I know Intel is dipping its toe into the GPU market, but let’s be real, AMD and nVidia are the only options and have been for the last 20+ years. The manufacturers/assemblers of the complete graphics cards are varied and widespread, but the core tech comes from two companies only.
Why is this the case? Or am I mistaken and am just brainwashed by marketing, and there are in fact other viable options for GPUs?
Cheers!
The question isn’t just about upstarts, it’s asking how we got here. We can’t start Ovidia in a garage, but Nvidia did at one point. So where’d everyone else go? What partnerships and preferences put Nvidia on top?
In general, tech is an industry with high fixed costs and low costs per unit sold. That kind of pricing structure tends to limit competition.
Nvidia was founded at a time when outsourcing chip fabrication was common and viable, so all Nvidia had to do was focus on design. After a series of failures and near bankruptcy, Nvidia was finally able to invent the idea of a GPU and sell it to the marketplace.
After that Nvidia bought several companies to round out its patent portfolio and capabilities, remaining a dominant company in an industry it created. The only real competition was with other companies that had previous chip design experience.
Patents and the fact that these chips are massively complex designs. We are talking architecture on the complexity level of the empire state building, most of which is a blend of proprietary designs developed over decades.
Nobody is saying you can’t do it in your garage, in fact it’s easier than ever to start. Let me know how it goes, look into some of the recent tapeout challenges to get an idea of what you are proposing people just make in a garage.
You said exactly what the parent comment said and ignored the secondary part of OP’s intent. But thanks?
I was content to let the other comments address the history since I’m not particularly well versed there (and there’s already enough confidently incorrect bullshit in the world). I mostly just wanted to interject on why there aren’t more chip companies beyond just hand waving it away as “market consolidation”, which is true, but doesn’t take into account that barrier for entry in the space is less on the scale of opening up a sandwich restaurant or boutique clothing store and more on the order of waking up tomorrow and deciding to compete with your local power/ water utility provider.
The answer also gets kind of fuzzy outside the conventional computer space and where single board/ System On a Chip designs are common, stuff like Raspberry Pi’s or smart phones, since they technically have graphics modules designed be companies like Snapdragon or MediaTek. It’s also worth noting that computers have gotten orders of magnitude more complicated compared to the era of starting a tech company in your garage.
If it helps answer your question, according to Wikipedia, most of the other GPU companies have either been acquired, gone bankrupt, or aren’t competing in the Desktop PC market segment.
If you are really curious, read Chip Wars by Chris Miller.