Nvidia Now 3rd Largest IC Design Company

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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NVIDIA has displaced MediaTek for the number 3 spot in the list of world's largest IC design company. Broadcom remains number one, and Qualcomm number two on the world's largest fabless list.


GPU specialist Nvidia enjoyed strong demand for data centers and professional visualization applications in the second quarter of 2017, when the company saw its revenues surge 56.7% from a year ago to US$1.91 billion, TRI noted. Nvidia entered the top-3 fabless IC vendors and had the largest revenue increase among the top 10 in the second quarter, TRI said.
 
Some people don't like them as a company, but IMO they've earned their position. They're making a lot of cool things, and not just for gaming. (though I'm pretty happy with all of their products that I own) It'd be cool to see some "real" competition with them, but they make cool shit. Can't really fault them for it. Funny enough it all just works too (from my experience), and it all works together. (referring to my Shield TV, streaming from gaming desktop, etc. etc.) Smooth, pretty much flawless experience.
 
J3RK said:
Some people don't like them as a company, but IMO they've earned their position. They're making a lot of cool things, and not just for gaming. (though I'm pretty happy with all of their products that I own) It'd be cool to see some "real" competition with them, but they make cool shit. Can't really fault them for it. Funny enough it all just works too (from my experience), and it all works together. (referring to my Shield TV, streaming from gaming desktop, etc. etc.) Smooth, pretty much flawless experience.
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it's so ridiculous how people hate on them. I remember when they released riva TNT and blew the market's minds; they were the underdog back then. Plus they absorbed the old Voodoo engineers, I'll forever <3 Nvidia. Maybe it's because I had a crush on the Nvidia Geforce Fairy during my teenage years...
 
Napoleon said:
it's so ridiculous how people hate on them. I remember when they released riva TNT and blew the market's minds; they were the underdog back then. Plus they absorbed the old Voodoo engineers, I'll forever <3 Nvidia. Maybe it's because I had a crush on the Nvidia Geforce Fairy during my teenage years...
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AMD's Ruby was my thing. Dawn was cute, too.
 
J3RK said:
Some people don't like them as a company
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I dislike them because they built themselves up on open standards alongside ATI, then went and became the thing they once were against. So they do deserve a lot of hate for that until they go back to supporting open standards again.
 
Goodlookinguy said:
I dislike them because they built themselves up on open standards alongside ATI, then went and became the thing they once were against. So they do deserve a lot of hate for that until they go back to supporting open standards again.
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That's fair. However, both sides have tried to share some of that tech with the other, then the other side puts out something else. AMD LEANS toward open, but they aren't totally open. I have to say though the whole "ecosystem" that Nvidia has created works really well. I'm not usually one for ecosystems in general, but I plug it in, and can play games. Not a bad thing.
 
Goodlookinguy said:
I dislike them because they built themselves up on open standards alongside ATI, then went and became the thing they once were against. So they do deserve a lot of hate for that until they go back to supporting open standards again.
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Hate them all you want, they build the world's best GPU's. I personally don't care how the GPU in my PC went from idea to product on a shelf - I don't care how the sausage is made, I just care about the end product.

Remember they're running a business, not fanboy highschool. And their obligation is to create value for shareholders, end of story. If they could "go back to open standards" while making shareholders happy, I"m sure they'd do it. But obviously protecting their innovations is more important. There's really no upside to letting AMD copy their homework.
 
DPI said:
Hate them all you want, they build the world's best GPU's. I personally don't care how the GPU in my PC went from idea to product on a shelf - I don't care how the sausage is made, I just care about the end product.

Remember they're running a business, not fanboy highschool. And their obligation is to create value for shareholders, end of story. If they could "go back to open standards" while making shareholders happy, I"m sure they'd do it. But obviously protecting their innovations is more important. There's really no upside to letting AMD copy their homework.
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That's kind of an odd statement to make. Do you know what it was like in the 90s prior to this? One company held all of the power. It was very bad for consumers. Back then the two, now major GPU manufacturers, arose to power because of this problem. If we go back to a very one-sided thing, like I see with PhysX, CUDA, GPGPU, and all of the other off stuff nVidia does to outright undermine all competition, this is problematic. If they get big enough, they'll be allowed to charge ridiculous prices and the like if they please. I'm glad to see AMD is attempting to take it seriously, but I still see it as an overall uphill battle against a long-term monopoly play by nVidia.

Also, I'm a programmer, so there's other feelings here you might not understand, but open standards mean a lot to me though.
 
Napoleon said:
it's so ridiculous how people hate on them. I remember when they released riva TNT and blew the market's minds; they were the underdog back then. Plus they absorbed the old Voodoo engineers, I'll forever <3 Nvidia. Maybe it's because I had a crush on the Nvidia Geforce Fairy during my teenage years...
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Voodoo cards were the shit back in the day.
 
I hate their telemetry bullshit and as others have said, their way of trying to lock customers and the market to their ecosystem, which automatically makes me wary and looking for alternatives.

But cannot deny, they got their shit straight and have being on point with their execution for many years now, meanwhile nobody else provided them with any competition.

We need to be careful with blindly following any corporation like this, because what always come after is lack of alternatives and sky high prices.
 
Goodlookinguy said:
That's kind of an odd statement to make. Do you know what it was like in the 90s prior to this? One company held all of the power. It was very bad for consumers. Back then the two, now major GPU manufacturers, arose to power because of this problem. If we go back to a very one-sided thing, like I see with PhysX, CUDA, GPGPU, and all of the other off stuff nVidia does to outright undermine all competition, this is problematic. If they get big enough, they'll be allowed to charge ridiculous prices and the like if they please. I'm glad to see AMD is attempting to take it seriously, but I still see it as an overall uphill battle against a long-term monopoly play by nVidia.

Also, I'm a programmer, so there's other feelings here you might not understand, but open standards mean a lot to me though.
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No they can't just charge ridiculous prices. Sure prices will go up there is a point when it goes to far people will not buy it. You won't be seeing 1060 for $1000 and $5000 Titan. People would also be less likely to upgrade to the newest cards. Money is in volume and pushing new tech and performance to compel people to upgrade every cycle of releases. Intel performance some what stagnated over the recent years but their price stayed relatively the same in the consumer market over that time.
 
vegeta535 said:
Intel performance some what stagnated over the recent years but their price stayed relatively the same in the consumer market over that time.
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They actually stagnated the whole market by "forcing" the market and industry to 4 cores and very little increase in IPC.

And by the looks of how they are reacting to Zen, looks like they had the intention of giving us the same crap for the foreseeable future.

Nvidia already said that they wont bother in releasing anything new, since they dont have competition, so, we are already starting to experience the same possible stagnation.

What i would love to see them do, is go all out with a proper desktop ARM cpu and light a fire under intel and amd behinds.
 
grtitan said:
They actually stagnated the whole market by "forcing" the market and industry to 4 cores and very little increase in IPC.

And by the looks of how they are reacting to Zen, looks like they had the intention of giving us the same crap for the foreseeable future.

Nvidia already said that they wont bother in releasing anything new, since they dont have competition, so, we are already starting to experience the same possible stagnation.

What i would love to see them do, is go all out with a proper desktop ARM cpu and light a fire under intel and amd behinds.
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Zen so far is a massive failure and here is why. It only fits the desktop somewhat and not servers or mobile. And that's where Intel used its resources.

Same reason why Nvidia is winning without any competition, over half of gaming systems sold are mobile and AMD got absolutely nothing in mobile. If you dont have mobility for consumers you have nothing as such.

I know its a sore subject, but the desktop is in reality dead.
 
grtitan said:
I hate their telemetry bullshit and as others have said, their way of trying to lock customers and the market to their ecosystem, which automatically makes me wary and looking for alternatives.

But cannot deny, they got their shit straight and have being on point with their execution for many years now, meanwhile nobody else provided them with any competition.

We need to be careful with blindly following any corporation like this, because what always come after is lack of alternatives and sky high prices.
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I use many of their products, but I in no way feel "locked in". The only thing locking me in is that their hardware is nice, and it just works. You can cite this or that time in history where they made a blunder, but you can do that with any company. The thing is, if you're buying a GPU, or an Android based streaming box, etc. they're pretty much the way to go. You're totally correct in that nobody is giving them a run for their money right now. I'd love to see that happen. I've owned plenty of ATI/AMD/3DFX (you can take a peek at those "list the video cards you've owned" threads for examples all the way back to my EGA cards. :D

I don't blindly go where I'm led. I go where the products do what I want them to. Currently that's these guys, and I can't really find fault with the way they're doing it. If someone steps up, or AMD gets competitive again, I'll GLADLY give them a whirl. Silly qualifier: "Some of my best frien... I mean favorite video cards were ATI..." :D

Anyway, this isn't a these vs. them thread (as far as I know). They've come a long way since my AGP Riva 128 (paired with a Canopus Voodoo followed by Creative Voodoo II by the way...) :cool:
 
Napoleon said:
it's so ridiculous how people hate on them. I remember when they released riva TNT and blew the market's minds; they were the underdog back then. Plus they absorbed the old Voodoo engineers, I'll forever <3 Nvidia. Maybe it's because I had a crush on the Nvidia Geforce Fairy during my teenage years...
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Nude patch anyone?
 
vegeta535 said:
No they can't just charge ridiculous prices. Sure prices will go up there is a point when it goes to far people will not buy it. You won't be seeing 1060 for $1000 and $5000 Titan. People would also be less likely to upgrade to the newest cards. Money is in volume and pushing new tech and performance to compel people to upgrade every cycle of releases. Intel performance some what stagnated over the recent years but their price stayed relatively the same in the consumer market over that time.
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At one time someone said there won't be $1,000 cards, yet here we are.

AMD goes with open standards simply because it can't afford going with propietary stuff. They just don't have the people to do it.
But even then, they are not doing much, they just let other people do the developing. Just take a look at Mantle, it started as a propietary API and quickly became open and ultimately became vulkan. Then there is OpenCL which is nowhere near CUDA in terms of capabilites/features. Also, there is NO physx equivalent. AMD touted HAVOK accelerated physics since before nvidia bought Ageia.
 
I love confronting AMD fans offline IRL (no google for help :p) with a simple question... what does it mean when they say "open standards"? They look at me for a while, blink a few times and then go something like... ahhh, well you see, it is the technical ummm standards, errr that are errr like open, you know, like totally, which errr, is like awesome for customers. Riiiight, what the fuck ever.

If your ONLY competition already has something proprietary that you're trying to copy with an alternative, it doesn't make any difference whether the source code is publicly available or not, you are still locking customers in (eg. FreeSync), just with poorer (and poorly scheduled) quality control. "Open standards" is a double-edged sword that can be both good or bad.

I bloody hate it, when the world we live in has pharmaceuticals sitting on life-saving drug patents, automobile and aeronautical companies with copyrighted safety features that they won't let others use for free... and yet you sorry fucks have the audacity of hating (essentially) a toy maker for holding copyrights?

[Edit] Perhaps my tone above was harsher than necessary. But it is really aggravating when someone says something intellectually obtuse like "Nvidia makes good products but they're a bad company because closed standards" for the millionth time, and it is taken as a real argument. Instead of being treated for the complete ignorance of the very basics of technology and modern business that it is. If this is indeed your argument, then you rightfully deserve at least some insult for this affront to common sense.
 
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Syntax_Error said:
I love confronting AMD fans offline IRL (no google for help :p) with a simple question... what does it mean when they say "open standards"? They look at me for a while, blink a few times and then go something like... ahhh, well you see, it is the technical ummm standards, errr that are errr like open, you know, like totally, which errr, is like awesome for customers. Riiiight, what the fuck ever.

If your ONLY competition already has something proprietary that you're trying to copy with an alternative, it doesn't make any difference whether the source code is publicly available or not, you are still locking customers in (eg. FreeSync), just with poorer (and poorly scheduled) quality control. "Open standards" is a double-edged sword that can be both good or bad.

I bloody hate it, when the world we live in has pharmaceuticals sitting on life-saving drug patents, automobile and aeronautical companies with copyrighted safety features that they won't let others use for free... and yet you sorry fucks have the audacity of hating (essentially) a toy maker for holding copyrights?
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While I agree with you 100%, we all operate on our own scales. For some these larger problems seem out of reach. There are also those of us who can differentiate between large and small problems (or debates) and appreciate or debate both. Since we're on a computer hardware and gaming enthusiast site, it's completely appropriate to debate copyrights, proprietary technologies, that pertain to those topics. Discussing large pharmaceuticals here would actually be silly in my mind. If you want to fight the mega-corporations, then assemble your crack team of intelligence, hackers, muscle, and demolitions experts, and go get 'em! In the meantime, I'll discuss computer hardware here. :D
 
J3RK said:
Discussing large pharmaceuticals here would actually be silly in my mind.
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I agree that if we pretend bigger problems don't exist, the trivial matters suddenly start to appear more significant, but I digress.

Allow me to simplify my earlier statement further; there is a reason behind IP copyrights, a reason compelling enough for governments to let companies hold them for even something as important as life-saving drugs. Copyright protection encourages investment in R&D. So without it, businesses would not be compelled to spend billions to innovate, and we won't even have the products and technologies that we have right now. This is how capitalism works.
 
Syntax_Error said:
Allow me to simplify my earlier statement further; there is a reason behind IP copyrights, a reason compelling enough for governments to let companies hold them for even something as important as life-saving drugs. Copyright protection encourages investment in R&D. So without it, businesses would not be compelled to spend billions to innovate, and we won't even have the products and technologies that we have right now. This is how capitalism works.
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I agree. But it is a balance. Companies should fight for their intellectual property, but it is not the job of clients and customers to support that. It is our job to promote open standards and open code. Copyright is good for the companies because it encourages investment in R&D, open design encourages inter-operation between products and solutions between different companies. It also helps protect against depending on a single company to support a product. For example, if a product is selling you a closed-source program, and the company goes bankrupt, you are most likely screwed and will need to find a new solution. However, if the program was open source there is a good chance that the community and/or other corporations will continue supporting that product, even after the company that spearheaded dissappears. It builds a lot of confidence in customers when things are generally more open.

TLDR: intellectual property rights vs open standards: it's a balance. It's not consumers responsibility to fight for the former, we are fighting for the latter.
 
Syntax_Error said:
I agree that if we pretend bigger problems don't exist, the trivial matters suddenly start to appear more significant, but I digress.
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Nobody is mobilizing the populace. We're pretty much headed for the dystopias that we all love to experience in our games, movies, books. Until it becomes completely intolerable to the majority, nothing is going to happen. I realize that's a pretty dismal statement, but let's be realistic here. Beyond voting for the lesser of evils, writing letters to your representatives, etc. What exactly do you think is healthier for an individual to do? Stress into an early grave over gargantuan problems, or relieve a bit of stress by chatting with like-minded individuals about things that they enjoy? I do my best to make the smaller world that I live in as good of a place as it can be. Wasting my time as an anti-corporate freedom-fighter doesn't sound all that appealing. When 75% of the populace is ready to do something, you can count on my support. When you take down your first evil organization, I will lend my support. When we have bands of cyberpunk, Loa-riding console jockeys infiltrating corporations and cracking ice, maybe you'll have my support. In the meantime, I'll continue to vote, write an occasional letter, and then worry about my back yard. And whether or not I like certain graphics card companies that make hardware to play my games on.
 
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serpretetsky said:
TLDR: intellectual property rights vs open standards: it's a balance. It's not consumers responsibility to fight for the former, we are fighting for the latter.
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I completely agree. The point I'm trying to make is that Nvidia is just a tiny part of a much bigger system that works the way it works. You can't logically call Nvidia (or any other company that works within the legal guidelines, for that matter) bad or "evil" without considering the entire system as such. And if the system itself is evil then it only points to its creators being inherently evil... us, mankind.

This is a tech site (as 'J3RK' kindly pointed out earlier), a tech company should be judged based on their level of technology and the quality of their products, and not exclusively held to some arbitrary moral standards. You can't talk morality without looking at the bigger picture.


J3RK said:
In the meantime, I'll continue to vote, write an occasional letter, and then worry about my back yard. And whether or not I like certain graphics card companies to play my games on.
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It was never my intent to challenge anyones right to make their own choices, but rather to challenge the ridiculous notion that "Nvidia alone is a bad company, for copyrighting their research." That is illogical. and as an argument, has no place on a tech site of all places.
 
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Syntax_Error said:
I completely agree. The point I'm trying to make is that Nvidia is just a tiny part of a much bigger system that works the way it works. You can't logically call Nvidia (or any other company that works within the legal guidelines, for that matter) bad or "evil" without considering the entire system as such. And if the system itself is evil then it only points to its creators being inherently evil... us, mankind.

This is a tech site (as 'J3RK' kindly pointed out earlier), a tech company should be judged based on their level technology and the quality of their products, and not exclusively held to some arbitrary moral standards. You can't talk morality without looking at the bigger picture.


It was never my intent to challenge anyones right to make their own choices, but rather to challenge the ridiculous notion that "Nvidia alone is a bad company, for copyrighting their research." That is illogical. and as an argument, has no place on a tech site of all places.
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Got it. I may have misread what you were trying to say. Also, my "arguments" if you want to call them that, while they adhere pretty closely to my actual viewpoint, weren't made to be 100% serious.
 
Hate them all you want for charging an arm and a kidney for their GPUs, but major props to Jensen Huang for actually being an engineer & CEO and not some flake. This talk of his is pretty awesome as it goes through the design process for their earliest chips and the engineering struggles they faced.
 
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