Richard Cownie (tich@pobox.com) on 8/4/10 wrote:
---------------------------
>But being a pioneer doesn't always lead to a sustainable
>business. Right now NVidia just announced an
>unexpected $150M drop in revenue for the quarter - that's
>20% of their business that vanished overnight. And by
>mid-2011 we'll have adequate CPU+GPU chips from both
>Intel and AMD which will simply obliterate NVidia's
>revenue from sub-$100 discrete GPUs. And in the $100-$200
>range NVidia still has nothing at all that matches
>the Evergreen series on features (DX11, Eyefinity) or
>price-performance. A situation that's probably only
>going to get worse with AMD's Southern Islands arriving
>in Q4 2010 and Q1 2011.

Without arguing whether or not the sub-$100 GPU market can vanish and be replaced by on-chip GPUs, does anyone have a feel for this question:

If the sub-$100 discrete GPU market goes away, can nVidia survive on the high end (and, I suppose, embedded) chips alone? Or do they need the volume of the low end to justify the ongoing development?

-Mark Roulo