Why are there many gpu manufacturers (zotac, Asus, msi…) but onlz 2 pc CPU manufacturers?
In: Technology
There used to many more CPU manufacturers in the old days.
Pre-pentium when you had CPUs with names like 486 every company that could make CPUs could make their own version of the chip and they would all fit the same slot on the motherboard have the same instructions and work the same way with the rest of the system.
Then Intel and to a lesser degree AMD made their chips a brand with slogans like “Intel Inside” and dancing people in multicolored cleanroom suits. They also changed their products to better set them apart from the competition and to make them incompatible with one another.
One by one the other chipmakers shut down their own x86 lines so that today only Intel and AMD (and a Chinese attempt to make their own x86 cpu) remain.
A big issue was that for the CPU you would need a different board for each maker and the OS would need to support them all.
There simply isn’t enough room in the market for many different ways of doing things.
Even Intel and AMD are now on sort of the own standard again. When it came to going from the old 32-bit CPUs to new 64-bit systems. Both AMD and Intel created their own way architecture. For a while there was a Windows 64-bit OS for the Intel 64 and one for the AMD 64 bit CPUs. The Intel one is history now and both AMD and Intel create their CPUs according to the AMD created standard. Nobody wants to deal with two different incompatible versions of the same OS.
For GPUs things are a lot easier. The OS and the mainboard don’t really care which manufacturer puts their cards into the computer as long as they adhere to the relevant standards and provide working drivers nobody on the other side of the abstraction layer needs to worry too much about it.
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