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Tablets disrupt casual PC use

by on10 May 2013



Lots of place for GPUs and growth, thinks Nvidia

Nvidia’s conference calls are always a nice place to hear something new and something old about the graphics market and Vivek Arya from Bank of America Merrill Lynch asked Nvidia about the fact that for first time in five years the discrete graphics market has started to decline. For the last five years discrete market was more of less flat at $3 billion and in the last quarter we have seen some indication that it might be shrinking. Bankers and analysts fear that a shrinking of GPU market might continue in the future.

Jensen replied that the discrete market has been growing 12 percent for Nvidia over the last five years and Nvidia sees no reason why this trend should stop now. Nvidia is making GPUs more useful over time mentioning that four years ago no one has expected to see GPUs used to accelerate general purpose computing, digital content creation. No one thought of using GPUs for server and now IBM, Dell and HP are shipping servers based on GPUs, for accelerated VDI and cloud computing.

Jensen mentioned that "Shazam and many others are starting to develop their software on GPU, so that they could deal with the Big Data problems that are happening as a result of more and more mobile devices and the use of cloud computing.” He also added that PC is one of the most important gaming platforms because it's open and mentions China and Korea as well as rest of the Asia a places where game consoles are not as important and successful as in the USA.

Tablets disrupt sales of PCs for casual use and we could not agree more, but professional users still need PCs in order to create content and design stuff. You cannot use a phone to create a movie, thinks Jensen and we might add that you cannot write a thousand word story on a phone, either. Keyboard, large display, mouse and big storage will continue to be a big deal for many and this is why Nvidia thinks that many of these notebooks and desktops will continue to have a GPU inside.

Nvidia thinks that low end gets affected by tablets and Nvidia doesn’t see itself a player in the lower end of the market for basic computing. It’s been like that for 5 to 7 years. The company’s investment in Tegra was to be the part of computer disrupting entry level computers. A great tablet is a better than cheap PC, Jensen believes.

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