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NVIDIA To License Its GPU Tech
An anonymous reader writes "Today in a blog post, NVIDIA's General Counsel, David Shannon, announced that the company will begin licensing its GPU cores and patent portfolio to device makers. '[I]t's not practical to build silicon or systems to address every part of the expanding market. Adopting a new business approach will allow us to address the universe of devices.' He cites the 'explosion of Android devices' as one of the prime reasons for this decision. 'This opportunity simply didn't exist several years ago because there was really just one computing device – the PC. But the swirling universe of new computing devices provides new opportunities to license our GPU core or visual computing portfolio.' Shannon points out that NVIDIA did something similar with the CPU core used in the PlayStation 3, which was licensed to Sony. But mobile seems to be the big opportunity now: 'We'll start by licensing the GPU core based on the NVIDIA Kepler architecture, the world's most advanced, most efficient GPU. Its DX11, OpenGL 4.3, and GPGPU capabilities, along with vastly superior performance and efficiency, create a new class of licensable GPU cores. Through our efforts designing Tegra into mobile devices, we've gained valuable experience designing for the smallest power envelopes. As a result, Kepler can operate in a half-watt power envelope, making it scalable from smartphones to supercomputers.'"
We want to transition to an IP company.
Then we only have to employ lawyers and executives, and save ourselves the trouble of all that making stuff.
I may be mistaken, but I anticipate that licensing the hardware will require sharing the associated driver sources with licensees. That seems like a step in the right direction, albeit for more profitable reasons.
We want to transition to an IP company. Then we only have to employ lawyers and executives, and save ourselves the trouble of all that making stuff.
Nah, that's not why. They're following in the footsteps of Apple and Sega - license out your key strengths to strategic partners, and you're sure to succeed.
Right?!?
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
I'm guessing the High Performance Computing guys might be interested as well.
Think of how many licensees they could gain.
None?
If you're wondering about AMD, they also had a project doing graphics for ARM CPUs, but it was outright sold-off to Qualcomm.
Qualcomm's "Adreno" GPU? The name is an anagram of Radeon.
Maybe now Intel can licence the tech and *finally* get a decent GPU in its chips.
David Shannon says:
PC sales are declining with the rise of smartphones and tablets.
Uh oh, our traditional PC market is dying.
High-definition screens are proliferating, showing up on most every machine. Android is increasingly pervasive. Yesterday’s PC industry, which produced several hundred million units a year, will soon become a computing-devices industry that produces many billions of units a year. And visual computing is at the epicenter of it all.
But wait! The mobile market is hot hot hot!
For chip-makers like NVIDIA that invent fundamental advances, this disruption provides an opening to expand our business model.
We should go all in on mobile and get some of that delicious moolah.
But it’s not practical to build silicon or systems to address every part of the expanding market. Adopting a new business approach will allow us to address the universe of devices.
How can we like, totally dominate this market?
So, our next step is to license our GPU cores and visual computing patent portfolio to device manufacturers to serve the needs of a large piece of the market.
Lets licence out our IP! You saw how it like, totally worked for ARM, right?
The reality is that we’ve done this in the past. We licensed an earlier GPU core to Sony for the Playstation 3. And we receive more than $250 million a year from Intel as a license fee for our visual computing patents.
We tried it in baby steps, and the money was delicious.
Now, the explosion of Android devices presents an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate this effort.
More money is good.
The ONLY company on this planet with an interest in very high-end desktop class GPU technology for their own use is Intel. No-one else has the need (PowerVR fills the gap for most companies that license GPU designs) or the ability to build such a complex design into their own SoC.
Anyone else with an interest in Nvidia GPU capabilities would opt to buy discrete chips from Nvidia, or one of Nvidia's existing ARM SoC parts.
AMD is currently devastating Nvidia in the high end gaming market. Every one of the 3 new consoles uses AMD/ATI tech for the graphics. EA (the massive games developer) has announced their own games engines will be optimised ONLY on AMD CPU and GPUs (on Xbone, PS4 and PC). Nvidia is falling out of the game.
The x86 space is moving to APUs only. Chips that combine the CPU cluster with the GPU system. Intel's integrated GPU is pure garbage. However, Intel spends more on the R+D for its crap GPU than Nvidia and AMD combined. It would be insanely cheaper for Intel to simply license Nvidia's current and future designs. Doing so would give Intel parts that compete with AMD for the first time ever. Of course, it still wouldn't fix the problem that AMD tech is in the only hardware AAA games developers care about.
Next year AMD completes its project to take desktop x86 parts to full HSA and Huma (as seen in the PS4). Next year Intel begins the process to use this tech (and will be two years behind AMD at best). Both companies are moving to PC motherboards that solder memory and CPU on the board itself. Both are moving to a 256-bit memory interface, although again AMD will have a significant lead here.
Intel wants to copy AMD's GDDR5 memory interface (again, as seen in the PS4) but that requires a lot of tech Intel does not have, and cannot develop in-house (god only knows, they've tried). Nvidia also has massive expertise with GDDR5 memory interfaces, and the on-chip systems to exploit the incredible bandwidth this memory offers.
Everyone should know Intel wanted to buy Nvidia, but would not accept Nvidia's demand to have their people run the combined company. The top of Intel is BRAINDEAD, composed of the useless morons who claimed credit for the 'core' CPU design, when all core was in reality was a return to Pentium 3, after Netburst proved to be a horrible dead-end. This political power grab is responsible for all Intel's current problems, including this biggest disaster in semiconductor history- Larrabee. Intel's FinFET project has crashed twice (Ivybridge was much worse than Sandybridge, despite the shrink, and Haswell is worse again). Intel has no new desktop chips for 2014 as a consequence.
Now we can see it is likely Intel is readying Nvidia based parts for 2015 at the earliest. Intel has used licensed GPU tech before, notably the PowerVR architecture. However, Intel's utter inability to write or support drivers meant the PowerVR based chips wee a disaster for Intel. Intel's biggest problem with its current GPU design is NOT that it is a Larrabee scale failure, but that Intel is actually making headway. So why is this an issue?
Well companies like S3 also made successful headway with their own designs, but this didn't matter because they were way behind the competition at the time. It is NEVER a case of being better than you were before, but a question of being good enough to go up against the market leaders. Intel knows its progress means that internally its GPU team is being patted on the back and given more support, and yet this is a road to nowhere. Intel needs to bite the bullet, give up on its failed GPU projects, and buy in the best designs the market has to offer. Nvidia is this.
Unlike PowerVR, which is largely a take it or leave it design (which is why Intel got nowhere with PowerVR), Nvidia comes with software experts (for the Windows drivers) and chip making experts, to help integrate the Nvidia design with Intel's own CPU cores.
What does this mean for Nvidia drivers? Maybe slightly more documentation (or even source), or just more complex NDAs?
"PowerVR is kicking our ass in the mobile market and even Intel is doing a better job of transitioning their graphics tech in that direction. We also intentionally lost a lot of business by declining to license our GPUs for next-gen game consoles. We need all the help we can get to increase the rate of adoption of our GPU technology in mobile devices."
Then why did nvidia go into Tegra?
I thought nvidia went into Tegra, so it could avoid licensing its IP out to get into the SoC market. Tegra must be losing money.
What is not being discussed, is that Moore's Law has changed the PC market over the last decade. Faster and cheaper transistors mean that the margins in software and hardware design are bigger now. Less skilled microprocessor design team, and less up to date processes, are now good enough. It also means that higher level programming languages produce good enough performance, instead of assembly, which means ease of switching instruction sets. That is very bad for intel's profit margins. With stronger hardware, higher level programming languages can also mean ease of switching operating systems/desktop environments. Bad for Microsoft.
Now, it is possible to use MIPS and Android to make a decent computing stack. Now, if some organization with lots of money, like say, CHINA, decided it wanted to kick Microsoft and Intel to the side, it could now do so.
this sounds a lot like arm is doing right now. NVidia will sell the design of their GPU core, maybe some software, IP and other tech to other companies to make and design their own chips based on the NVidia architecture. the thing is, there is demand for high end GPUs, but for it to be reasonable to include NVidia's tech, they need more freedom to design and implement the hardware as they wish. this is going to be a completely new market for NVidia and will bring higher quality graphics and NVidia IP to more devices. this is a move toward collaborative computing, designing and sharing ideas and technology that will ultimately make the world a better, faster, higher quality, and more efficient place. plus NVidia otherwise has a strangle hold on quality graphics, this is their duty to help makes high quality graphics mainstream and easy to implement. no more need to reinvent the wheel and start from scratch every time I want to implement graphics or fight over my inability to design something worth using anymore! maybe we even move away from 2D and subpar for good now..
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I'm sick of hearing about NVIDIA when they won't release the code for anything....
Totally utterly worthless...
I don't care how good you support the product you sell when it's guaranteed to be dropped at some later date and then NOTHING works.
nVidia's graphics drivers include proprietary and patented Microsoft technologies. They cannot open source them, ever. They made their deal with the devil and they have to live with it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Wouldn't it be great if they open sourced their fucking Linux drivers instead of playing the little game they play?
Why? What would be so good about that? AMD did it and it didn't do much for them.
The long arm of Intel's legal team can't reach VIA right now, but it would quickly devolve into a legal battle (which Intel would win) if Via's ownership was moved to NV which is not only in the same country as Intel but in fact both are headquarted in the same city (Santa Clara)
Actually Intel paid Nvidia over 1 billion in a settlement two years ago. Also note that Nvidia has announced plan for building a new and impressive campus. I am going to guess that it cost substantially less than a billion dollars.
Part of Nvidia's agreement with Intel was to cease development of x86 compatible devices. Which explains the shift for Project Denver from x86 to ARM. And with ARM came partnerships with Google/Android and that ecosystem which has outlasted any Tegra deals Nvidia has attempts with Microsoft. (Microsoft Kin and Surface RT being two of the biggest flops with Tegra or really in general)
What the fuck will you do with open source graphics drivers? Compile them in gentoo with some custom gcc options?
Bunch of god damn kids think that Debian and Stallman have it all figured out.
I think this reeks of desperation. Nvidia has been dominating the GPU market for a long time and currently, imo, still has the a bit better portfolio when it comes to discrete GPUs. The difference is very small though, so you could argue if it even matters.
What I find really interesting that AMD seems to be on the winning track now. They have been the butt monkey of the industry for years.
AMD could never get the upper hand over Intel, only for short (but very important) years when Intel screwed up with the P4. ATi could never really get the upper hand over Nvidia, which is proven if you see how the market share for discrete GPUs looks and looked like in the past years (30ish% for AMD, the rest for Nvidia), if you go in the low end market, you have a lot of Intel as well.
AMD too over ATi, nothing really changed and many people even thought they might sink.
But then something happened: the minituristation happened and allowed to integrate GPU and CPU, it allowed the integrated GPUs to be worth something (in contrast to what Intel had done in the past years with that attempt) and AMD had, thanks to ATi, actually decent GPUs to integrate.
For the mass market, you need to be as cheap and simple as possible and suddenly, AMD can offer that, while Nvidia (no CPU) and Intel (no decent GPU) cannot.
It seems that AMD really picked the right track. This move here from Nvidia seems to indicate they attempt to change themselves for the future, but have no real idea how. If things go on as now, AMD now has like five years until Intel has a chance to catch up and Nvidia needs even more (they need to develop x86 experience AND experience with integrating it).
AMDs advantage in integrating CPU and GPU is getting bigger with every new generation of chip, as there is not much innovation in regard to the CPU is required, but the GPU-part is getting better and better. I think that both big NextGen Consoles picked AMD is not only proof of that thought, but only the beginning of a development that might lead to Nvidia being sold as scrap (to Intel?) at the end of the decade.
In all honesty: Who would have thought that like five years back?
Consoles are focused on lowest possible cost of their hardware, since they sell to consumers at a loss, or at the best a slim profit. They need their suppliers to give them hardware for bottom dollar. That means you don't get much profit per unit.
Now that doesn't mean AMD is getting screwed, I'm sure they are making money per unit sold, but make no mistake: The reason they got the contracts is they could offer the lowest price and that means a thin profit. So 10 million chips sold in the console is less profit than 10 million sold in a desktop or server or the like.
It is not the grand prize of hardware contracts.
On another note I find it hilarious how fanboys relish in the concept of a competitor doing badly, as if we all wouldn't be more screwed if there was a single company. Personally, I like nVidia GPUs, they work better in my experience. However I'm real, real glad AMD is around. Why? Well if they weren't nVidia could, and would, charge more than they already do, and they wouldn't release new tech as fast.
So if you are an AMD fanboy wishing the death of Intel and nVidia, what you are really saying is "Gee I hope AMD will be able to overcharge me for lower end technology when they have nobody to push them!"
...and one week later they'll find themselves competing against a hundred Chinese brands that use exactly the same designs.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Shannon points out that NVIDIA did something similar with the CPU core used in the PlayStation 3, which was licensed to Sony
Really? NVIDIA licensed an AMD CPU core to Sony? Nifty.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They've been selling only to Cray and the Chinese so their prices are through the roof. I could be developing departmental analytic machines, but apparently working on volume is a scary proposition.
Wouldn't it be great if they open sourced their fucking Linux drivers instead of playing the little game they play?
Why? What would be so good about that? AMD did it and it didn't do much for them.
Obviously, the linux drivers are the ONLY reason why AMD is behind NVidia.
This is a popular myth, that Intel must keep AMD around, otherwise it will be broken up by the goverment, or something.
In fact, there is nothing illegal about having a monopoly in itself. What is illegal is certain business practices carried out by monopolies.
Intel does not help AMD in any way. In fact, it wants 100% of x86 market. You can see this by the way it is now going after the lower end of the market with Silvermont based Celerons.
Think about it. If they license Kepler patents to a third party SoC developer, then that company will be directly competing against their own Tegra 5 chip. So, the only way it make sense is if they are canceling the Tegra 5 project.
My comment stands irrespective of nVidia.