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Is an ogliopoly a stable configuration for the computer industry?

S

Shalmanese

Platinum Member
It has always suprised me that companies like ATI & nVidia or Intel & AMD have managed to keep consistently close to each other in terms of perofrmance for such a long time. I would have thought from my naive viewpoint that such industries should naturally head towards a monopolistic market since prgoress is so unpredictable and the stakes are so high. That is, one of the companies should have invented some revolutionary technology that can make cards twice as fast for the same price and doomed the other company to oblivion.

How is it that two companies can keep at roughly the same comparative performance level through time even when the actual performance levels have increased by several orders of magnitude?

 
The similarity of performance at the top end is mostly technology driven. It's the advances in silicon process technology that allow long-thought-of, neat new tricks and features to become reality. And those advances, when market ready, are available to everyone who runs a chip fab.
 
The joy of competition. Intel fanboys benefit from AMD, nVidia buyers benefit from ATI, and vise versa. When the name of the game is "compete or die", and it goes on long enough, what happens is a target performance curve starts to form and accurate design specs can be met. If a company sits around too long they get hosed. But since there isn't a single "best" object the hosing is recoverable. Staying in a dormant state happens to be quite acceptable. Just not immensly profitable.

Imagine if this happened in the software end.
 
I am not opposed to competition...
except when it slows down standardization...

to many ideas, too many ways to accomplish the same thing....
Too many incompatibilities...

Look at the path of the DVD rewritable...youll understand my complaint.:|
 
Originally posted by: sao123
I am not opposed to competition...
except when it slows down standardization...

to many ideas, too many ways to accomplish the same thing....
Too many incompatibilities...

Look at the path of the DVD rewritable...youll understand my complaint.:|
Click to expand...
Or DHTML browsers... I feel ya bro 🙁
 
In addition to the fabrication technology being shared, so is much of the research that goes into advancements. The major players in the industry aren't as head-on as you think, the infrastructure behind all the top companies are shared, and even between companies such as AMD and Intel they have cross-licensing agreements.

ATI and NVIDIA's technology is driven by an inevitable road-map which has already been laid out from past research in the high-end offline rendering world. They also both have to work under the DirectX specifications to meet unified feature targets, as well as developer requests. 3dfx's downfall is an example of what happens when a company tries to go off and do their own thing, oblivious to the rest of the industry demands.
 
Originally posted by: FuriousBroccoli
In addition to the fabrication technology being shared, so is much of the research that goes into advancements. The major players in the industry aren't as head-on as you think, the infrastructure behind all the top companies are shared, and even between companies such as AMD and Intel they have cross-licensing agreements.

ATI and NVIDIA's technology is driven by an inevitable road-map which has already been laid out from past research in the high-end offline rendering world. They also both have to work under the DirectX specifications to meet unified feature targets, as well as developer requests. 3dfx's downfall is an example of what happens when a company tries to go off and do their own thing, oblivious to the rest of the industry demands.
Click to expand...

Yes, I thought it was something like that. So if a company is falling behind, they still have a good chance of putting out something better performing in the future.
 
ATI and NVIDIA's technology is driven by an inevitable road-map which has already been laid out from past research in the high-end offline rendering world. They also both have to work under the DirectX specifications to meet unified feature targets, as well as developer requests. 3dfx's downfall is an example of what happens when a company tries to go off and do their own thing, oblivious to the rest of the industry demands
Click to expand...

Yet what about the opposing standards of todays OS's.
Windows vs Linux vs Unix vs MAC OS.
Without stirring up a MS Monopoly debate...
the roadmap of theses products has diverged enough to make serious incompatibilities...
Software written for one rarely runs on the other...
There needs to be standards for
GUI, API, filesystem directory format, etc.
Then linux can incorporate these things to become a real competitor against windows...
The real things hindering linux is the absence of important technologies that should have been standardized...
things such as DirectX, MFC, API, etc. (im not necessarily advocating the microsoft side) the best technology should be the standard
Once these are standardized... barriers for cross OS software will be removed... then competition in the OS market will happen properly.
 
You just listed why a monopoly is NOT good for consumers and why an oligopoly is very good for consumers. An oligopoly promotes standards adherance and a well thought out long term plan. Which is a major difference right now when it comes to the software and hardware markets. The hardware markets are coming a long way very quickly.

Is OfficeXP much better than Office 95?
Is The Geforce4 TI4600 much better than the Riva128?
Is the AthlonXP much better than the K5?
Is the i845PE much better than the 430FX chipset?
Is the 200GB WD drives much better than the 2GB WD drives?
Is the 29160 card much better than the 2940 card?
Is the 10/100/1000 card much better than the 10Bt/10B2 card?

Hardware's come a long way. And it's not slowing down. Not as long as there isn't a "winner".
 
Everyone uses essentially the same product development tools (CAD), essentially the same process technology equipment, recruits from the same universities, and utilizes essentially the same research.

To me it's more surprising when companies end up bowing out (3Dfx).

Still, the things that are true differentiators in the industry are risk management, long range planning and marketing. Probably the most important of these is the long-range planning part. Fabs take 4 years to build, design teams take several years to design and productize chips, and the level complexity of the project as a whole is very high, coordinating package technologies, chipsets, memory technology, software and basically getting everyone to do a simultaneous "heavy-lift" of a new technology... to me the primary differentiator in the industry (and throwing in other companies such as HP, IBM, Cisco, etc.) is how well the company stays coordinated towards a long-range plan that makes sense and how well they stick to the plan.
 
> Is OfficeXP much better than Office 95?

Christ man, hardware has unlimited growth potential, office software doesn't!! I can tell you exactly what I want and what we will get in 10 years ( we will be near 1000Ghz processors then ), but please share with us your ideal roadmap for 10 years worth of office development, I bet in your wildest dreams it can't match the growth potential of hardware, so don't make apples to oranges comparisons!
 
Is Doom III better than Wolfenstien? In some ways, Incredibly so!

In fact, I would say that some of the improvements dwarf by far the leap from the 486 to a 3Ghz Pentium. Using Office software against Processors to compare software and hardware is disingenious. What about monitors? In the 486 era, 14" was standard, 15" was slightly high end and 17" was luxury. Now, 17" is standard, 19" is slightly high end and 21" is luxury. A measly 2 - 3".

So, would it be possible for, say, ATI to figure out a way to do Tile based Rendering by themselves without nVidia finding out and then dropping a bombshell product on the market that runns at 500Mhz and manages to doube the performance of the 1Ghz nVida card at a fraction of the price?

Or would nVidia inevitably find out in the early design stanges and put something similar on the market?
 
Originally posted by: FuriousBroccoli
.....3dfx's downfall is an example of what happens when a company tries to go off and do their own thing, oblivious to the rest of the industry demands.
Click to expand...
well, what was the true story why 3dfx went belly-up?
i was perfectly happy with my voodoo3 !

 
heres another oligopoly : gateway + dell + compaq = 50% of the oem system mfgrs.
now it seems gateway "may" be going bankrupt due to poor quality control.
heres my latest gateway true story. bought a gateway at work. it wouldnt recognize
our network. rma-d it. replacement gateway wouldnt recognize our network either!!!
gave up on gateway and rma-ing to
them. instead we bought an external rj45-to-usb ethernet adapter which worked fine.
>>>>>why is gateway going under? this is an example of why.
 
Or maybe it's because they have inflated support cost because they happily accept RMA stuff that is perfectly fine but just coming from users who can't set them up right? 🙂
 
peter - yes, we could set it up right. we set up the external rj45 to usb adapter up right
without a problem, and gateway sent out its own tech support, and he was the one who
rma-d the first gateway, and ordered a replacement [which didnt work either]
🙁
 
The Voodoo 3 was too little, too late. 32bit color, hardware TnL, 32Mb memory, FSAA, DXT texture compression, all these things the competition had that they didn't. They got lazy and complacent, they thought they were big enough to start telling people what they wanted, but then NVIDIA set us free. Same thing's starting to happen with ATI now, because NVIDIA are pushing a lot of stuff that developers don't want, like Cg, and they are falling behind with their technology.
 
Originally posted by: capybara
heres another oligopoly : gateway + dell + compaq = 50% of the oem system mfgrs.
now it seems gateway "may" be going bankrupt due to poor quality control.
heres my latest gateway true story. bought a gateway at work. it wouldnt recognize
our network. rma-d it. replacement gateway wouldnt recognize our network either!!!
gave up on gateway and rma-ing to
them. instead we bought an external rj45-to-usb ethernet adapter which worked fine.
>>>>>why is gateway going under? this is an example of why.
Click to expand...

Thats not really what I'm talking about however. Theres not really much you can do WRONG in the OEM market. Theres only so many different configurations you can make and they don't differ by much. But in the video card market or CPU market, it seems quite possible to release a product that is 50 - 100% faster than your competitor (that would be like Dell releasing a $200 P4 3Ghz PC). Its just the fact that they haven't which surprises me. Also: What about the recent flurry of new entrants into the Video Card market (Matrox, Creative/#D Labs, Trident). While they certainly aren't at GF4 levels, I still find it amazing that people who have had no experience in producing cards faster than a TNT2 manage to all of a sudden produce a GF3 class card without the middle steps. What was to stop them producing such a card a year earlier? Process technology? Public domain Research?
 
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