Alan Dang of Tom’s Hardware takes an in-depth look into the next decade of GPU offerings and tries to divine what we may see happen. He begins by reminiscing about the crumble of the Sound Card market (moving from the PC speaker, to the high-end Sound Card, back to integrated audio), then covers the three major players: AMD, Intel, and finally NVidia. While he bashes on NVidia for the lengthy delays of the Fermi chipsets that had the potential to destroy the company (and some say still might), he does rightfully say that NVidia is still the market leader largely due to their superior software and SDK offerings available to developers.
The bottom line is that Nvidia has a considerable lead over both Intel and AMD when it comes to high-performance parallel computing. The investments it has made in creating viable commercial tools for GPGPU are already paying off with exclusive Adobe Creative Suite 5 support and broader adoption of CUDA among scientific professionals. If the company continues its momentum and aggressively grows the GF100-based product line, it has a chance to obtain iPod-like dominance in the market and at the very least, I think Nvidia has established itself firmly in the GPGPU world. Third place will have to go to either AMD or Intel.
One thing many people leave out in these types of articles is the software aspect. It matters little if Intel’s or AMD’s chips are ‘better’, if nobody can find reliable tools to develop for them. NVidia already has compilers from multiple sources (internal, PGI, etc) and several API libraries (PhysX, ScenX, OptiX, CUDA) to make using NVidia hardware simple and uniform. This alone, combined with their renewed push into Mobile chipsets (Optimus), Embedded chipsets (Tegra), and the high-end (Fermi) should easily carry NVidia through the next decade.
Opinion: AMD, Intel, And Nvidia In The Next Ten Years : Introduction – Review Tom’s Hardware.
The AMD versus Intel battle is a hot topic in the computing industry that has been fiercely discussed for many years. However, there has never been a clear winner, and it looks like it is just going to run and run. AMDvsIntel.co.uk has a series of articles discussing various aspects of this fascinating debate.
Randy Randy… ‘love reading his optimistic articles about nVidia – nVidia should build a minument in his honor! Well, if he is so farsighted, why doesn’t he talk about future fiber optic, multi level mother boards, or Toshiba RAM chips and GDDR around CPU socket, primary CPU built in chipset (for external devices only, of course), 2D-3D monitors (a few years away), or something real simple like Ringtone Volume Manager in cell phones… or something… that is really 10 years away (if we make through 2012 of course 🙂 ) – PCI express parallel computing mechanism… means 2-3 slave PCs on a main board of a desktop… 🙂 yetp… things have tendency to get smaller and faster 🙂