I agree with you, and in particular the general “they’re cooking something” sentiment. The rest of this is just my personal take, so take it with a grain of salt. I do not have any inside knowledge of this.
Nvidia currently rules the AI space, but they don’t have much of a “moat”. In theory, anyone can swoop in and make their gold-rush shovels obsolete–or at least too expensive. They probably also look to what Apple has done with vertical integration and want some of that stability.
I predict they will focus on:
AI (as they already are)
Cloud workloads, like cloud gaming, but also business workloads (beyond what has already been moving to the cloud at a dizzying clip), e.g., workstations. Basically, we’re back to thin clients (again).
Mobile gaming. Maybe mobile CPU/SoC.
Handheld gaming. These last two are important since the desktop gaming market will be stagnating with component prices being so ridiculous.
Desktop gaming. This isn’t a priority for them right now, but If/when desktop gaming snaps back, there will be a huge backlog of demand.
Linux runs the majority of items 1-4 and is gaining in 5. Windows will probably remain the platform of choice for business desktops for a while. But, Linux runs great on ARM. Windows can run on ARM and should handle business desktop workloads just fine.
Most likely they’re hiring for mobile gaming first. That would be the quickest bang for the buck, in my opinion. However, that work (improving performance on Linux) will be useful for all of the points above.
We’re entering interesting times in computing. It will be interesting to see how Apple fares since they had a lead in ARM development, but don’t have much of a hold on gaming.
I agree with you, and in particular the general “they’re cooking something” sentiment. The rest of this is just my personal take, so take it with a grain of salt. I do not have any inside knowledge of this.
Nvidia currently rules the AI space, but they don’t have much of a “moat”. In theory, anyone can swoop in and make their gold-rush shovels obsolete–or at least too expensive. They probably also look to what Apple has done with vertical integration and want some of that stability.
I predict they will focus on:
Linux runs the majority of items 1-4 and is gaining in 5. Windows will probably remain the platform of choice for business desktops for a while. But, Linux runs great on ARM. Windows can run on ARM and should handle business desktop workloads just fine.
Most likely they’re hiring for mobile gaming first. That would be the quickest bang for the buck, in my opinion. However, that work (improving performance on Linux) will be useful for all of the points above.
We’re entering interesting times in computing. It will be interesting to see how Apple fares since they had a lead in ARM development, but don’t have much of a hold on gaming.