It’s an avalanche for GPU makers.

by Kris_Tuttle on December 17, 2009

The last cou­ple of months have been marked by a broad set of pos­i­tive devel­op­ments for the GPU mak­ers, espe­cially Nvidia and AMD. Some of the high­lights have been:

Appli­ca­tion accel­er­a­tion goes main­stream. — The lead­ing cre­ative appli­ca­tion providers, Adobe and Autodesk, are embrac­ing the GPU and dri­ving the require­ment for one into space of gen­er­al­ized com­put­ing. This actu­ally started with prior gen­er­a­tions of the soft­ware but we’ll see more of this in prod­ucts like Adobe Cre­ative Suite Ver­sion 5 but even Flash will take advan­tage of the GPU to improve per­for­mance and the experience.

Inter­net video gets seri­ous. — Video is one of the lead­ing new appli­ca­tions for the Inter­net today and it is shift­ing from the short grainy YouTube con­tent of yes­ter­day to high def­i­n­i­tion, in some cases even 3D, con­tent. This level of dig­i­tal video demands more pro­cess­ing power to pro­duce and even to view prop­erly. Every­body want’s video, more so than even text and brows­ing, and it’s another good rea­son to have a GPU in com­puter, espe­cially mobile Inter­net devices.

GPU in the cloud. — Until recently it wasn’t clear if GPU com­put­ing power would be avail­able in the cloud. Given the suc­cess of generic on-demand offer­ings from Ama­zon, Google and oth­ers it seemed only mat­ter of time before we would begin to see it. Both AMD and Nvidia are work­ing closely with the major play­ers and we will see GPU proces­sors on-demand and in the cloud per­va­sively in 2010.

Cloud-based GPU appli­ca­tions are ship­ping. — Men­tal Images has announced and is pro­vid­ing Real­ity Server which rep­re­sents the high end of dig­i­tal image ren­der­ing in the cloud. Some com­pa­nies are using it today with their own cloud servers. Appli­ca­tion plat­forms like OTOY are enabling the high­est end of gam­ing even on mobile devices like the iPhone using cloud-based GPU soft­ware and accel­er­a­tion. Here is a link to a Techcrunch post on OTOY back in June of 2009. We also cov­ered a demon­stra­tion of OTOY in our short research report on the 2009 Gilder Tele­cosm Con­fer­ence. It’s avail­able in the sam­ple pub­li­ca­tions sec­tion of our website.

3D con­tent has arrived. — The cin­ema indus­try has embraced it. Avatar is in the­aters this week. A big dif­fer­ence today is that the cin­ema indus­try cre­ates con­tent in native dig­i­tal form which means that con­tent can be moved rather than rede­vel­oped into other for­mats for games, short videos, images and other forms of con­sumer enter­tain­ment content.

Stan­dards are emerg­ing. — Although there is still plenty of bick­er­ing over PhysX ver­sus OpenCL and DirectX ver­sus oth­ers, these tech­nolo­gies are set­tling into main­stream soft­ware like appli­ca­tions, browsers, and oper­at­ing sys­tems. In cases were two impor­tant stan­dards make it, it looks like they will both be sup­ported. This makes it pos­si­ble to deliver high-end graph­ics and 3D appli­ca­tions to a large market.

We expanded on the mobile 3D theme fur­ther in a report pub­lished yes­ter­day by GigaOM called: 3-D Unteth­ered: A Look at Mobile 3-D Tech­nol­ogy (GigaOM Subscription).

On top of all the indus­try adop­tion Intel set­tled with AMD and paid them $1.25B, scrapped their Larrabee-based plans to enter the dis­crete GPU mar­ket and is under fur­ther FTC inves­ti­ga­tion for try­ing to screw Nvidia.

Put sim­ply the indus­try is shift­ing to video, 3D, and mobile and right now this leaves Intel mostly out of the action. It’s great news for Nvidia, AMD, ARM, Imag­i­na­tion Tech­nol­ogy, Qual­comm and a host of other semi­con­duc­tor makers.

When it rains, it pours.

[Dis­clo­sure: The Research 2.0 model port­fo­lio has posi­tions in both Nvidia and Qualcomm.]

{ 1 comment }

Dave Kellogg December 22, 2009 at 2:38 AM

Kris,

Great post. While I don’t totally understand it yet myself, I’m told that GPUs can also be used successfully in data warehouse query acceleration which is yet another exciting new market if it ends up happening.

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