fatslob-:O said:
I wonder if their the ones who were more involved in designing the R7 260X and the R9 290 as well as the R9 290X chips. I still wonder why silicon graphics went belly up. |
They wen't belly-up more than once. :P
Basically not enough design wins.
Matrox took over the professional market, nVidia and AMD wen't with the gamer then compute markets.
3dfx was bought by nVidia, PowerVR went mobile, S3 was bought by Via then sold off to HTC.
XGI was spun-off from SiS and tried to break into the market and failed, SiS then bought them out.
Intel and AMD started to include a free-GPU in all their platforms which squeezed out IGP's from Via, nVidia, SiS from the market.
NEC faltered and left.
Tseng was bought out by the then-ATI.
Cirrus Logic, Trident and Texas Instruments sold off/left the GPU market.
In the end we are left with a Duopoly.
PC gamers essentially fund the technology that goes into the consoles, console's are low-profit business for GPU manufacturers it's not enough to cover R&D costs if the big three wanted a new GPU built from scratch, AMD might make a couple Billions dollars over 10 years from all three consoles if they are lucky, which for AMD is a great thing, they need all the cash they can get.
As for who designed the R9 290 series, well. Not allot of *new* engineering wen't into it, most of the work was done with Bonaire from an architectural perspective, just AMD took advantage of the mature 28nm to blow up the die size.
AMD has also cut engineers to try to become profitable again, which might explain WHY we will have had the same GPU's for 3 god damn years.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
