My well formed framing is :
> Gaming is a mature market with a huge range of
capable surplus hardware
> Gaming forms Nvidia's biggest revenue source
Meme learning, self driving cars, robotics, etc are all yet to be determined markets that belongs to no one.
A slew of companies are going after this market. Nvidia maintains a more than premium pricing in it.
Google and many other cloud providers which buy hardware at large scales got tired of this trend by hardware companies in gouging them with
enterprise premiums that equate to (You have lots more so we charge you lots more). They began unseating a slew of companies under :
https://www.opencompute.org/
https://www.opennetworking.org/technical-communities/areas/specification/open-datapath/
https://fossbytes.com/open-compute-project-google/
https://www.networkworld.com/articl...red-to-be-entering-the-networking-market.html
https://cloud.google.com/tpu/
So, the competition for the next phase of computing has already swooped in and come out with things to hurt the money Nvidia
thought they were going to get.
Beyond this, More and more is being pushed down to smartnics detaching CPUs from storage as shown by the multi core ARM chip that drives NVME drives. In the enterprise, they already have drafted specs towards server less storage.
Spot the CPU...
So, my thinking is not flawed, it just deeply informed and forward thinking beyond the average understanding.. thus the lack of belief.
Tossing money at R&D doesn't guarantee results especially in an industry where everyone is doing so and a now trending ecosystem of cloud providers whose mission is to completely destroy enterprise hardware profit margins. Nvidia like others are fighting an uphill battle against far more powerful and conjoined groups to destroy their ability and others in the hardware sector to profit immensely from proprietary and overpriced wares. It's called commodification. In such a paradigm, margins and premiums are crushed. So, Nvidia is going to be in a fight for its life to maintain its main revenue source : gaming with sound competition from AMD and now Intel. Others might join the party but it would be difficult. Outside of this, Nvidia invested heavily in R&D in
hopes it would solidify numerous and new multi-billion dollar markets. They're facing off against cloud providers with an opposite agenda to make that ecosystem opensource, commodified, whitebox, and cheap. The cloud providers and open standards are going to win and I can almost guarantee you that Nvidia will fail in its current agenda which is tragic because they decided to blunt their main revenue source in attempts to gain new markets. They even boldly attempting to push an unwilling and reeling consumer segment into enterprise pricing. It's about the most lethal mistake a company
often makes at their peak : Alienate and hurt your main revenue source in search of new markets which you end up failing to capture. You end up with horrid ROI on R&D, a scattered and confused internal structure, and a frontal attack against your bread and butter. Tech companies go through this all the time at their peak. IBM comes to mind as do others who are no longer in existence.
Their profits, resources, and R&Ds are clearly focused on an agenda of trying to corner a range of markets with higher margins and proprietary lock ins. It's why it will fail in epic fashion when faced against far more powerful groups, with bigger budgets, and a combined goal to destroy hardware profit margins, commoditize it, and open source the software stack. They're not going to expand because their expansion is spearheaded by ridiculous margins and proprietary lockin vs much more powerful forces towards lower margins/open source. Their going to fail to capture those new markets from potential customers that roll their own hardware for far cheaper in open consortiums and they're going to wake up to a feverish competition in their core gaming market after having opened the door with an arrogant money grab (Geforce 20). Ray tracing is only going to be successful through Vulkan and a pretty standardized hardware interface to a completely separate MCM chained chip. Tensor cores are a meme towards the final form and will be held as largely incapable of processing the more complex and necessary variant. 7nm and an industry maturing to MCM will allow for a more full and sound implementation to be realized.
Screen-cap this post.