On Tue, Jul 22, 2003 at 06:56:58PM -0700, Mark Vojkovich wrote: | The interest, at least as far as the press is concerned, seems to | be almost totally in the chipset performance. nForce2 is available | without internal graphics. If I recall correctly, nForce3 (I believe | there were some reviews out today) has no internal graphics.
I'll take a look. | I do not expect graphics hardware to become a commodity. As Joel Spolsky mentioned, Microsoft tries hard to make such things happen. :-) | It is something that graphics hardware vendors fight hard against, Understandably. | and commoditization has not been the trend. In the PC, workstation, and simulator spaces there are fewer graphics hardware vendors today, and their products are more compatible, than at any time in the past five to ten years. I agree that graphics hardware hasn't been completely commoditized, but it sure looks like the trend is strong in that direction. I'd expect the same trend to carry through to embedded devices (as the PC folks leverage their technologies in the new markets). I'd also argue that programmable GPUs with a common programming interface increase the tendency toward commoditization. The business model for graphics apps running on various vendors' GPUs begins to look a lot like that of ordinary application software running on various implementations of the x86. This isn't accidental. | > There is at least one very significant incentive -- driving down system | > cost and enlarging the market by commoditizing the software | | This is something graphics vendors will fight hard against. | They don't want to commoditize the software. ... If you believe that lower device/system costs lead to higher volumes of sales, and software cost is an appreciable fraction of the device/system cost, then commoditizing the software leads to higher revenue for the hardware vendors. That's one reason Linux gained a foothold in the embedded space. Maybe you're thinking primarily about driver software. Graphics vendors do add a tremendous amount of value in their drivers, but even there parts of the software are commoditized when it makes economic sense. Perhaps the commonly-used code in XAA is a good example. | The goal is to have your graphics kill your competitors, and that | is done by preventing commoditization of software and hardware. | It involves outfeaturing and outperforming your competitor and protecting | your software and hardware IP. Certainly that used to be true. Judging by what I hear from app developers, it's getting less true all the time. They really want to stick to standardized functionality that's available with decent performance on all platforms. Their return-on-investment is highest if the hardware is commoditized. And Microsoft maintains its position in part by playing the hardware vendors off against one another. MS wants the best price and performance for the features in its APIs, not for features that aren't part of those APIs. That leaves less room for the hardware vendors to compete on features. Allen _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
