markets as long as they're kicking ass in them.
- zokier 10y agoIsn't that what this post was all about? Releasing brand new architecture on compute first seems to me pretty much like prioritizing compute market over consumers.
- Cshelton 10y agoI mean, at what point will we go full circle of going back to a "mainframe" where consumers don't really own/posses the computing power, rather it's down in datacenters. Like, you play your game through a VM basically, and your personal computer is just an AWS instance...
- AndrewKemendo 10y agoPretty much already there.
- sherincall 10y agoGeForce Now[0] - a VM you connect to from your PC, install games and stream. GeForce Now for SHIELD[1] - Different model, more like "netflix for games" [0]: http://www.geforce.com/geforce-now http://www.geforce.com/geforce-now [1]: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/games/geforce-now/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/games/geforce-now/
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- cr0sh 10y agoThere's also this: http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidia-grid.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidia-grid.html
- perryh2 10y agohttps://www.paperspace.com/ https://www.paperspace.com/
- jra101 10y agoGaming GPUs still more than 50% of revenue for NVIDIA: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11361/nvidia-announces-earnings-for-q1-fy-2018 http://www.anandtech.com/show/11361/nvidia-announces-earning...
- kobeya 10y agoAnd shrinking.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- gruturo 10y agoNot necessarily. So many of the improvements would anyway have a dual use, and it's not like their margins in the gaming/end user GPU business are razor thin. Moreover, the volume is probably immensely higher, so despite lower per-unit profit, they probably make it up in quantity. Won't be like this forever given the different speeds at which the 2 sectors grow, but it's gonna be some time before the roles are reversed.