The future of GPUs

Another trend is that the high end is constantly getting smaller. SGI’s mistake was not to realize this truth. Ten years or so ago, SGI was the company to go to for high-end graphics hardware. They still retain this niche; their latest hardware allows a large number of GPUs to share the same RAM and therefore work together tightly. The difference now is that the GPUs are developed by NVIDIA. The people who originally formed NVIDIA used to work for SGI, but their management didn’t want them to produce a consumer-level graphics accelerator, since it would compete with their high-end hardware. These folks went on to form their own company, and now own about 20% of a market that is orders of magnitude larger than the entire market in which SGI competes. Worse from SGI’s perspective is that many of the people who needed high-end hardware a decade ago now barely tax their consumer-grade equipment..