This video got me thinking....what's the future for consumer GPUs?

[EdInk]

 

[dorsetknob]

1'14" on wards he says
We the consumer are only going to be given what they want to give us"

Reality check mate that was always the case and always will be
Manafacture's will always target the market segment that is most profitable to themselves
Cloud and data centre computing has grown many 1000% in the last 15 years and now that GPu's can be utilised for more than just graphics it makes Business sense to utilize your product to exploit this growing market

 

[BarbaricSoul]

He makes some valid points, but the issue I have with his logic has to do with quantity. Yes, the big data GPUs do sell for a lot more money, but do they sell enough of the high-end data center GPUs to actually bring in more money compared to how many mid-high-end/high-end GPU they sell and how much they make of those GPU sells. Honestly, my guess, and mind you, it's only a guess, is that Nvidia sells enough GTX 1070 alone to counter what is made off selling those +$5000 GPUs. Sure, Nvidia may make thousands of dollars per +$5000 card, but my guess is that there are thousands more of the 1060/1070/1080/1080 cards sold compared to the +$5000 cards, just because of there being a larger customer base for the gaming cards.

I mean really, how many +$5000 GPUs can Nvidia sell in a year compared to how many GTX 1060/1070/1080 type cards are sold in a year?

 

[64K]

Consumer graphics is a big part of the market and I don't see it going down any time in the near future. Worst case scenario gamers get a GPU with some features stripped away that aren't needed for gaming anyway. When I see gaming performance increases stagnating generation after generation then I will be concerned. A bigger concern I think is hitting a wall with process node shrinks on silicon without a suitable alternative for replacement of silicon but it's being worked on by some very smart people so probably something else will come along when needed.

 

[tugrul_SIMD]

Don't worry, one day realtime ray tracing will come back to games and that will use pure cores. Maybe one day artificial intelligence will be used to produce images, then it will be used too. Texture mapping and pixel shading may have come to a top optimized state.

 

[Sasqui]

Manafacture's will always target the market segment that is most profitable to themselves

Just look at the market for 290x's when coin mining was profitable. Cards with an MSRP of $350 were selling for upwards of $600+ if you could even find them. Have to wonder if AMD and the non OEM's saw that coming, and how they played the market at the time.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. 50 seconds and I've already seen too much. Volta still has hardware rasterizers. That is something specifically for translating 3D data into visual frames. Until NVIDIA/AMD remove rasterizers entirely, they still have hardware dedicated specifically to graphics processing. That said, 80%+ of a GPU is SIMD processors which are great for any parallel task, of which graphics is only one. It'd be stupid not to use them for other stuff too.

 

[EdInk]

Deep learning isn't new. Nvidia got involved in 2009 but for AMD with Radeon Instinct, to want a piece of that cake (and I now believe it's the reason only mainstream GPUs were made last year, to invest more time in creating a solution fit for deep learning), is indicative of a bigger push to fulfill that segment first in the next couple of years. Interesting times ahead if this move turns out very well for AMD. The budget king will have a taste of that awesome goodness; making much higher profit margins and the only way to justify making PC graphics card is to increase pricing.

 

[dorsetknob]

Interesting times ahead if this move turns out very well for AMD. The budget king will have a taste of that awesome goodness; making much higher profit margins and the only way to justify make PC graphics card is to increase pricing.

Nope a incorrect prediction

GPU silicon Wafers will always have Segments/chips that fail to meet the highest spec's needed
those wafer segments made into chips will find their way into Consumer grade cards.
Been happening for years and will continue to do so
That's how both AMD and Nvidia spread the Chip wafer to manufacture different SKU
Same thing happens with CPU wafers for Again AMD and Intel

 

[Derek12]

what's the future for consumer GPUs?
More GPGPU features

 

[dorsetknob]

what's the future for consumer GPUs?
More GPGPU features

Higher processing power
more memory
more functionality
and higher Retail Prices

 

[eidairaman1]

Bio Augmentation like Deus Ex or Ghost In The Shell series.

 

[EdInk]

Nope a incorrect prediction

I hope I'm wrong

Launch price GTX970 - 398sqmm die @ $330
Launch price GTX1070 - 314sqmm die @ $429(FE) - smaller die

Nvidia struck gold with Maxwell and are milking it, if AMD strikes gold, it will do what every company does. Milk it.

 

[Vya Domus]

They didn't stop caring about graphics , they started caring about other things as well. Saw it coming for years , GPGPU is a big thing and of course they focus more and more on that. All that focus on hardware scheduling on newer architectures was not actually meant for gaming as a lot of people though after all that crap about Asynchronous compute.

Someone will still make consumer GPU's , whether that will be AMD , Nvidia , both or someone else remains to be seen many years from now. But I do expect one of them to get out of the consumer market simply because at one point they might make so much money from the other stuff that it wont make sense anymore. Who knows.

 

[Derek12]

Higher processing power
more memory
more functionality
and higher Retail Prices

You know what is GPGPU?

 

[dorsetknob]

You know what is GPGPU?

no I'm a ignorant 11 yr old please enlighten me

 

[Frag_Maniac]

The transpo biz is a mega huge $10,000,000,000 industry, so it makes sense Nvidia would get involved with it ever since GPUs have been AI capable. It doesn't mean they're going to give up on GPUs for graphics or gaming though.

This isn't an either/or thing, it's just that people aren't used to seeing GPUs doing so many different types of work.

 

[Ebo]

For those who can remember that Matrox made consumer GFX, late 1990'is or early 2000'ends, then they stopped and just went purly professinal since then.

 

[EdInk]

The transpo biz is a mega huge $10,000,000,000 industry, so it makes sense Nvidia would get involved with it ever since GPUs have been AI capable. It doesn't mean they're going to give up on GPUs for graphics or gaming though.

This isn't an either/or thing, it's just that people aren't used to seeing GPUs doing so many different types of work.

Video only highlights that with the increased interest in AI/Deep learning, consumer graphics has been pushed down one step down the ladder. It gives a plausible reason why Nvidia GPUs are more expensive; corporations are willing to pay much more for the same die. Could we see pricing increase if/when AI/Deep Learning generates significant revenue for the GPU manufacturers?

 

[Frag_Maniac]

Video only highlights that with the increased interest in AI/Deep learning, consumer graphics has been pushed down one step down the ladder. It gives a plausible reason why Nvidia GPUs are more expensive; corporations are willing to pay much more for the same die. Could we see pricing increase if/when AI/Deep Learning generates significant revenue for the GPU manufacturers?

I don't think it's "pushed down the ladder" within it's market segment. It's like this, any multi segment manufacturer is going to market their business sector products first. And it's not just due to new advances being made, but real world applications that are beneficial to everyone.

That should always take priority over mere entertainment, IF you truly want to be part of making the world better. Even if that weren't their mindset, everyone knows playing the do gooder these days boosts your popularity.

You also have to consider the much higher cost of R&D and manufacturing, and the lower number of units sold. When you compare that to mass produced product that is sold in much higher volumes, the profit margin in non entertainment segments isn't as overwhelming as some think.

All that we're seeing here is the GPU industry becoming much more diverse and profitable. That means they can dump more into gaming GPUs as well. There will be segments of Nvidia from now on. The dept that works on gaming GPUs, the one that works on work station GPUs, and the dept that works on AI type GPUs.

 

[Shihab]

what's the future for consumer GPUs?
More GPGPU features

Not the way Nvidia's heading. They have been trying to diverge (is that the right word, "diverge?") their professional and consumer SKUs for a while now. It began with a simple software limitations using drivers, and now it evolved to hardware handicaps in double precision FP performances. Heck, if games weren't so reliant on floating points, we'd have seen even single precision FP performance gimped!

Sure, we get non-gaming related uses for GPUs added to them. Hardware acceleration is perhaps the most common use for GPUs after games these days, and even that don't really go much beyond video decoding (usually) and encoding/transcoding, and those are often offloaded to dedicated hardware within the graphics card (e.g: Nv's purevideo, NVENC). Other than that, I can't really think of many GPGPU uses for the average consumer. Even the future doesn't look that promising, corporation see more profit for them in doing the computation on their end, so I wouldn't hold my breath for a true AI running off that box under your desk.

real world applications that are beneficial to everyone.
That should always take priority over mere entertainment

Yet the average singer makes more on a single wedding than I, an engineer, do in a month. And let's not even drag "sportsmen" into this. /s

 

[Frag_Maniac]

Yet the average singer makes more on a single wedding than I, an engineer, do in a month. And let's not even drag "sportsmen" into this. /s

I think you're looking more at the most popular singers. Let's not forget that for every one of them that tops the charts, there are 100s if not 1000s more that are struggling to survive. Even top rated bands often live on their last dime due to high costs of tours, Jethro Tull (even in their "heyday") for example. Conversely, most journeyman level engineers with proper training are making scale wages, which are pretty good for that field.

Anyways, you missed my point, I was speaking in terms of global benefit vs luxuries. Most people would prioritize safe vehicles over being able to afford going to concerts or nice home audio gear.