Lots of people heard that Nvidia wasn’t going to join the X86 race but rather “go it alone” in the ARM market, and were baffled that NVidia would drop major computer architecture design and go after a market that’s proven over and over again it’s good for not much more than embedded systems. A new article over at ArsTechnica does a good job breaking down why NVidia will have a tough road ahead of them in “beating” Intel, but that they honestly may not even have to to win.
If it turns out that the ARM ecosystem can get within a factor of two of x86 in terms of performance and performance per watt as ARM chips move to higher levels of size and complexity, and if that ecosystem can simultaneously keep the cost of ARM chips much lower than that of x86 chips, then ARM could do to x86 what x86 did to Alpha, MIPS, SPARC, PowerPC, and the other RISC workstation architectures. Intel used its process strength to get close enough to RISC workstation and server performance that the PC’s status as a low-cost commodity machine gave the PC an edge. We all know how the story played out: the high-end RISC vendors were marginalized, as the lower volumes on their now-boutique chips kept their prices up; meanwhile, Intel relentlessly narrowed the performance gap and moved the PC into new markets because it was dramatically cheaper and almost as good.
I think it’s a smart move on NVidia’s part to let Intel run with the Server space (where NVidia can always have an “in” with Tesla and Quadro GPGPU addons), and instead target the growing smartphone, tablet, and portable computer spaces. It’s slimmer margins for sure, but a vastly larger market that’s already used to upgrades every 6 months.
All this has happened before: NVIDIA 3.0, ARM, and the fate of x86.
