| FunFan said: Thats quite ironic, given that the PS3 having a GPU was an afterthought. I have no doubt that NVidia PS3 excitement was insincere and purely marketing/business driven. Why would they be so exited about being a last minute fix? |
The GPU in the Playstation 3 wasn't an afterthought, It wouldn't have been much of a generational upgrade without one.
Nor is it entirely feasible just to drop a new GPU in last-minuit. You need new buses, dram, motherboard, packaging, cooling, overhauled software stack... Everything. The Playstation 3 was built with a GPU in mind from a very early stage.
The GPU in the Playstation 3 was a big chip... A very profitable chip. nVidia would have been stupidly pleased with itself for scoring that long-term contract.
Tegra is almost the opposite. It's a very small chip. A very low-profit margin chip and it is a relatively old chip, it's profit margins should be allot smaller for nVidia.
But if Nintendo can counter those lower margins with higher volumes (Which everything is pointing to that it can...), it should balance itself out in the long run.
nVidia's main revenue stream is still the PC. I think it's a good thing that nVidia finally scored a big design win with Tegra for once... And we can finally see what Tegra was always capable of from a gaming perspective, Android wasn't really showing us what it could do.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
