Does Nvidia have a future?

[mrcape]

Mobile computing sux.

[Talonman]

The title of the article is "Does Nvidia Have a Future?", not "Is Nvidia the King?". Ultimately, it doesn't matter how strong their strongest card is, if they can't sustain their business. And while having the strongest card may be a selling point that contributes to sales (Directly or via halo effect), it's obviously not a magic wand that somehow skews the laws of profit and loss in business. So no, they shouldn't put more importance on performance - they should put the importance on Nvidia's health and future as a business, which is exactly what they've done in this article.

Really, there's lots of bias to be found out there - this article is barely, if at all, a blip on the radar.

Yes, that must be the reason they did mention it for ATI, and not Nvidia...

"AMD followed up with the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which held the undisputed performance crown for over five months"

I guess when talking about Nvidia's health and future as a business, it's only just to bring up the 4870 X2. Talking about Nvidia actually having the performance crown with the 295 is way less important than that.

[RejZoR]

Today, having performance crown means excatly nothing. Ok, so you've managed to build a super expensive chip taht no one will buy.
But if you manage to design high end chips with appealing price tag, you're an instant winner. And AMD is a winner this round.
Almost everyone that i know have HD4xxx series gfx card, only few have renamed 9800GTX+ and even less have GTX 275/285/295 cards.
I just bought HD4870 for 122 eur where i couldn't find any 9800GTX+ below 130 eur. Now who is stupid!?!?! I don't care if NVIDIA hs the fastest GTX 295 on earth. I dont' have anything from that. But i do have a lot from HD4870...

[Glow9]

I might not be understanding all this right but am I the only one who doesn't want their graphics card essentially stuck in their cpu? Talk about limited upgrades.

[Flanman]

Yes, that must be the reason they did mention it for ATI, and not Nvidia...

"AMD followed up with the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which held the undisputed performance crown for over five months"

I guess when talking about Nvidia's health and future as a business, it's only just to bring up the 4870 X2. Talking about Nvidia actually having the performance crown with the 295 is way less important than that.

so they mention that the 4870x2 stole the crown for a short period means they are automatically biased against nvidia and love ati?

[Talonman]

Only if they opt to not mention for how long the 295 held the crown too...

Keep things even.

[mrcape]

I might not be understanding all this right but am I the only one who doesn't want their graphics card essentially stuck in their cpu? Talk about limited upgrades.

You are not the only one. I also hate the idea of a crappy memory controller stuck in my CPU. They're going to stuff everything they can in there. Stuff and shrink, stuff and shrink, stuff and shrink til we're down to just iPhones and hologram screens.

[Flanman]

well if you added the rest of the sentence from your blue line, they pretty much say that 295 stole the crown, even if it wasn't by much. i'm going to assume they only said five months for the 4870x2 is because, like stated, 295 came out and was faster and still is. i don't see a point in saying how long it has held the crown if nothing has taken it away yet, but hey, that is just me.

[Talonman]

You may be right, but I would have also included that bit of info.

Not that big of a deal...

The article did have some good points too.

[spursindonesia]

Yep, cheap yet decently capable mobile CPU chips, this should be a goldmine of the future. In my country, the Blackberry look alike cheap handphone is in booming situation, pay US$ 100 and you'll be online, and the subscription fee is getting more and more affordable by day. If nVidia can create chip that perform well for these HPs, it will sell like so strong like cheap peanuts in the developing countries/third world nations.

[Talonman]

I might not be understanding all this right but am I the only one who doesn't want their graphics card essentially stuck in their cpu? Talk about limited upgrades.

Me too!

Keep the CPU, the CPU, and the GPU, the GPU.

Let the systems work take the most productive path.

[Flanman]

You may be right, but I would have also included that bit of info.

Not that big of a deal...

The article did have some good points too.

it probably wouldn't have hurt to have added when the 295 hit retail so people had a general idea of how long it has been top dog.

i only skimmed through a couple parts so far, will definitely have to give it a good read though since most are saying its a good article

[Calmatory]

As a matter of fact, i know that nVidia is not going to go under, and i think most people will be susprised with the new cards performance and pricing.

As long as Nvidia's SKUs are more expensive to manufacture than those of AMD, they can only wish AMD does not start price war.

So yeah, they can make wonders, sell them for dirt cheap but that won't mean they will make any more profit than AMD would, if any.

I am all for mobilizing everything. There is nothing which would keep me on desktops. The only real thing I could think of would be WORK and GAMING. The rest can be done with a decent laptop, and is mobile. Or even a mobile phone. (<3) Waiting for some ARM equipped multicore devices with 5" screen and > 800x480 res, +100h of battery life. (OpenPandora is close one. )

[trinibwoy]

There are lots of ways to compete. One way is to try your best to reduce costs. Another is to try your best to differentiate your product and increase perceived value. AMD is doing the former, Nvidia the latter. It worked out better for AMD last round but it's a long race.

[Manicdan]

I might not be understanding all this right but am I the only one who doesn't want their graphics card essentially stuck in their cpu? Talk about limited upgrades.

a GPU+CPU in one will be great for some computers, but not all. im sure you remember the thread, death to the desktop. there is no way the dedicated video card is going away anytime soon. compare the phenom 1 to C2Q, one scaled better going from 1 to 4 core in cinebench, but the other still won overall performance and was cheaper to make since it was 2 duel cores. computers with separate cpus and gpus will be extremely common, the fusion type computers are only good for a few things, one being compact, and two being for people/products where upgrades are not the primary factor. essentially laptops and mini pcs.

[Talonman]

As a matter of fact, i know that nVidia is not going to go under, and i think most people will be susprised with the new cards performance and pricing.

I hope you are right!

[Glow9]

Me too!

Keep the CPU, the CPU, and the GPU, the GPU.

Let the systems work take the most productive path.

Yup just think of the idiotic fanboism that would errupt from this haha. Considering it would be one chip for everything. However, I would think that other companies would get involved if this would happen which I don't think certain companies are counting on right now. Lets face it Sony/IBM could sue for x86 licenses I mean pretty much seems like there is a monopoly on i right now or heck they could design their own. With ps3 sales being crappy based on the fact that when it was released it was the most expensive system to come out. That was not very affordable. However If they got into this market they could not only throw this chip into PCs but into their Gaming devices too.
I mean lets face it Sony + IBM I am sure more than capable of delivering a product like this. x86 could become null since it isn't competitive. So I could see other manufactuers producing something else.

Benefits too the lone chip way out for Intel and AMD right off the bat is it's a Hell of a lot less to produce chips than both cards and chips.
I think thats the real thing these companies are going for. I mean look at all the $ companies are investing in fab facilities.

It would likely kill the Mobo/card manufacturing industry. Lets face it with your vid card and cpu on the same chip your not buying a pcb graphics card. There goes a lot of money towards MSI/ASUS/ect ect ect. How would they make up for it? $300+ per motherboard. Then likely, these chips would jump sockets like there's no tomorrow. So it would just be rediculous for the consumer. low mid high range chips that you can't upgrade w/out rebuying everything. I would not be surprised to see these chips be $1500 for high end.

[Sparky]

There are lots of ways to compete. One way is to try your best to reduce costs. Another is to try your best to differentiate your product and increase perceived value. AMD is doing the former, Nvidia the latter. It worked out better for AMD last round but it's a long race.

Well, if nvidia is trying to differentiate their product and "perceived" value, they better stop playing with the renaming scheme as that won't hold water much longer

[Stukov]

You come away with feeling like for all Nvidia has done in the last few years, they still have yet to be given full credit....

(Leading GPU Computing, CUDA, CUDA Compilers, PhysX, Ray Tracing, Folding, Native Drag-n-Drop Video Transcoding in 7, and headding up the OpenCL board...)

Forget x86. Let the CPU do it. It probably does it better anyway.

Keep the GPU on apps that shine with lots of parallel processors.

I dont like the title of the article... I hope they do one on ATI too. I wonder if it will be written in the same manor?

"GT200 was the faster chip we’d all been waiting for, but AMD had trumped Nvidia with its RV770 chip – the Radeon HD 4870 delivered about 80 per cent of the performance for almost half the price of a GTX 280 at launch. Soon after, AMD followed up with the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which held the undisputed performance crown for over five months and, even when it did get competition, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 295 wasn’t hugely faster and suffered with high levels of AA applied so it could be argued that the 4870 X2 was still the superior part in some respects."

How does a chip that is about 20% slower trump Nvidia? Cost, yes at first... That was adjusted. They should put more importance on performance.

You can tell where a site stands on Nvidia, on how they select their words when putting a 295 up against a 4870 X2...

So how many months has the 295 heald the performance crown, and why dont they mention that? It has been King all year...

Because even if Nvidia matched the prices 1:1 with ATIs cards, AMDs cards were cheaper to produce. Nvidia's entire market plan had average sales price of their cards to be MUCH higher, hence the calculated cost of the chip was allowed to be higher. Having such competition, they had to lose alot of money in order to keep market share.

In that sense, AMD pulled out a win this round. To the end user it was a win all around as they had some really good cards on both sides at a very reasonable price. But Nvidia has been leading for quite a while, now AMD is dictating the market by smarter business, where Nvidia is trying to play on a different field with hardware that wasn't designed to be fought there.

[cegras]

Talonman, I think you're missing the point. Bit-tech was not talking about absolute performance, but rather a relative metric. ATI accomplished a significant % of nvidia's performance for significantly less die space and maybe manufacturing costs.

The fact that nvidia was forced to put out a dual GPU, one 'card' solution (hard to say that when their first one was two PCB's glued together) shows that they were not ready to counter, while the 4870X2 was a deliberate move to position their chip in the high end.

In fact, for this whole generation I'd argue that it's been nvidia playing catchup and reaction the whole time. I'm not sure how wide the advertising reach for nvidia is but the GTX295 was launched without much fanfare - you should be able to see why after nvidia basically shat all over ATI's 'dual gpu high end' strategy.

[SamHughe]

I think the picture in mrcape's signature summarizes this discussion very well:


He thinks he's so cool and stuff and the people on the other side cannot get to him. But pay attention to the rope he's cutting. Well...soon he'll be in a big surprise (and a boatload of trouble). Apply this to NVidia.

[zerazax]

Talonman

Relax... unless you own shares or work for them or something, no need to get personally offended. The article was pretty well balanced and good at looking at the *business* side of where Nvidia stands today and where their products are going.

Nvidia had the problem of being GPU-only essentially and now realizes they must diversify to survive if GPU's are being merged/changed - and hence they've been trying to bring out new technology, but a lot of it just isn't sticking (PhysX, CUDA, etc.) - be it because people don't want it at all or because it isn't mature and people don't want to use it yet.

And worse, they have to compete against big companies that are entrenched in where they want to head - Intel, ARM, etc.

As for why ATI wasn't given such an article, its simple... ATI is owned by AMD now, who has the x86 side and thus isn't in the same predicament as Nvidia. In fact, AMD supposedly acquired ATI so that they could get to the fusion of GPU and CPU...

If the situation were reversed, and Nvidia and AMD had merged, then ATI would probably be the one people are discussing if they have a future

[Talonman]

You may indeed be correct...

I din't mean to come off as personally offended.

It's all good.

[trinibwoy]

And worse, they have to compete against big companies that are entrenched in where they want to head - Intel, ARM, etc.

Nvidia does not compete with ARM, they are an ARM licensee. They're competing against TI, Broadcom etc.

[Xello]

Heh i have to say Talonman is probably the most relaxed person on this entire forum, taking into considering the amount of sh*t he has put up with the last few months and sheer number of negative statements directed toward him personally, i don't like to get involved but he does a good job of defending himself and making others seem stupid as a result of him keeping his cool

I don't really remember the last time i read an article of this nature on a company that was completely unbiased, though