Why are graphic cards often manufactured by so many brands? Why does Nvidia not have one dedicated manufacturer?
In: Engineering
Nvidia is fabless – this means they only do the design work and then order the GPU chips from a semiconductor *fab*rication plant. They then ship these, along with a basic card design (called the “reference card” that Nvidia also sells out of their own webstore) for the board designer companies to base their design off of. They then put those GPU chips onto various designs derived from the reference – such as blower cards, water cooled cards, cards that are shorter to fit into a small form factor case, etc. and lots of aesthethic designs. This way Nvidia doesn’t have to cater to every buyer’s wish by themselves.
Supply chain diversification. It prevents delays, failures, recalls, or other supply risks from causing catastrophe for the company
Nvidia is a graphics card designer, they make the design/architecture for the graphics card. They are the ones who improve the science, engineering and technology to improve the graphics card performance.
But they don’t manufacture the graphics card. Why?
Because it’s difficult. Keeping up with the manufacturing technologies and implementing manufacturing on a large scale is expensive and hard. This is what manufacturers specialise in. Like Qualcomm only designs but doesn’t manufacture.
Now why not have only 1 manufacturer. Well it’s like keeping all your eggs in 1 basket. It’s like Microsoft only giving Windows to Dell PCs. It’s just not a good business practice and it was found out long ago. Also different manufacturers provide different cooling solutions and different vram modules.
P.S. An analogy would be architects don’t make the buildings.
Because nvidia doesnt want to do sales and distribution. They just want to do the design and outsource the manufacturing to sell direct to OEMs. There are tons of customizable things on a GPU so nvidia leaves that up to the OEMs.
Its just like how you cant buy a car directly from toyota, you buy it from a dealer and the dealer customizes the car different ways.
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