I wonder if consumer VR would have faired better if gamers didn’t have to compete with miners and data centres for chips and had more reasonably priced cards a few years back.
But instead of stepping up to the plate and igniting a Red Queen's Race that would have benefited everyone, INTC first tried to discredit the technology repeatedly, then they built an absolutely dreadful series of decelerators that demonstrated how badly they didn't understand manycore. Eventually, they gave up, and now they're playing catch-up by buying companies that get within striking distance of NVDA rather than building really cool technology from within.
Now if someone threw a large pile of money at AMD again, things could get really interesting IMO. But the piles of stupid money seem biased towards throwing ~$5M per layer at the pets.com of AI companies these days.
Reminds me of "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win".
So many companies have this reaction (e.g. RIM with BlackBerry). Wondering if this is some kind of "corporate instinct".
There is a sort of survivors bias in focusing in the 2% and assuming that's the norm. Corporations act this way because it generally works.
Like the OP said though, it does lead to arrogance over time, and that's when a fall happens.
Corporations can't really be as successful at innovating as a startup. A startup is free to build or reshape itself into anything, focus on a single thing, and pivot on a dime. In a corporation the same structures that hold it up and moving are the ones that resist it changing direction or promoting something new. Easy to lose focus and get lost in the red tape.
And that's before you consider the risk a CEO sees in potentially cannibalizing their own (currently successful) business or just throwing money down the drain at 98 losing ideas. Like you said, 2% of ideas may be successful so a corporation would rather let the startup play it out and then buy it if it has potential. Easier to justify to investors.
So corporations innovate when they have nothing to lose and any risk is worth taking. See MS trying to somewhat successfully reinventing themselves after seeing mobile and FOSS booming. Private companies also have an easier time innovating because they have no investor pressure. They may be behemoths but at least they can avoid suffering from the "too many cooks in the kitchen" syndrome.
I know this to be true, however I cannot understand for the life of me why this is the case.
If I was the CEO or CTO and had, say, 5k people under me, you had better believe there would be dozens of little 3-4 person teams doing hard research on threats and coming up with recommendations to get in front of them.
I mean this is basic 1st year MBA SWOT Analysis stuff.
holding the place of an incumbent has advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes you can't leverage the advantages, and that's when a company can get buried by the upstart the worst.
And having lots of teams "innovating" is also not that great. You'll just end up with a stack of 100 great ideas on your desk but only 2 that might make money. Your job is to guess which 2. Any decision you take will be heavily scrutinized by everyone in the company and shareholders. You may just go the safe way, that worked over the past few years and put a bonus on the table.
A 10-20-100 person startup with everybody in the same office and a very flat structure will be a lot more agile. The people are all there for that one single purpose, and the dynamic is quite different. Once the goal is reached many just move on. This provides a very different motivation vs. the typical corporate employee.
[0] https://qz.com/846530/something-weird-happens-to-companies-w...
It's not that Intel doesn't have people that recognize the issues, but rather the people who do have that foresight are drowned out by people who don't realize the game has changed. Intel, to be fair, does have the best autovectorizer--but designing vector code from scratch in a purpose-built vector language is still going to produce better results, as shown when ispc beat the vectorizer.
But Nvidia can also get drunk on its kool-aid, just as Intel has been. Nvidia's marketing would have you believe that switching to GPUs magically makes you gain performance, but if your code isn't really amenable to a vector programming style, then GPUs aren't going to speed your code up, and the shift from CPU-based supercomputers to GPU-based supercomputers are going to leave you happy. There's still room for third-way architectures that is anyone's game.
Arguably one of the things that Nvidia really got right was learning from those past failures at other companies and making it easier for developers to utilize the platform starting from a standpoint that they were familiar with and helpfully nudging them towards what would run fast in parallel.
CUDA's sweet spot lies between embarrassingly parallel (for which ASICs and FPGAs rule the world because these are generally pure compute with low memory bandwidth overhead) and serial (for which CPUs are still best), a place I call "annoyingly parallel." There are a lot of workloads in this space in my experience.
But if you don't satisfy both of the aforementioned requirements and/or you insist on doing this all from someone else's code interfaced through a weak-typed garbage collected global interpreter locked language, your mileage will vary greatly cough deep learning frameworks cough.
Finally, it doesn't matter who's doing it, marchitecturing(tm) drives me nuts too.
Controlling the language certainly helps Nvidia's economic moat.
Only now, more than a decade later they realize their mistake and try to correct the juggernaut's course. Such glacial mistakes in this industry can cast death blows to even the largest entities.
They drowned out Pat Gelsinger late 00s, then Justin Rattner and many others Retired in early 10s, the rest is history.
Bad management is when your company evaporates because you make one bad call.
Management gets points for surviving and then fighting back despite being wrong. And when you look at Intel's history, there are few companies on the planet who have managed to do that multiple times. They have a good mix of people who know what they are doing technically AND people who do whatever it takes to keep the company from sinking when those bad technical calls happen.
If Nvidia survives whatever their next bad call maybe expect them to start looking more and more like Intel.
That's a pretty low bar!
AMD could never made the same gamble as Intel did for Itanium. There's a long technical argument as to whether the world is better off in a technical CPU design sense because of that, but I disagree that it's necessarily good management of Intel that's allowed it to recover from disaster.
The best management can play the hand they're dealt perfectly and still lose. However bad management can play the best hand poorly and still win.
I think the big disconnect is thinking they had to make people rewrite code. CUDA often targets entirely new codebases, and in some cases new types applications.
The "rewriting of code" is mostly for things like AV processing and codecs where there was such a sellable benefit in performance it would have been insane for them not to invest the effort.
Intel was doubly hindered here, because they wanted everything to use x86. Intel had trade secret and patent protections from competitors, and a critical mass of marketshare.
Parallel programming was something that had to fit into that "x86 for everything" mindset rather than being a separate/competing technology to x86. The company that pushed winmodems and software sound cards wasn't going to be able to lead the disruption there.
That somebody might be Nvidia. I believe that Nvidia is still battling and has not yet paid the 1.06 billion Euro fine to AMD imposed on it by the UK courts in 2009. Hearsay claims that it was the similar US fine that basically paid for Zen R&D...
It seems gratuitously confusing for readers, and doesn’t seem to have any benefit I can see.
Stock symbols
As far as I can tell, the hardware development continued and the next wave of VR will have much higher quality and more performant GPUs to make a good first impression.
It would look differently if the entire VR field would’ve collapsed due to low sales but tbh it looks like it’s maturing slow and steady and that’s how it should be
So essentially high gpu prices might have given the field just enough time to mature with patient early adopters before it goes main stream. At least that’s how I hope it will be
I had much better luck getting people to try things like Daydream, which have extremely limited processing power but could do cartoony graphics just fine.
I think the industry really missed an opportunity to start with lightweight AR. Let the users walk around by showing them where they are and overlay things on top. There are plenty of useful applications; many require precision sensing that phones don't have, but there are others that can be done with just an accelerometer and a camera.
This is part of why I find Facebook's Quest so compelling.
The problem with lightweight AR is that with current technology, it's not that useful. If you've ever tried Google Glass or Focals by North, there's not much you can do with them that couldn't be done better with a smartwatch [1].
And if you try to pack a larger FOV display or more processing power into the glasses, you end up with something like HoloLens, and then you've got a similar problem to the VR headsets -- it's probably not something that you'll want to wear for long periods of time (you can't anyway due to battery life), and certainly not something you'd wear walking down the street.
It's not that these are missed opportunities. On the contrary, there are a lot of people who have been working on them for years with billions of dollars spent in the process. But they're hard, and it will take time to get there.
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[1] The one exception was being able to capture quick moments with the Glass camera -- but of course, that raised privacy concerns.
Though afterwards what got me to uninstall everything was a combination of Facebook/Oculus being untrustable and the low playerbase/match making problem in Echo Arena.
And then CUDA emerged.
So it's not like they magically thought of GPGPU -- there were people working on it before CUDA, but yeah, they had the vision and invested the money and hours of work to make it happen.
I don't think VR changed the GPU demand landscape at all. Most of that market has high overlap to those already doing PC gaming. And if you're already doing PC gaming, you probably already have a GPU perfectly capable of doing VR.
Consumer VR would fair better if there was a halo game to justify the investment. Entry-level VR still starts at $400, and there's not a lot of games where you go "yes I must try this", and fewer still that are then also VR exclusive to really force you into the VR experience.
there is no such thing as a 'killer app' "ATM" - a 'killer app' by definition is one that transforms technology/society and that afterwords, we 'cannot do without' (or at least think so) - eg. personal computers+spreadsheet, smartphones+mobile internet, etc.
If a 'killer app' is 'at the moment', it isn't a killer app because there is a 'next' moment, implying that the previous 'killer app' wasn't 'killer' because we can now do without it
Those non-gamers are still want to going to want all sorts of things going on in their VR scenes with framerates high enough that 10% of the population doesn't get motion sick.
As for crypto and AI: I don’t think anyone saw that coming, but it was a safe bet that, one day, a technology would emerge that could use this kind of calculation power. And that promoting and investing in GPU computing in general was thus a smart thing to do. IOW: making your own luck.
Couple years back when I was researching for stock investment I looked into NVDA's product offering. I used to thought NVDA was only good at video cards but was surprised to find they had already fanned out to a number of different areas with their GPU technology. Basically anything that needs massive parallel computing is a candidate to apply the GPU. From memory, they were into super computing, cloud computing, animation farm, CAD, visualization, simulation, automative (lots of cars have Nvida chips), and of course VR/AI. Crypto I don't think was on their product roadmap. It just happened.
Not really. Team Green is very careful after the crypto kerfuffle to jump on minute trends like "AI," and very reasonably so. The first wave of cookie cutter "AI" companies are already beginning to offload their GPUs.
Except in the short term, doesn't increased demand for chips generally decrease unit prices, rather than increases them? Do you really think there was such a large shock, and prices rose so fast, that this permanently hobbled VR uptake even years later when chips are cheaper than they would be in the absence of crypto and DL?
I'm starting to come around to the idea that it's here now and the size of the market is just pretty much what it's going to be.
They come out amazed and wondering why these aren't everywhere. Then they ask how much it costs (~$4000) and their excitement vanishes.
You can get a setup for much less than that now, but it's blurrier, slower, uglier, more nauseating, and lacks important features like finger tracking. It won't be smartphone-level for a long time, if ever, but once the tech reaches affordable levels, I'm convinced there will be a larger audience.
If they can get rid of the headset requirement, then I think the potential is almost limitless.
Vive trackers $300
2080 Ti $1200 (I suppose I should count this by its new "low" price, but I got it early)
Overclocked i7-6700k and high end motherboard, closed loop cooler with better fans, ssds, psu, case, ram etc ~$1400
= ~$3900
The important parts are the Index, the 2080 Ti, and a CPU with high single-thread performance. If you lose the trackers (more trouble than they're worth, really) and go more budget on the other parts you can put together something equivalent for under $3000, but not by much.
It will make users go "wow" at first, then they toy a little with it, then recognize that there just isn't that much great stuff you can actually do with it (as a recreational user) especially considering how clumsy and annoying the gear is and will remain for the foreseeable future.
Sure, it will still have a following, and there still will be current and new special purposes where the technology actually makes sense, but I cannot imagine it will see true wide adoption on smartphone or even TV scale.
Yeah, it's clumsy and annoying now, but I don't think it'll be for much longer. The Quest is super usable already.
Still the number of units sold are probably reported in 10Ks or 100Ks not in millions let alone billions of units.
Glass & 3D TV never added anything meaningful to the mix. They were just extensions of technology that already existed. VR entirely changes the paradigm of how we interact with computers.
Even if it's "only" VR gaming that takes off, that is an entirely new medium of storytelling for artists to explore. We don't see those often.
Remember that DOOM was more popular than Windows - games are often all the system seller you need.