Mark Roulo (nothanks@xxx.com) on 8/4/10 wrote:
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>

>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?
>

I don't know the breakdown of NVidia's revenues by
market segment.

But it seems to be almost a universal law of chip
development that you can't survive long by selling high-end
chips alone, against competition that has a low-end
high-volume revenue stream. That's how we got the
dominance of x86 over RISC. The high-end-only chips that
survive are those that belong to systems companies who
can make their money not just on the chips, but on selling
complete systems, plus software and services (which isn't
what the graphics-card market looks like, though quite a
few companies have tried to make HPC look that way -
and failed).

Personally, I can't see how NVidia can dig themselves
out of this hole as an independent company. Though I
expect the Fermi chips and drivers and associated IP
have value and will live on somewhere, in some form.