This highlights really well the importance of competition. Lack of competition results in complacency and stagnation.
It’s also why I’m incredibly worried about AMD giving up on enthusiast graphics. I have very few hopes in Intel ARC.
I expect them to merge enthusiast into the pro segment: It doesn’t make sense for them to have large RDNA cards because there’s too few customers just as it doesn’t make sense for them to make small CDNA cards but in the future there’s only going to be UDNA and the high end of gaming and the low end of professional will overlap.
I very much doubt they’re going to do compute-only cards as then you’re losing sales to people wanting a (maybe overly beefy) CAD or Blender or whatever workstation, just to save on some DP connectors. Segmenting the market only makes sense when you’re a (quasi-) monopolist and want to abuse that situation, that is, if you’re nvidia.
True, in simple words, AMD is moving towards versatile solutions that is going to satisfy corporate clients and ordinary clients while producing same thing, their apu and xdna architecture is example, apu is used in playstation and Xbox, xdna and epyc used in datacenters, and AMD is uniting btb and btc merchandise for manufacture simplification
I wonder, what is easier: Convincing data centre operators to not worry about the power draw and airflow impact of those LEDs on the fans, or convincing gamers that LEDs don’t make things faster?
Maybe a bold strategy is in order: Buy cooling assemblies exclusively from Noctua, and exclusively in beige/brown.
Data centers don’t give a shit if your GPU has LEDs. Compared to the rest of the server, the power draw is nearly insignificant. And servers push enough air that imperfect flow doesn’t matter.
This is like Kodak inventing the digital camera and then sitting on it for the next 20 years. Because it doesn’t use film. And Kodak is film.
This is not entirely fair, Kodak invested a lot in digital photography, I personally bought a $1500 Kodak digital camera around 2002.
But Kodak could not compete with Canon and other Japanese makers.To claim Kodak could have made more successful cameras earlier, is ignoring the fact that the technology to make the sensors simply wasn’t good enough early on, and would never have been an instant hit for whoever came first to market. Early cameras lacked badly in light sensitivity dynamics and sharpness/resolution. This was due to limitations in even world leading CMOS production capabilities back then, it simply wasn’t good enough, and to claim Kodak should have had the capability to leapfrog everybody doesn’t make it true.
To claim Kodak could have beat for instance Canon and Sony, is ignoring the fact that those were companies with way more experience in the technologies required to refine digital photography.
Even with the advantage of hindsight, I don’t really see a path that would have rescued Kodak. Just like typesetting is dead, and there is no obvious path how a typesetting company could have survived.
Kodak isn’t dead they’re just not dominating the imagining industry any more. They even multiplied, there’s now Kodak Alaris in addition to the original Kodak.
Between them they still are dominating analogue film which still has its uses and it could even be said that if they hadn’t tried to get into digital they might’ve averted bankruptcy.
There’s also horse breeders around which survived the invention of the automobile, and probably also a couple that didn’t because their investments into car manufacturing didn’t pan out. Sometimes it’s best to stick to what you know while accepting that the market will shrink. Last year they raised prices for ordinary photography film because they can’t keep up with demand, their left-over factories are running 24/7.
Sometimes it’s best to stick to what you know while accepting that the market will shrink
I argue it’s always best to do that. A company dying doesn’t mean it failed, it just means it fulfilled its purpose. Investors should leave, not because the company is poorly run, but because other technologies are more promising. These companies shouldn’t go bankrupt, but merely scale back operations and perhaps merge with other companies to maintain economies of scale.
I honestly really don’t like companies that try to do multiple things, because they tend to fail in spectacular ways. Do what you’re good at, fill your niche as best you can, and only expand to things directly adjacent to your core competency. If the CEO sees another market that they can capture, then perhaps the CEO should leave and go start that business, not expand the current business into that market.
