14 DAY TRIAL // 2014 hasn't been the kindest to NVIDIA. While the company seems to have retained most of its enthusiasm in regards to graphics technology, marketing prospects could have turned out a lot better. Alas, that is not likely to change by the end of December.
The Santa Clara, California-based company is in no danger of even approaching bankruptcy, of course. Especially not when it's one of only two providers of graphics processing units.
However, the company does seem to be in a less than ideal pickle in regards to its sales on the short term. That's what certain market watchers have found at least.
According to Digitimes, NVIDIA will see a drop in overall demand for graphics processing units in the last quarter of this year. Which is to say, October-December, 2014.
We actually spoke about this threat on mobile GPUs not long ago, but feel the topic deserves a bit more looking into.
The low demand on the notebook front
NVIDIA, just like AMD, pretty much lost the low-end desktop front, and half the mid-range market, a few years back, so those are no longer factors.
In the meantime, they have had to be especially active and careful on the laptop market. You'd think AMD has been doing a bit better there, what with the Radeon GPUs integrated into its APUs (accelerated processing units).
Alas, AMD's market share has been tempered by a history of minimum activity on the mobile market as a whole, compared to Intel.
But we digress. We're looking at the discrete GPU segment today. It is there that the signs of concern have appeared.
The report we mentioned says that NVIDIA, and AMD for that matter, will be essentially withdrawing from the entry-level market of notebooks.
Considering that they already did something like this a few years back, when GPUs began to integrated graphics parts, it's more like they're ceding the lower half of the mainstream segment.
They will focus on mid-range and high-end notebooks from now on. We suppose this means that Intel will have one less worry after this.
An understandable move
You can't really afford to cram a great GPU inside a laptop when that laptop is supposed to cost $199 / €199. It wouldn't make sense performance-wise either, since the rest of the PC wouldn't be able to keep up, basically wasting a lot of the possible prowess of the chip.
Still, this all boils down to a significant decrease in GPU sales in general, and a strong loss for NVIDIA in particular, since it has no CPU-GPU hybrid chips to fall back on, unlike AMD. Well, except for the Tegra line of ARM-based SoCs (Tegra K1 in particular), but we haven't seen that one in many products other than some Chromebooks and NVIDIA's own Shield tablet.
Much of this can be laid at the feet of the new Intel Core m mobile CPU, based on the 14nm Broadwell architecture.