For those of you who aren't exactly computer savvy, if you are using an operating system with a graphical interface (read: all of them), then you are currently using a graphics card.
A graphics card (also referred to as a VGA accelerator by some people, or just VGA card) is a piece of silicon with a single purpose: To display what you currently see on your screen. Their methods are widely varied, and in the DOS era, they were rarely standardized. Back in the days of the ISA system bus (the precursor to PCI, AGP, and PCI-E), graphics acclerators had pretty terrible performance and were really expensive. Not only that, but they were necessary. Anyone who wanted to play some DOOM or Turok had to have one, and so came the first big graphics companies.
More than 10 years ago, there was a graphics card company called 3dfx.
They were amazing and several years ahead of their time, developing technologies such as SLI (scan leave interface, a technology that allowed the use of multiple graphics cards per computer, thus improving 3d performance) and power saving features that weren't seen from the competition for years, most of their entries into the market blowing the competition out of the water. Keep in mind that they first rose to power when 2mb of on-board video memory was almost superfluous.
However, due to rampant mis-management, bad spending, competition from the then brand new Geforce 2 and Geforce 3 cards from the rising star Nvidia, 3dfx failed. Three days before they were slated to release what was supposed to be their live-saver, the Voodoo 5 series, the were sold by investors, ironically enough, to Nvidia. We don't see much of 3dfx anymore, unless you like to use multiple video cards in your computer, in which case only the faint echoes of the original SLI technology echo through your monitor.
Fast forward to today. We have two major graphic card companies, as well as two major processor manufacturers. ATI, and Nvidia. ATI was recently bought by processor manufacturer AMD when it was in dire financial straits, giving it the budget it needed to finally start to succeed again. With only one misstep, the fiasco that was the 2900xt, ATI has been relatively successful lately, outselling Nvidia in key market points.
Nvidia on the other hand has formed an informal alliance with Intel (aka Chipzilla), and with their dishonest marketing strategies, (Such as "The Way It's Mean To Be Played", where they pay game development companies large sums to make their games perform better on Nvidia systems) has caused a lot of PR damage.
In 2008, as is standard, Nvidia and ATI released their new graphics cards at roughly the same time. ATI shocked the PC-enthusiasts of the world with their "HD 4870", which was more than two times more powerful than their previous entry, the 3870. The 4xxx series gpu's by ATI outsold the Nvidia gt200 cards in that round, due to their higher price performance. Nvidia has slowly been losing market share over the past year to the AMD/ATI combination.
And now we have the current generation of graphics cards.
A couple months ago ATI launched their 5 series graphics cards. The flagship 5870 once again managed to double the performance of the last series of graphics cards, and was the first Direct X11 (A standard 3d coding API proliferated by Microsoft) supporting card ever released. ATI managed to strike a hard blow against Nvidia, releasing their new, suprisingly cheap cards right at the end of the lifecycle of the gt200 cards. Because of this, ATI has gained approximately 8% of the graphics card market share in just a few months. Nvidia's new offering, the gt300, codename "Fermi" is now nowhere to be seen.
Here's the problem:
Fermi has been delayed for nearly 6 months now. Originally scheduled to come out only a month after the 5xxx series cards, it's now been pushed back to March. While there have been a couple teasing screenshots, the problems encountered by Nvidia are really telling.
One of the problems stems, not from a failing of Nvidia, but from their new production process. They've moved to the 40nm production node (meaning the average width of a logic gate on the GPU die will be no greater than 40nm), which is buggy and untested. TSMC, the company responsible for manufacturing the cards, has managed to achieve only a 2% success rating. That isn't a typo. That means that out of every 100 pieces of blank silicon TSMC is given, only 2 of them will yield successful graphics cards. Blank silicon and hafnium wafers aren't cheap, and Nvidia has supposedly squandered millions of dollars on this technology. Not only that, but Nvidia has entirely switched the architecture of their GPU, literally rebuilding it from the ground up.
The second problem is that Nvidia refuses to admit that it's failed. As a matter of fact, Nvidia was even caught faking gt300 reference cards. There have been no benchmarks released, and other than the constant delays, absolutely no sign that the Fermi cards will ever be released.
Now go back to the beginning.
3dfx found itself in exactly the same position. Mismanagement, underhanded corporate tactics, and massive delays led to the death of the company even after it had been so successful. Only one failure can lead to the death of an industry giant in a market as volatile as that of the graphics card industry. And so that leaves us thinking: If nVidia fails, who will step up to fill their place?
A graphics card (also referred to as a VGA accelerator by some people, or just VGA card) is a piece of silicon with a single purpose: To display what you currently see on your screen. Their methods are widely varied, and in the DOS era, they were rarely standardized. Back in the days of the ISA system bus (the precursor to PCI, AGP, and PCI-E), graphics acclerators had pretty terrible performance and were really expensive. Not only that, but they were necessary. Anyone who wanted to play some DOOM or Turok had to have one, and so came the first big graphics companies.
More than 10 years ago, there was a graphics card company called 3dfx.
They were amazing and several years ahead of their time, developing technologies such as SLI (scan leave interface, a technology that allowed the use of multiple graphics cards per computer, thus improving 3d performance) and power saving features that weren't seen from the competition for years, most of their entries into the market blowing the competition out of the water. Keep in mind that they first rose to power when 2mb of on-board video memory was almost superfluous.
However, due to rampant mis-management, bad spending, competition from the then brand new Geforce 2 and Geforce 3 cards from the rising star Nvidia, 3dfx failed. Three days before they were slated to release what was supposed to be their live-saver, the Voodoo 5 series, the were sold by investors, ironically enough, to Nvidia. We don't see much of 3dfx anymore, unless you like to use multiple video cards in your computer, in which case only the faint echoes of the original SLI technology echo through your monitor.
Fast forward to today. We have two major graphic card companies, as well as two major processor manufacturers. ATI, and Nvidia. ATI was recently bought by processor manufacturer AMD when it was in dire financial straits, giving it the budget it needed to finally start to succeed again. With only one misstep, the fiasco that was the 2900xt, ATI has been relatively successful lately, outselling Nvidia in key market points.
Nvidia on the other hand has formed an informal alliance with Intel (aka Chipzilla), and with their dishonest marketing strategies, (Such as "The Way It's Mean To Be Played", where they pay game development companies large sums to make their games perform better on Nvidia systems) has caused a lot of PR damage.
In 2008, as is standard, Nvidia and ATI released their new graphics cards at roughly the same time. ATI shocked the PC-enthusiasts of the world with their "HD 4870", which was more than two times more powerful than their previous entry, the 3870. The 4xxx series gpu's by ATI outsold the Nvidia gt200 cards in that round, due to their higher price performance. Nvidia has slowly been losing market share over the past year to the AMD/ATI combination.
And now we have the current generation of graphics cards.
A couple months ago ATI launched their 5 series graphics cards. The flagship 5870 once again managed to double the performance of the last series of graphics cards, and was the first Direct X11 (A standard 3d coding API proliferated by Microsoft) supporting card ever released. ATI managed to strike a hard blow against Nvidia, releasing their new, suprisingly cheap cards right at the end of the lifecycle of the gt200 cards. Because of this, ATI has gained approximately 8% of the graphics card market share in just a few months. Nvidia's new offering, the gt300, codename "Fermi" is now nowhere to be seen.
Here's the problem:
Fermi has been delayed for nearly 6 months now. Originally scheduled to come out only a month after the 5xxx series cards, it's now been pushed back to March. While there have been a couple teasing screenshots, the problems encountered by Nvidia are really telling.
One of the problems stems, not from a failing of Nvidia, but from their new production process. They've moved to the 40nm production node (meaning the average width of a logic gate on the GPU die will be no greater than 40nm), which is buggy and untested. TSMC, the company responsible for manufacturing the cards, has managed to achieve only a 2% success rating. That isn't a typo. That means that out of every 100 pieces of blank silicon TSMC is given, only 2 of them will yield successful graphics cards. Blank silicon and hafnium wafers aren't cheap, and Nvidia has supposedly squandered millions of dollars on this technology. Not only that, but Nvidia has entirely switched the architecture of their GPU, literally rebuilding it from the ground up.
The second problem is that Nvidia refuses to admit that it's failed. As a matter of fact, Nvidia was even caught faking gt300 reference cards. There have been no benchmarks released, and other than the constant delays, absolutely no sign that the Fermi cards will ever be released.
Now go back to the beginning.
3dfx found itself in exactly the same position. Mismanagement, underhanded corporate tactics, and massive delays led to the death of the company even after it had been so successful. Only one failure can lead to the death of an industry giant in a market as volatile as that of the graphics card industry. And so that leaves us thinking: If nVidia fails, who will step up to fill their place?
