Yeah, I think that will turn out to have been really shortsighted. Focus is a good thing when you're as small as AMD, but it doesn't seem like they've done too well in the x86 or high-end graphics markets since then either. Of course, their game of CEO musical chairs suggests that the effect of any particular business decision may be swamped by general mismanagement.
> Nvidia's trickle-down approach of putting really old desktop GPUs in a mobile SoC doesn't seem to be doing very well.
Granted, not having unified shaders and some other niceties has been pretty weak, but I think an even larger factor may be the content problem they face. The dominant mobile GPUs (and most importantly, the mobile GPUs in the market-creating, market-leading iOS devices) use a tile-based, or chunker, architecture where the GPU renders one chunk of the screen at a time. Nvidia GPUs don't; they render the whole screen at once. Nvidia believes their architecture is better; I tend to agree for desktop/console content and in a "pure" technical sense I suppose. The problem is that the vast majority of mobile game content has been optimized to work well on chunker GPUs, so any performance advantage Nvidia might see vanishes, and their power efficiency suffers slightly.
They can overcome this structural disadvantage by (1) adopting a chunker architecture, (2) encouraging developers to make games that work better or look cooler on Tegra [1], or (3) capturing a bunch of market share by building a better overall platform, and making Tegra the default target for developers. They could also just build a GPU that's sufficiently better than PowerVR/Mali/Exynos/Adreno in other respects that the tile-based/non-tile-based divide matters less.
For what it's worth, it's hard to compare mobile SoCs from a pure-technical-goodness standpoint, because their designers have such different market positions. A5X's GPU will smoke Tegra at a lot of things, but a lot of that is because Apple can afford for A5X to be twice as big [2]. Nvidia's customers cannot afford a 150mm^2 chip at their current market position.
Yeah, I think that will turn out to have been really shortsighted. Focus is a good thing when you're as small as AMD, but it doesn't seem like they've done too well in the x86 or high-end graphics markets since then either. Of course, their game of CEO musical chairs suggests that the effect of any particular business decision may be swamped by general mismanagement.
> Nvidia's trickle-down approach of putting really old desktop GPUs in a mobile SoC doesn't seem to be doing very well.
Granted, not having unified shaders and some other niceties has been pretty weak, but I think an even larger factor may be the content problem they face. The dominant mobile GPUs (and most importantly, the mobile GPUs in the market-creating, market-leading iOS devices) use a tile-based, or chunker, architecture where the GPU renders one chunk of the screen at a time. Nvidia GPUs don't; they render the whole screen at once. Nvidia believes their architecture is better; I tend to agree for desktop/console content and in a "pure" technical sense I suppose. The problem is that the vast majority of mobile game content has been optimized to work well on chunker GPUs, so any performance advantage Nvidia might see vanishes, and their power efficiency suffers slightly.
They can overcome this structural disadvantage by (1) adopting a chunker architecture, (2) encouraging developers to make games that work better or look cooler on Tegra [1], or (3) capturing a bunch of market share by building a better overall platform, and making Tegra the default target for developers. They could also just build a GPU that's sufficiently better than PowerVR/Mali/Exynos/Adreno in other respects that the tile-based/non-tile-based divide matters less.
For what it's worth, it's hard to compare mobile SoCs from a pure-technical-goodness standpoint, because their designers have such different market positions. A5X's GPU will smoke Tegra at a lot of things, but a lot of that is because Apple can afford for A5X to be twice as big [2]. Nvidia's customers cannot afford a 150mm^2 chip at their current market position.
[1] http://www.tegrazone.com/support/game-support [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_system_on_chips