Reply to post: Re: Always good to have competition to rein in that nVidia/AMD duopoly

Re: Always good to have competition to rein in that nVidia/AMD duopoly

The big difference between desktop and mobile GPUs is that a mobile GPU is still a GPU. Desktop GPUs are about large scale cores and most of the companies you mentioned in the mobile space lack the in-house skills to handle ASIC cores. When you license their tech, usually you’re getting a whole lot of VHDL (or similar) bits that can be added to another set of cores. ARM I believe does work a lot on their ASIC synthesis and of course Qualcom does as well, but their cores are not meant to be discrete parts.

Remember most IP core companies struggle with high speed serial busses which is why USB3, SATA and PCIe running at 10Gb/sec or more is hard to come by from those vendors.

AMD, Intel and NVidia have massive ASIC simulators that cost hundreds of millions of dollars from companies like Mentor graphics to verify their designs on. Samsung could probably do it and probably Qualcomm, but even ARM may have difficulties developing these technologies.

ASIC development is also closed loop. Very few universities in the world offer actual ASIC development programs in-house. The graduates of those programs are quickly sucked up by massive companies and are offered very good packages for their skills.

These days, companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple are doing a lot of ASIC design in house. Most other new-comets don’t even know how to manage an ASIC project. It’s often surprising that none of the big boys like Qualcomm have sucked up TI who have strong expertise in DSP ASIC synthesis. Though even TI has struggled A LOT with high speed serial in recent years. Maxwell’s theory is murder for most companies.

So most GPU vendors are limited to what they can design and test in FPGA which is extremely limiting.

Oh... let’s not even talk about what problems would arise for most companies attempting to handle either OpenCL or TensorFlow in their hardware and drivers. Or what about Vulcan. All of these would devastate most companies. Consider that AMD, Intel and NVidia release a new driver almost every month for GPU. Most small companies couldn’t afford that scale of development or even distribution.