Is it just me or do we need a 3rd player in the GPU industry?

[taltamir]

the dubai government now owns 51% of AMD's spun off fabs (although controlling shares are still remain in US hands due to differentiated share voting power); they have a lot of oil money to invest in technology which that ARE investing in technology (they know oil profits will not last forever and are trying to be the owners of essential technology instead).
they are pouring billions into new fabs that if things go as planned will allow them to match intel.
Intel's fab advantage in the past isn't just because they are magically better, they had significantly more money to invest in their fabs to buy the latest equipment while their competitors had to do with cheaper / older tech. With the billions being invested in GloFo foundries they might actually catch up.

 

[SickBeast]

intel's main problem is that they are trying to extend their monopoly. Instead of scaling up their IGP, they are trying to get replace GPUs with inefficiency x86 multicore implementation so that they could extend their monopoly into new fields and crush the competition... the problem is that they pay too heavy a performance fine for it.

It is the exact same marketing driven design that resulted in the P4 being the fail that it was. Unless they wise up and tell their engineers "design the most powerful and power efficient GPU you can" rather then "design a GPU that will allow us to extend our x86 monopoly" then they will not be able to make headway into the field. Unless competing fabs continue to struggle and allow intel to leverage a frightening process advantage to mitigate their marketing driven design shortcomings.

They were trying to do this. Larrabee has been cancelled.

Based on their most recent efforts with Sandy Bridge, I'm impressed with what they have done. The "3000" GPU actually beats out a Radeon 5450 in most cases, which is more than I would have expected, and is actually very competitive with Fusion.

To me it seems somewhat rudimentary for Intel to add more cores to their IGP and create a discreet GPU out of it.

Once Llano comes out, Intel might have to create something to compete. It will be interesting to see what they try to do.

 

[taltamir]

They were trying to do this. Larrabee has been cancelled.

Well, what about their Knight Ferry "next gen larrabee"?

 

[Arkadrel]

To me it seems somewhat rudimentary for Intel to add more cores to their IGP and create a discreet GPU out of it.

Once Llano comes out, Intel might have to create something to compete. It will be interesting to see what they try to do.

Its a tough battle though, for Intel to really squash AMDs Llano (in GPU department) theyd need:



1) Intel need to figour out how to use gpu resources of the sandy bridge gpu, even when a discrete put in.

2) Intel will need a version of hybrid crossfire, that ll work with nvidia/amd/intel? discrete cards.

3) Intel will need to get GPGPU capabilities on IGP's (that work with discrete cards too)

4) Intel will need to get full directx 11 support without any work arounds.

5) Intel Ivy bridge will need a 300% increase in GPU performance to compete with the Llano's GPU.

6) Intel needs driver quality to match AMDs + something simular to MLAA that could be big for the low end IGPs.


Nr 4 and 5 probably the most important though.

 

[SickBeast]

Well, what about their Knight Ferry "next gen larrabee"?

I had not heard about this. The last I heard Intel had cancelled Larrabee and was keeping mum regarding future products of that nature.

AMD also had a similar project in a way. I'm pretty sure that the original Phenom was going to be a 50+ core CPU, but they scrapped it half way through the process for some reason.

 

[Damascus]

We sure need another player in the market. It worries me how both the existing ones started to be comfortable with their current status, none of them is eager anymore to really pull ahead, we get a~15-25% performance improvement with every generation and a huge marketing bull.

To whoever said a player is all he needs, would you like to pay north of 600$ for a card that barely pulls ahead of the same tier of last generation? You certainly haven't thought that through.

So you're saying if there were a third player around, TSMC wouldn't have botched everything and stumbled over themselves for the past year (and next)?

 

[Arkadrel]

So you're saying if there were a third player around, TSMC wouldn't have botched everything and stumbled over themselves for the past year (and next)?

Not if that 3rd player was intel... they have their own fabs
I could just see it now... Intel launches a 14nm GPU, lmao that would surprise AMD and Nvidia.

 

[SickBeast]

Its a tough battle though, for Intel to really squash AMDs Llano (in GPU department) theyd need:



1) Intel need to figour out how to use gpu resources of the sandy bridge gpu, even when a discrete put in.

2) Intel will need a version of hybrid crossfire, that ll work with nvidia/amd/intel? discrete cards.

3) Intel will need to get GPGPU capabilities on IGP's (that work with discrete cards too)

4) Intel will need to get full directx 11 support without any work arounds.

5) Intel Ivy bridge will need a 300% increase in GPU performance to compete with the Llano's GPU.

6) Intel needs driver quality to match AMDs + something simular to MLAA that could be big for the low end IGPs.


Nr 4 and 5 probably the most important though.

Yeah, once you put it that way, it does seem as though Intel has a tough road ahead in terms of GPUs. It looks even more daunting than AMD trying to create the fastest CPU, in fact.

 

[taltamir]

I had not heard about this. The last I heard Intel had cancelled Larrabee and was keeping mum regarding future products of that nature.

11/16/2010:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/..._Knights_Ferry_Accelerator_at_Trade_Show.html

The code-named Knights Ferry device - which is not supposed to become a commercial compute solution and which is believed to be based on the code-named Larrabee GPU design - performed operations typically made on clusters or machines with many processing cores.

The Knights Ferry has 32 x86 cores clocked at 1.2GHz and featuring quad-HyperThreading. The unit, aimed at PCI Express 2.0 slots, has up to 2GB of GDDR5 memory. The chip itself has 8MB of shared L2 cache, which is quite intriguing by itself since highly-parallel applications do not require a large on-chip cache.

Sep 11, 2010:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVZDH15TRro
Intel engineers demonstrate a ray tracing gaming engine they built for knight ferry.

And there have both other snippets here and there that said that while larrabe the product was canceled it is still being developed into potential future products.

 

[aigomorla]

How much did that GTX 560 Ti cost you? What would you think if you had to pay 3 times as much for it?

uhhh we came back to VooDoo2 prices!


if u guys ask me... i wish gpu cards came separate from die and ram like how the computer is.
And it was up to the users choice to add as much ram as he felt was needed on the board and the core which he felt he wanted.

And upgrading to a higher tier only meant getting a new core and not an entirely new card, or just poping in more ram in the slots.

 

[taltamir]

uhhh we came back to VooDoo2 prices!


if u guys ask me... i wish gpu cards came separate from die and ram like how the computer is.
And it was up to the users choice to add as much ram as he felt was needed on the board and the core which he felt he wanted.

And upgrading to a higher tier only meant getting a new core and not an entirely new card, or just poping in more ram in the slots.

I agree with you there... And it doesn't even have to be a card... with the northbridge being absorbed by the CPU there is now room for it opening up, just place it into the motherboard using a socket and mount a ginormous HSF on it

 

[SickBeast]

uhhh we came back to VooDoo2 prices!


if u guys ask me... i wish gpu cards came separate from die and ram like how the computer is.
And it was up to the users choice to add as much ram as he felt was needed on the board and the core which he felt he wanted.

And upgrading to a higher tier only meant getting a new core and not an entirely new card, or just poping in more ram in the slots.

I agree, that would be ideal. That said, there has got to be a reason why no one has done that up until now.

 

[wahdangun]

uhhh we came back to VooDoo2 prices!


if u guys ask me... i wish gpu cards came separate from die and ram like how the computer is.
And it was up to the users choice to add as much ram as he felt was needed on the board and the core which he felt he wanted.

And upgrading to a higher tier only meant getting a new core and not an entirely new card, or just poping in more ram in the slots.

the problem is, right now GPU have much much faster development cycle than CPU, and if they do something like that , then they won't absorb new tech fast enough, and they can't change busswidht and ram type or anything that will come out (although its maybe feasible on lower end GPU)

 

[Dribble]

3rd player is never going to happen. Trying to get into it is near impossible (Intel failed) and it's not a growth area - while pc's are going to be around for a long time, the glory days of the desktop pc with it's stand alone gpu are really behind it.

The market to join is the smartphone/tablet one which is really for the whole soc, but there is a gpu element.

 

[bleucharm28]

There will never be 3 players, only 2. Kinda like Pepsi & Coke, everything else is considered "meh!"

 

[Arkadrel]

There will never be 3 players, only 2. Kinda like Pepsi & Coke, everything else is considered "meh!"

Light and dark, up and down! Coke and Pepsi! huh!?

but I like Dr pepper ; _ ;


Market could probably handle a 3rd player, but itd be one hellva tough start, and the market wouldnt be as profitable for 3 companies as it is for just 2.... a 3rd player could probably result in either a failed attempt, or pushing one of the others out of it.

It would take serious balls, and deep pocket, and a guy that wasnt afraid to gamble a fortune to start it. It could happend.... but I dont think it will (and in all likelyhood it would be a failed attempt).

I think maybe if someone has some new egde, like a new tech... say some genius way to do raytraceing and got it looking better than anything AMD/Nvidia/intel could do, they could take bite after bite and build up a market for their thingy.

I dont think some 3rd party doing the same thing as the other 2 is gonna be very successfull.

1) Intel need to figour out how to use gpu resources of the sandy bridge gpu, even when a discrete put in.

2) Intel will need a version of hybrid crossfire, that ll work with nvidia/amd/intel? discrete cards.

3) Intel will need to get GPGPU capabilities on IGP's (that work with discrete cards too)

4) Intel will need to get full directx 11 support without any work arounds.

5) Intel Ivy bridge will need a 300% increase in GPU performance to compete with the Llano's GPU.

6) Intel needs driver quality to match AMDs + something simular to MLAA that could be big for the low end IGPs.

This is what Intel needs to have a bigger bite of the pie, once that is out of the way, they could start makeing Discrete graphic cards. But first they need to get their IGPs up to nvidia/amd levels.


that said... because intel sells so many motherboard/cpus, with onboard graphics they already have a huge bite of the total.

 

[taltamir]

There will never be 3 players, only 2. Kinda like Pepsi & Coke, everything else is considered "meh!"

it might be considered "meh" but it exists and keeps prices reasonable.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

*if* everyone is dependent on only 1... prices will skyrocket.

prices mostly won't go anywhere, its performance that will stagnate without competition, so if we want faster performance we'll have to pay for it, but general purpose part prices won't go anywhere.

 

[taltamir]

prices mostly won't go anywhere, its performance that will stagnate without competition, so if we want faster performance we'll have to pay for it, but general purpose part prices won't go anywhere.

that is wishful thinking.

 

[BoomerD]

MATROX....we need you.

ROFL!! I don't remember Matrox being all that great...

uhhh we came back to VooDoo2 prices!


if u guys ask me... i wish gpu cards came separate from die and ram like how the computer is.
And it was up to the users choice to add as much ram as he felt was needed on the board and the core which he felt he wanted.

And upgrading to a higher tier only meant getting a new core and not an entirely new card, or just poping in more ram in the slots.

I still have a Monster VooDooII 8 mb card...IMO, the graphics at the time were much better than competing ATI or nVidia offerings.
Everyone did think I was off my freaking rocker for paying $200 for a video card...and an add-on card at that.

 

[Throckmorton]

You "we need more competition" people are going to regret it when Intel can really compete and puts ATI and nVidia out of business because they have a virtual monopoly on chipsets.

Video cards will go the way of the soundcard and once again we will suffer.

Oh yeah and those Intel GPUs will be in every console too.

 

[Vdubchaos]

Barriers to entry

ding ding ding

Also when we are talking GPU market I'm guessing we are taking ONBOARD graphics out of the topic. Sure they reprent a HUGE % of graphics sales, but they are not relevant to any of us....

 

[nonameo]

I think that we will start to see more integration and the GPUs integrated into CPUs will start to look much better. I think We'll see imagination start to make some headroom in the CPU/GPU area.

 

[RobertPters77]

I agree. We also need a third player in the x86 cpu market. Via's license is set to expire in 2013 and they've done nothing relevant in the cpu industry for the last couple of years.

I'd love it if the FTC made intel grant a few more x86 licenses. Because honestly we have a freaking duopoly in the two most critical components of the computer business. Intel vs Amd, Nvidia vs Amd. We have tons of Memory and Hard Drive manufacturers though. And was it not Ati that originally pioneered separating the gpu from the cpu?

 

[taltamir]

Because honestly we have a freaking duopoly in the two most critical components of modern society

fixed