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I don't think Nvidia cares much about the mid or lower tier of GPUs, especially consumer GPUs. Sure they manufacture them to stay competitive in that area, but
by samspenc 2y ago
I don't think Nvidia cares much about the mid or lower tier of GPUs, especially consumer GPUs. Sure they manufacture them to stay competitive in that area, but I don't think they care too much about it.
Their core revenue comes from - in decreasing order - really expensive data center GPUs, somewhat expensive workstation / enterprise GPUs, and finally, expensive top-of-the-line consumer GPUs like the 3090 / 4090 (and upcoming rumored 5090) which they can mark up higher than the lower tiers.
I'm sure that Nvidia knows that even though consumers / gamers will complain, the companies and hobbyists buying them will have no choice and be willing to pay for that power and extra performance and VRAM, whether it be for creatives (3D or game creators) or AI / ML / LLM hobbyists trying to GenAI at home.
- cdshn 2y agoBut if the ex-SGI employees that started Nvidia have any sense, they'll stick to the consumer market to ensure no upstart can build an enterprise computing empire off of gamers.
- samstave 2y agoJust a piece of history of SGI: When I went to school for Softimage in 1997 - my favorite thing was building with MetaClay -- I built an amazing Human Figure on an O2 SGI box -- and sadly I lost my dat backup years later - which I would have been able to bring into blender these days.... Metaclay in 1997 was unreal on SGI... Now its in the Alien that is Free Blender... (Softimage was[ $25,000 a license at the time](https://i.imgur.com/9gaeeQl.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/9gaeeQl.jpeg) - and an [SGI O2 was 15K and an Octane was 47K](https://i.imgur.com/aVQATfV.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/aVQATfV.jpeg) https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?threads/sgi-hardware-and-software-price-lists-1995-1998.345/ https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?threads/sgi-hardware-and-sof... --- So after going to school for 3D when it was only taught in 5 schools in the nation at the time - and you can see what a simple rig cost... I later spent $1,600 on an Evans and Sutherland 32MB Full-Length ATX video card that could handle OpenGL... and run NT and Softimage...
- cdshn 2y agoI have a Fuel with an SSD drive. Unfortunately it wont boot off of an SSD so I have to move everything to a network drive before the SCSI drives die. Meanwhile there are other ghosts in it that make it a lazy booter.
- gregw2 2y agoEx-Sun guys started it actually. The SGI guys joined later.
- JonChesterfield 2y agoSun was a treasure. Lots of the engineering leads at AMD have Sun on their CVs.
- cdshn 2y agoWow, cool. Too late to edit, but I think the main point stands, the founders and early employees were all from giants with feet of clay who collapsed because they ignored the consumer market.
- gregw2 2y agoI agree they effectively ignored the consumer market and died. But it wasn't because they didn't see it coming. It just is, in practice, hard for a billion dollar b2b company to embrace the consumer market even when they recognize it as an existential threat. For more what I mean by that, I wrote an SGI retrospective at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39960660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39960660 (Sun or SGI might have escaped if they'd merged with then-weak Apple/NeXT, but it's not clear if that would have helped Apple be more successful in hindsight.)