NVIDIA to License its GPU IP à la ARM and PowerVR

[btarunr]

Although NVIDIA's Tegra line of SoCs are among the best performing there are on the market; the high-end SoC market is dominated by Qualcomm and Samsung. These chips are built from scratch by the companies, but the underlying CPU and GPU architectures are licensed from ARM, and the likes of Imagination Technologies, respectively. Imagination's PowerVR graphics cores make up over 80 percent of the embedded GPU market-share. There's a big change of plans at NVIDIA. The company is beginning to think that its expertise in GPU is better proliferated in the mobile SoC space not by waiting for Tegra to gain a foothold, but by licencing its GPU IP (intellectual property) to whoever is willing pay up, much in the same way ARM and Imagination do.

NVIDIA spokesperson David Shannon, in a recent blog post, wrote: "our next step is to license our GPU cores and visual computing patent portfolio to device manufacturers to serve the needs of a large piece of the market... We'll start by licensing the GPU core based on the NVIDIA Kepler architecture, the world's most advanced, most efficient GPU. Its DX11, OpenGL 4.3, and GPGPU capabilities, along with vastly superior performance and efficiency, create a new class of licensable GPU cores. Through our efforts designing Tegra into mobile devices, we've gained valuable experience designing for the smallest power envelopes. As a result, Kepler can operate in a half-watt power envelope, making it scalable from smartphones to supercomputers."



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[1c3d0g]

More avenues for revenue = win.

Personally I believe this is mostly about pushing CUDA in virtually every segment of the market, though. Time will tell.

 

[Xzibit]

Its another avenue but it conflicts with there current model.

They might be going this route because Qualcomm took most of the old Tegra 3 customers and Nvidia shot themselves in the foot by being late to the game with Wayne & Grey.

Tegra division has been hemorrhaging for Nvidia the last few quaters. Re-coupe as much money as you can by selling off GPU IP.

Q4 down 14.6%
Q1 down 51%

 

[jigar2speed]

Its another avenue but it conflicts with there current model.

They might be going this route because Qualcomm took most of the old Tegra 3 customers and Nvidia shot themselves in the foot by being late to the game with Wayne & Grey.

Tegra division has been hemorrhaging for Nvidia the last few quaters. Re-coupe as much money as you can by selling off GPU IP.

Q4 down 14.6%
Q1 down 51%

So, the Tegra's not doing so well in terms of design wins
Nvidia doesn't have any console contracts this time round.
Intel's Iris will be eating away at Nvidia's low and mid-range mobile lineup.
AMD laptops don't need Nvidia GPU's at all
"The desktop is dead" if you believe the hype, so that's a shrinking market of Geforces
Project Shield is a joke

Oh, and they keep iritating the Linux crowd, too.
Good job Nvidia, making those shareholders happy!

100% agreed with the above 2 comments.

 

[Huguito]

http://cdn.meme.li/instances/400x/38250081.jpg

5)Nvidia will start supporting Linux when gays, nazis and pedophiles will get rights.

You know what is really funny you little xenophobic troll???! The fact that Nvidia is AIMING this market (gays, nazis and pedophiles users) with the Tegra project (wich is not going well)..

And because its not going well, they decided to license their tech to other companys in a better position to them.. the ones that sells millions of products to "gays, nazis and pedophiles" users...


Soo.. in the end, your Beloved Nvidia company its doing whatever they can to to grab a piece of the "gays, nazis and pedophiles" community WICH BTW i can guarantee your mom/dad/sister and at least 98% of your family/relatives/friends belongs.. why?!?! they have an android smartphone


oh !! btw, Android = linux wich is pretty much almost everything mobile this days


and you?!?! what smartphone do you have?!?!

 

[librin.so.1]

I was hesitating about posting this and just saved this post away, to be posted in some indeterminate point in the future. But Huguito's post made me change my mind, dig it up and post it. Here Ya go.

Spoiler

5)Nvidia will start supporting Linux when gays, nazis and pedophiles will get rights.

I'm a Linux user, but OH SNAP I am neither gay, nazi or a pedophiple.
Also Your statement is quite incorrect. Since gays, nazis and pedophiles are so called "minorities", they actually have more rights than the rest of us in a large portion of this world (it's complicated). According to Your logic, Nvidia should support Linux zealously - even more zealously than Windoze. After all, all those minorities do have more rights. But somehow, the only amount of real support from Nvidia comes to pleasing Valve, i.e. directly getting cash-muhney.

A tiny example:

[...]and there's no reason for [redacted] to be slow with [redacted], except that afaics nvidia has custom-tailored this stuff for the source engine and everything that behaves differently is slowed down

Also, the fact that lots of performance optimizations, better debugging and RandR support, day-one drivers for new GPUs and many other things that were long waited for, finally got into the driver after Valve started poking Nvidia about it.
As soon as Valve stops poking Nvidia with their poking stick which has a bag-o-cash tied on the poking-end, Nvidia's real level of support will resurface again.

P.S. Yes, 'droid is Linux. I felt like withholding from rubbing this in, but: OH HAHA Linux dominates the smartphone market.

 

[orionbg]

I have a dream.... Intel to get licence for Kepler! Then just imagine what CPUs they can create!

 

[AlienIsGOD]

well i see some people cant have a mature conversation w/o bringing up homophobic comments.... reported and i hope you get banned

 

[AlienIsGOD]

I meet one of biggest AMD heroes which post here I will stake him to the ground.

wow death threats.... ur paving your own way out of the forums quite good.

 

[Xzibit]

It's not going well because you said so?

It's not going well because Nvidia said so.

Someones been hit in the head one too many times

 

[librin.so.1]

@Xzibit Where did You get this graph? Does Nvidia provide more such data, not necessarily involving Tegra?

 

[Xzibit]

@Xzibit Where did You get this graph? Does Nvidia provide more such data, not necessarily involving Tegra?

Nvidia website

Under "About Nvidia" "Investors"

You can listen in to Financial webcast or download there PDFs for more info. The graph is from "First Quarter 2014 Results Presentation" page 7 of 11.

 

[Recus]

Tegra its not doing so well because the market says so.. how many design wins they have?!?!?

any major phone vendor?? table maker?? any apple device?? anything?!?!?!

meanwhile samsung have the custom made exynos (arm based) soc that sells MILLIONS anytime, qualcomm its present in almost everything too..




you know what?? im not loosing my time anymore.. bye bye

Have you seen Nvidia financial results? I see more than ten bucks Tegra profit.

It's not going well because Nvidia said so.

http://img.techpowerup.org/130619/nvidiategraq12014.jpg

Someones been hit in the head one too many times

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pkGi_lSMx...UA/s2D2LWLXXrk/s1600/Ron+artest+Elbow+Gif.gif

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSBJBv_T5GiPX4K-rn0oYZFHGgNF4TvzCaOrn0PF5KwIAQ16mRw

Shame AMD don't do such slides. Since they also down during quarter it would be interesting to see. Maybe ego won't allow.

Someone been hit in the nuts too many times since you trying to show how bad Nvidia is doing.

 

[Xzibit]

Shame AMD don't do such slides. Since they also down during quarter it would be interesting to see. Maybe ego won't allow.

AMD does have the same thing at there website aswell.

Although I don't see how that pertains to this story. Nvidia by Licencing out GPU IP is just competing against itself in its current form or sees an unsustainable form in Tegra. Intel already uses Nvidia IP in its processors. In mobile phones Qualcomm has the old ATi IP it bought from AMD and its doing extremely well in the market most flagship mobile phones from vendors will be carring a Snapdragon 400-800. The Snapdragon 800 can go into a smartphone or tablet and do 4k video. Its gonna take a while for someone to catch up to Qualcomm.

Imagination Technologies will be Nvidia main competitor in mobile so its going to be all about pricing IP. You also have to wonder if they are selling the IP then will companies not purchase Tegra 4 Wayne or Grey chips and opt for the IP instead so it hurts them aswell.

 

[Recus]

Nvidia by Licencing out GPU IP is just competing against itself in its current form or sees an unsustainable form in Tegra.

Apple's Siri dumps Google in favour of Microsoft's Bing in iOS 7

Apple and Microsoft joined because they are doing bad. Extremely bad... NOT.

 

[1c3d0g]

Uhm, while it's not my intention to go into deep financial analysis of a corporation, you DO know that it's very typical for companies to have a Q1 slowdown compared to their previous Q4 results? You know this, right?!?

I'm asking this, because that graph is just about the worst thing you could use to back up your claims.

 

[Xzibit]

Uhm, while it's not my intention to go into deep financial analysis of a corporation, you DO know that it's very typical for companies to have a Q1 slowdown compared to their previous Q4 results? You know this, right?!?

I'm asking this, because that graph is just about the worst thing you could use to back up your claims.

I guess we can all believe which Nvidia graphs we want to believe are real.

Lets not be ignorant that the bar next to it is GPU division and that's only moved downward no more then 6% for 2 quarters straight. Comparing 6% to 14% and 51%. Really ?

Guess its hard to see the graph next to it.

 

[1c3d0g]

:shadedshu Thanks for proving my point about the graphs. Looks like there's no need to discuss this any longer with you, as you apparently seem to be quite thorough in your research about NVIDIA's financial health, their mobile strategies as well as their future, unannounced products. Hell, I think you might as well replace their CFO while you're at it!