4 ms·

So... They want to get out of the business of actually making things and just sell IP cores now?

sho_hn 13y ago
They've never really been in the business of "making things" as end-users would see it. They've designed chips and reference PCBs, but they contract outside foundries for manufacturing (unlike, say, Intel, who have their own fabs) and the silicon goes to retail partners like ASUS and Gainward and many others to actually put into the channel (with minor downstream customization like custom heatsink designs). They've only recently actually sold some things directly to customers, like the SHIELD gaming handheld.
- Eyght 13y ago
  It will be interesting to see if anyone will use their GPU's for a product that directly competes with the SHIELD.
  - sho_hn 13y ago
    I'd say SHIELD is pretty much a PR effort to incite others to do exactly that - it creates buzz around the virtues of nVidia's mobile tech for gaming, and so could make licensing nVidia GPU IP an attractive selling point. I don't think nVidia expects SHIELD to be a high-volume seller on its own, it's pretty niche form factor-wise. This is also why you have a bunch of graphically intense games on the Play store which are Tegra-exclusives, from developers who cut a deal with nVidia. For example Arma Tactics.
- abuzzooz 13y ago
  To be fair, NVIDIA tried to sell a couple of products directly to end consumers before. For example they sold a dual tv tuner card a few years ago (http://www.nvidia.com/page/dualtvmce.html http://www.nvidia.com/page/dualtvmce.html), but it didn't go too well and was discontinued. These were always half-hearted attempts at testing the waters. NVIDIA never really put too much effort into it.
ibrahima 13y ago
This is just in addition to their current business of selling chips and cards as far as I can tell. I don't think anyone will want to produce exactly an nVidia chip, most likely the idea is that other vendors would want to integrate an nVidia GPU core on their mobile SoC (Kepler as an architecture is supposed to scale from mobile to cluster computing sizes) - perhaps Qualcomm or Apple, or hell, maybe even AMD now that they're starting to put out ARM chips. Heck, it'd be pretty interesting if Intel put integrated Geforce cores on their next gen CPUs, at least as an option. Although most likely neither AMD nor Intel would bother since they've got their own fairly strong mobile GPU architectures now and figuring out how to integrate an nVidia core would probably be more work for dubious gain.
n00b101 13y ago
> So... They want to get out of the business of actually making things and just sell IP cores now? NVIDIA GPUs are fabricated by TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company). NVIDIA never owned its own fab. The only difference is that now instead of keeping their IP cores secret they are willing to license them for a (probably huge) fee. Whoever licenses the core would probably also use TSMC for fabrication.

They've never really been in the business of "making things" as end-users would see it. They've designed chips and reference PCBs, but they contract outside foundries for manufacturing (unlike, say, Intel, who have their own fabs) and the silicon goes to retail partners like ASUS and Gainward and many others to actually put into the channel (with minor downstream customization like custom heatsink designs). They've only recently actually sold some things directly to customers, like the SHIELD gaming handheld.

Eyght 13y ago
It will be interesting to see if anyone will use their GPU's for a product that directly competes with the SHIELD.
- sho_hn 13y ago
  I'd say SHIELD is pretty much a PR effort to incite others to do exactly that - it creates buzz around the virtues of nVidia's mobile tech for gaming, and so could make licensing nVidia GPU IP an attractive selling point. I don't think nVidia expects SHIELD to be a high-volume seller on its own, it's pretty niche form factor-wise. This is also why you have a bunch of graphically intense games on the Play store which are Tegra-exclusives, from developers who cut a deal with nVidia. For example Arma Tactics.
abuzzooz 13y ago
To be fair, NVIDIA tried to sell a couple of products directly to end consumers before. For example they sold a dual tv tuner card a few years ago (http://www.nvidia.com/page/dualtvmce.html http://www.nvidia.com/page/dualtvmce.html), but it didn't go too well and was discontinued. These were always half-hearted attempts at testing the waters. NVIDIA never really put too much effort into it.

ibrahima 13y ago

This is just in addition to their current business of selling chips and cards as far as I can tell. I don't think anyone will want to produce exactly an nVidia chip, most likely the idea is that other vendors would want to integrate an nVidia GPU core on their mobile SoC (Kepler as an architecture is supposed to scale from mobile to cluster computing sizes) - perhaps Qualcomm or Apple, or hell, maybe even AMD now that they're starting to put out ARM chips. Heck, it'd be pretty interesting if Intel put integrated Geforce cores on their next gen CPUs, at least as an option. Although most likely neither AMD nor Intel would bother since they've got their own fairly strong mobile GPU architectures now and figuring out how to integrate an nVidia core would probably be more work for dubious gain.

n00b101 13y ago

> So... They want to get out of the business of actually making things and just sell IP cores now? NVIDIA GPUs are fabricated by TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company). NVIDIA never owned its own fab. The only difference is that now instead of keeping their IP cores secret they are willing to license them for a (probably huge) fee. Whoever licenses the core would probably also use TSMC for fabrication.