Maybe We Don't Understand the implications of OCL and HSA

[sontin]

GPGPU is not a flop. It was the next iteration like programmable shaders back 2001. Without innovation their is no room for growing.

 

[mrmt]

GPGPU is not a flop. It was the next iteration like programmable shaders back 2001. Without innovation their is no room for growing.

Who is making money with GPGPU? Nvidia? How much money do you think they will make if they have to design low volume silicon as they are doing with Titan? AMD? They can barely break even in their GPU business as a whole, let alone making money with GPGPU.

 

[Cerb]

Who is making money with GPGPU? Nvidia? How much money do you think they will make if they have to design low volume silicon as they are doing with Titan? AMD? They can barely break even in their GPU business as a whole, let alone making money with GPGPU.

According to nV very recently, Titan has been quite a surprise success. Quadro and Tesla don't sell as many units, but each one makes them a lot more money, and has gotten them into markets they weren't in, before, which is a very good thing for a company who's original bread and butter market keeps shrinking. They wouldn't be in film, supercomputers, medical imaging, etc., w/o their GPGPU tech, and they certainly wouldn't have sidelined the FirePros without the combination of that and ECC before AMD got around to it.

Fermi was big and hot, and also feature-packed, and provided better performance at decent power levels, outside of the halo units, compared to their last few generations (the 200 series, FI, did not win over OEMs, nor many users, just because they were too damn hot and loud, past the GT 240--Fermi wasn't as efficient as AMD's GPUs, but it was good enough). A minor improvement over a minor improvement over G80 wasn't going to cut it. Kepler, FI, is every bit as good, but smaller and lower power. It's more what they wished they'd made Fermi, but they don't have infinite time to perfect everything.

The discrete GPU business as a whole is effectively going away. It's "going away" much like the desktop. Not quickly, but every generation, fewer people want or need or care about video cards. They've been successfully staying in the black, while their original cash cow market has been shrinking on them, and their secondary high-volume market was pulled out from under them (chipsets). That they aren't in a bad way like AMD is actually pretty impressive, IMO.