Comment on How did it come to be that only two companies supply all of the world's PC graphics chips?
AliasVortex@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The short concise answer is mostly cost. Nvidia, AMD, and Intel are all spending multiple billions of dollars per year in R&D alone. It’s just not a space where someone can invent something in their garage and disrupt the whole industry (like, even if someone were to come out of left field with a revolutionary chip design, they’d need to convince investors that they’d be a better bet than literal trillion dollar companies).
XeroxCool@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The question isn’t just about upstarts, it’s asking how we got here. We can’t start Ovidia in a garage, but Nvidia did at one point. So where’d everyone else go? What partnerships and preferences put Nvidia on top?
despoticruin@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Patents and the fact that these chips are massively complex designs. We are talking architecture on the complexity level of the empire state building, most of which is a blend of proprietary designs developed over decades.
Nobody is saying you can’t do it in your garage, in fact it’s easier than ever to start. Let me know how it goes, look into some of the recent tapeout challenges to get an idea of what you are proposing people just make in a garage.
XeroxCool@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You said exactly what the parent comment said and ignored the secondary part of OP’s intent. But thanks?
AliasVortex@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I was content to let the other comments address the history since I’m not particularly well versed there (and there’s already enough confidently incorrect bullshit in the world). I mostly just wanted to interject on why there aren’t more chip companies beyond just hand waving it away as “market consolidation”, which is true, but doesn’t take into account that barrier for entry in the space is less on the scale of opening up a sandwich restaurant or boutique clothing store and more on the order of waking up tomorrow and deciding to compete with your local power/ water utility provider.
The answer also gets kind of fuzzy outside the conventional computer space and where single board/ System On a Chip designs are common, stuff like Raspberry Pi’s or smart phones, since they technically have graphics modules designed be companies like Snapdragon or MediaTek. It’s also worth noting that computers have gotten orders of magnitude more complicated compared to the era of starting a tech company in your garage.
If it helps answer your question, according to Wikipedia, most of the other GPU companies have either been acquired or gone bankrupt.
Pieisawesome@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
If you are really curious, read Chip Wars by Chris Miller.