What’s Up with NVIDIA?

Just the other day, I was pondering the question, “What’s up with NVIDIA lately?”, so it was with great amusement when I spotted an article at Loyd Case’s site, Improbable Insights, which asked that very question. It’s good to know I’m not alone in my thinking, because pretty well every point he makes, I agree with wholeheartedly. So, what is up with NVIDIA?

In the past year, sadly, most of the news to come out of the company has been less-than-stellar, such as quarterly losses, the debacle with their mobile graphics, and of course, the short-lived king-of-the-hill, the GT200 series. Not all has been bad with the San Jose company, but I’m sure CEO Jen-Hsun Huang prefers to go do his work when not at a war with Intel and others.

Over the course of the past year, the absolute number one focus at NVIDIA has to have been CUDA, because throughout the numerous conference calls I’ve been on, and e-mails I’ve been sent, it’s been pretty obvious. Second to that would have to be ION, and happily, that seems to be working out for the company just fine so far. How long the growth will continue is yet to be seen, however, as Intel has the opportunity to change the landscape drastically once they implement a GPU and CPU on the same chip.

What’s the next big thing for the company is really unknown. CUDA support is ramping up, and so is ION (not to mention Tegra), but what’s really going to help push the company back to wowing enthusiasts again is up in the air. There’s the GT300 cards, but even the launch of those is shrouded in doubt, due to supposed delays. On the other hand, once they do arrive, we may be truly blown away (and ATI) too, so we can’t discredit them just yet.

If there’s one thing that’s true, it’s that the next year for graphics is going to be incredibly exciting. With Intel’s Larrabee right around the corner, OpenCL adoption up and DirectX 11 on the horizon, who knows how things are going to play out?

Credit: Techgage

Still, it’s an odd place for Nvidia to be. The company’s marketing strategy once revolved around putting out high end products that offered either better performance or a more robust feature set than competitors – or both, in some cases. Then the company would push the new tech down into the mainstream and low end. Now, their key successes seem to revolve around high volume, low margin products.