Uttar said:
What you say is totally true - in the last 5 years, I'd tend to believe ATI's growth is more impressive than NVIDIA's (although ATI tends to work in phases - they were a fair bit bigger than they were 5 years ago, if you look even further back, unlike NVIDIA which was a much newer company).
Yeah, ATI is truely an oldie. They are probably the oldest that's still alive. But NVIDIA came along, new, burning with energy and wiped out pretty much everybody. Then they sat on their ass, Geforce FX came and went, Richard Huddy quit saying ATI is now the company NVIDIA 'was'. But as said in another thread, it's good that NVIDIA stumbled. They picked themselves up again and really refocused. I think their last two products, 7800 and 7900 GTX, are fantastic.
I'd tend to believe, however, that these kinds of lists emphasize on the last 1-2 years. Correct me if I'm wrong of course. If we want to talk about the last 5 years, things are very different indeed
And what I meant wrt markets was that NVIDIA is now entering the markets ATI entered 3 to 5 years ago.
Since it's a yearly list, then it sure makes sense to concentrate on the last year. But even then, I can't see how NVIDIA's performance as being much more impressive than ATI's.
Let's take the console case. Out of PS3 and XBOX 360, I think ATI got the better contract. I don't know who will get paid more in the end, but just from observation it seems that ATI won the XBOX 360 deal from the get-go, designed it with close collaboration with MS and came up with a very compelling (and original) architecture. This deal has allowed them to experiment and produce a unified shader part early. This experience will come in very handy when they make unified PC GPUs.
With NVIDIA on the other hand, it seems like Sony went to them. Cell is awesome, but a GPU it ain't. So NVIDIA landed a deal with Sony not so much to design a next gen console GPU but to provide the IP for the G70, some 3D tools and know-how. Now the G70 is a great chip and NVIDIA has an awesome inventory of IP: Cg, gelato, shaders, patents etc, but they didn't really strive to get this deal. And as a result, it doesn't help them strategically the same way the XBOX 360 deal helps ATI.
If we look at the last two years, where NVIDIA has really done well is with SLI. They thought that up nice and early and today, they clearly have the better implemention in the market. And also with their last generation, the G71 is definitely doing better than the R580 in efficiency per watt or per transistor. But ATI has done plenty of good stuff in the mean time as well. So in the end, I just still feel a bit queezy about their choice of NVIDIA as #21 and ATI as a nobody.
