If you ever wondered how to earn real money in the semiconductor industry, the answer was always just one – sell high-end stuff. This is even true in both commercial and consumer markets, since Xeon is essentially Core 2 processor, yet it costs orders of magnitude more (the minute you start putting 2/4/8 socket systems).
In the world of graphics, it is clear – sell one Quadro FX 5800 card and your profit margin equals to selling around dozen GeForce GTX 285 cards, who again, sell for more profit than 50-60 low-end graphics cards (yep, you’ve read correctly – fifty to sixty low-end cards).
Confirmation came in this Valve’s monthly update to their hardware survey, probably the best statistics about gaming hardware out there, touching “only” 16+ million people. This survey shows that the Christmas shopping season smiled nicely on Intel on the CPU side and both ATI and Nvidia on the graphics side.
15% of all users dropped single-core processors between June and January...
Roughly 50.000 people who used Intel’s integrated graphics subsystem bought ATI and Nvidia GPUs, reducing Intel’s share to 5.07% (5% too much, if you ask me). ATI now owns 27.25%, while Nvidia marginally increased its share to 64.72% of all graphics cards used. Big losers were also owners of multi-GPU configurations. As users are selling their 8800GTX SLI and 9800GX2 cards, most of them opted for a single graphics card, such as GeForce GTX or Radeon 4800 series. Less than 300.000 Steam users own a multi-GPU setup, yet everybody in the industry state that multi-GPU setup is the future?
On the CPU side, things turned quite interesting for the eternal battle between AMD and Intel. As you could read in the title, 0.43% of all users use Intel’s 8-core Skulltrail platform, while Phenom X3 has marginally higher market share (0.49%). 8-core Skulltrail beat 3-Core Phenom by almost four times, and by survey for March 2009, Skulltrail will probably overtake 3-core Phenoms in terms of overall share. Rough estimate would be roughly 70.000 Skulltrail systems out there, and 80.000 Phenom X3 systems. Who earned more money?
My take is that a certain ex-ATI/now-AMD is now chewing his hat of, because it was his decision to kill FASN8, AMD’s Barcelona-powered dual-socket gaming system.
In case you missed, this also proves that a certain Voodoo-empowered HP executive was wrong in his column about the end of high-end gaming machines. A lot of workstation users bought Skulltrail machines, but this statistics applies to people who installed Steam on their computers. And as we all know, it’s not that Steam is used for distribution of AutoCAD, Maya, Adobe CS4 and other professional software packages.
This month was also big on DirectX 10 – almost 25% of all users now use DirectX 10 on Windows Vista. Then again, percentage of owners of DirectX 10 hardware and DX9 operating system (Windows XP) jumped to 27.28% (up by 2%) as well.
All in all, Steam Hardware Survey once more provided us with an invaluable insight into the world of gaming hardware. I am personally surprised with the success of Skulltrail platform, given the state of economy and prices of Skulltrail systems. Then again, it is a living proof that Francois Piednoel and his team at Intel knew what they were doing when they created V8, followed by Skulltrail.
On a side note, I can’t wait for Nehalem-EP based Skulltrail… codename Skullcrusher? Greyscull? Or again back in the car world with Bugatti-like V-16 (two 4-core CPUs feature 8 threads each, thus 16 cores visible in task manager 
)?
I’m curious, though, that if you are saying that Multi-GPU tech is obviously not the future, and in fact is receding, than why is Skulltrail relevant?
I think for NVIDIA, it is pretty scary how bad multi-gpu is doing. Obviously, that’s why JenHsun is so excited about ION!
http://www.edbordenblog.com/2009/02/nvidia-shift-in-relevance-away-from.html
By: Ed Borden on February 12, 2009
at 18:57
Theo, you’re damn right! AMD shouldn’t have killed FASN8. I had a MSI K8T Dually system with opterons as well and would have gotten FASN8 as well. Maybe some AMD exec reads this!
Please bring back FASN8!
By: Thorsten on February 13, 2009
at 07:01
Well, AMD will probably bring FASN8, but it will be FASN12 or FASN24, given the number of cores on Istanbul and Magny Cours.
Probably everybody in AMD and a lot of people outside the company know what is the name of exec that killed the platform for minor savings, pissing off one huge motherboard vendor that heavily invested in development of their own FASN8 board.
By: theovalich on February 13, 2009
at 07:28
Good question.
Multi-GPU is important and it should be important. But, how exactly to deploy multi-gpu that makes sense, that’s whole another ballgame. I find it worrying that out of numerous millions of people that have Steam, only 300K use multi-gpu configuration.
Only reasnoble answer is that multi-gpu wasn’t accessed right. It was absurd to talk with Nvidia and AMD about multi-monitor support on their configurations. No, it was in their heads that anybody that has multi-gpu has 30 inch screen and nu mas. As expected, this approach failed miserably, given that power users have more than one monitor. And in case of some, especially WoW gamer, companies failed miserably. WoW scaled great and is the ultimate high res app, yet the companies didn’t pursue the 15M+ market with multi-gpu products optimized for them.
On the other hand, Skulltrail makes sense for all those situations when you’re CPU-bound. For instance, run Badaboom transcoding with GeForce GTX280 on single, dual, quad and octal core, and scaling will be there. Same thing in gaming – some games+resolution combos require as much cpu as possible, for some particular reason. What the market needs is scaling company such as LucidLogix – if we get 90-100% scaling, multi-gpu is cool.
Perhaps this is the greatest failure of Nvidia – company has nForce 100 and 200 chips and doesn’t offer performance advantages, in fact you lose performance on the account of added latency. We’ll see.
By: Theo Valich on February 13, 2009
at 15:48
So you are saying that one problem is that people are CPU bound at the upper end, so they need Skulltrail, otherwise people won’t buy multi-gpu? I think NVIDIA is right, that people who are using multi-gpu are those 30″+ customers. There just isn’t enough mainstream software right now that needs the power. And when ATI came strong into the market and made NVIDIA drop their prices, it doesn’t even make sense to gang up two mid-ranged GPU’s. Only place to use SLI is at the tippy top.
It’s tough right now for them. AMD too. Times are changing! Even Microsoft is getting screwed up, and Intel has to be looking at IBM at least a little. Buyer’s market, right?!
By: Ed Borden on February 14, 2009
at 06:22
Well, sadly, that is the problem… as far as multi-gpu exists, there was an issue between being CPU-bound and GPU-bound applications. And in roughly 90% cases, you’re GPU-bound (if you would take a look at Top 20 Games sold in 2008, percentage of GPU-bound games would be in minority).
There is vast amount of people that wanted to go multi-gpu route, but refrained from doing so because they could not use the second monitor. That changed now with Nvidia, but CrossFireX is still missing in the action, and it’s been almost two years since ATI first demonstrated multi-monitor capability to the press. Well, can’t have it all.
I think we can all conclude there is roughly 1M premium customers every year, even though I would say that number at least doubled in the past two years – my sources told me what manufacturer ship monthly 30.000 high end units in EU and 40.000 high-end cards in NA markets alone. If you go and ask Dell how many 24″, 27″ and 30″ screens they sold, the number is in millions, so there is a market there as well.
But, SLI and CrossFire have to do away with the image of person owning that configuration being a second grade customer, even though he’s a premium one.
the amount of problems that multi-GPU owners had in the past is just incredible, those ppl buy AMG Mercedes, BMW M series, RS Audis… and yetl, the amount of quirks which they go through is well… owning a Daewoo/Chevrolet comes to it.
A lot of SLI customers went away after being burnt, same thing with Crossfire. the problem is, neither of the two were serious enough with the support, and the amount of broken promises is just about enough for anybody, yet alone for ppl that spent thousands of dollars on the GPU part alone.
Steam may not be the best survey to find how many multi-GPU configs are out there, but it is closer to reality than any other.
I think that we have two architectures emerging in the GPU world, and that is something I will address in future interviews with GPU architects.
And I don’t think either of them is wrong.
By: theovalich on February 14, 2009
at 14:09