Comment by ThrowawayR2
21 hours ago
Why make consumer margins on consumer GPUs when they could be making enterprise margins on enterprise GPUs?
21 hours ago
Why make consumer margins on consumer GPUs when they could be making enterprise margins on enterprise GPUs?
One word: Volume.
You can make a nice profit off of the enterprise space, but the big winners are the guys who put the work into servicing the consumer market.
Once you remove laptops from the picture, the consumer market is small in dollars compared to enterprise and has been for awhile. This didn't used to be the case, but here we are.
Best estimates from last year are on the order of 50 million discrete consumer GPUs vs 7-10 million datacenter/enterprise GPUs. Sounds like the PC market is huge! but with average sales costs of well under 1k USD (a lot of the PC cards are budget variety, included with prebuilt computers, etc). it's only a $30-40b business. Those datacenter GPUs are averaging $50k each before the supply issues with HBM started to inflate everything greatly. But using that as a benchmark, that enterprise business looks like several hundred billions.
NVIDIA's latest filing reported $162b in revenue for datacenter compute in the last FY, so we know it's at least that large. Now add AMD, Intel, and everything going on in China that we don't have great numbers for. We can very conservatively say that the enterprise GPU market is currently >5x larger than consumer, in dollars, and it may be quite a bit larger than that.
This year is far from typical however. The AI bubble is throwing all of the numbers out of whack.
1 reply →
Thats why nvidia is the most valuable company in the world after effectively axing their consumer division?
I mean, why not both
"Both" requires more engineering staff on payroll, more wafers to fab/dice/package/test, more boards to manufacture, more inventory to manage, among other things. If their math says it isn't worth it (granted that they don't always get it right), then they don't do it.
"Both" requires allocating limited die capacity to products that have over an order of magnitude less margin.
> "Both" requires more engineering staff on payroll, more wafers to fab/dice/package/test, more boards to manufacture, more inventory to manage, among other things.
Aren't you describing how a business operates?
I mean, doesn't Intel already hire people for those tasks? Unless you are worried about a specific bottleneck, increasing headcount and production output is what businesses do.