If it does, I think it would be a good thing.

The reason is that it would finally motivate game developers to be more realistic in their minimum hardware requirements, enabling games to be playable on onboard GPUs.

Right now, most recent games (for example, many games built on Unreal Engine 5) are unplayable on onboard GPUs. Game and engine devs simply don't bother anymore to optimize for the low end and thus they end up gatekeeping games and excluding millions of devices because for recent games, a discrete GPU is required even for the lowest settings.

NVIDIA, like everyone else on a bleeding edge node, has hardware defects. The chance goes up massively with large chips like modern GPUs. So you try to produce B200 cores but some compute units are faulty. You fuse them off and now the chip is a GP102 gaming GPU.

The gaming market allows NVIDIA to still sell partially defective chips. There’s no reason to stop doing that. It would only reduce revenue without reducing costs.

I'm kind of nostalgic for the Golden Age of graphics chip manufacturers 25 years ago, where we still had NVIDIA and ATI, but also 3DFX, S3, Matrox, PowerVR, and even smaller players, all doing their own thing and there were so many options.

Qualcomm before they made all the chips they do today, ran a pretty popular and successful email client called Eudora.

Doing one thing well can lead to doing bigger things well.

More realistically, if the top end chips go towards the most demanding work, there might be more than enough lower grade silicon that can easily keep the gaming world going.

Plus, gamers rarely stop thinking in terms of gaming, and those insights helped develop GPUs into what they are today, and may have some more light to shine in the future. Where we see gaming and AI coming together, whether it's in completely and actually immersive worlds, etc, is pretty interesting.

Update: Adding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora_(email_client)

Won't personally miss Nvidia, but we need competition in the space to keep prices 'reasonable' (although they haven't been reasonable for some years), and to push for further innovation.

But if this does happen it will be in my opinion the start of a slow death of the democratization of tech.

At best it means we're going to be relegated to last tech if even that, as this isn't a case of SAS vs s-ata or u.2 vs m.2, but the very raw tech (chips).

My general impression is that the US technology companies either treat competition from China seriously and actively engage, or Chinese tech companies will slowly and surely eat the cake.

There are numerous examples: the recent bankruptcy of iRobot, the 3D printer market dominated by Bambu Labs, the mini PC market where Chinese brands dominates.

Overall, I think that AMD is more focused and energetic than their competitors now. They are very close to taking over Intel on their long CPU race, both in the datacenter and consumer segments, and Nvidia might be next in the coming 5 years, depending on how the AI bubble develops.

Most of the consumer market computes through their smartphones. The PC is a niche market now, and PC enthusiasts/gamers are a niche of a niche.

Any manufacturing capacity which NVIDIA or Micron devote to niche markets is capacity they can't use serving their most profitable market: enterprises and especially AI companies.

PCs are becoming terminals to cloud services, much like smartphones already are. Gaming PCs might still be a thing, but they'll be soldered together unexpandable black boxes. You want to run the latest games that go beyond your PC's meager capacity? Cloud stream them.

I know, I know. "Nothing is inevitable." But let's be real: one thing I've learned is that angry nerds can't change shit. Not when there's billions or trillions of dollars riding on the other side.

i predict that the "pc" is going to be slowly but surely eaten bottom-up by increasingly powerful SoCs.

Frankly, the graphics chops are plenty strong for a decade of excellent games. The big push in the next couple decades will probably be AI generated content to make games bigger and more detailed and more immersive

It would still suck if they left the market because who does AMD have to compete with with? Intel? LOL

Increased prices for everyone. Lovely. I can’t despise AI enough.

That way they will not only burn the most good will but will also get themselves entangled even more into the AI bubble - hopefully enough to go down with it.

Fuck this future.

That said, things like improved environmental physics and NPC/enemy AI might enable new and novel game mechanics and creative game design. But that can come from AMD and others too.