I'm not really ready to call Nvidia the new Intel. Nvidia seems like such a volatile company and I have no idea why. I just feel like I could wake up tomorrow and they could be gone.
The same can happen to NVIDIA, especially when Intel decides to launch something inside their CPUs that is "good enough" for many people.
Even the best current GPUs can't handle the inevitable future high-res VR. This is going to be a stable business for a while yet.
Intel hasn't had real pressure to innovate for years. They watched the battle and fall of NVIDIA/AMD, and in the meanwhile enjoyed good sales of CPUs for all the cloud computing.
Now, they have intense pressure to innovate - as in the server space ARM is going to eat them up, due to the superior power efficiency, laptop/desktop sales are down (again, because a four-year old computer works just fine if you upgrade its RAM to accomodate Chrome).
Intel needs something mind-blowing and that quick. And NVIDIA too, casual gamers are shifting to console (where AMD has quite a customer base) and mobile (where Samsung/Apple with ARM are in the lead). I haven't seen any performant Intel or NVIDIA mobile SoC solution yet.
Nvidia does have the Tegra, for the Android tablet market.
Interesting that they've ceded Windows on ARM (aka the rumoured Surface Phone) to Qualcomm - I would have thought Denver's code-morphing architecture would be better suited to emulating x86 instructions than a Snapdragon 835.
Which isn't used anywhere except a couple of tablets according to Wikipedia. Samsung, inarguably leader of the high-class Android manufacturers, uses either its own SoCs or Qualcomm. Many cheaper phones use Mediatek or Allwinner chipsets.
It's not used because most likely NVIDIA never really wanted to push it, it checked the water a bit with a few 1st and 3rd party tablets/android gaming consoles but this always looked more like to recoup some investment on the side while developing the SOC than an end goal.
The lessons learned from Tegra allowed NVIDIA to build the best (or at least the most powerful) automotive integrated solution currently on the market and at least as far as software compatibility and performance go they have no real competition.
The result is called a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a custom ASIC we built specifically for machine learning — and tailored for TensorFlow. We’ve been running TPUs inside our data centers for more than a year, and have found them to deliver an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning. This is roughly equivalent to fast-forwarding technology about seven years into the future (three generations of Moore’s Law). (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/05/Google-supercha...)
That sounds like a custom ASIC for this purpose. And if Google can do it, so can Intel.
Nvidia (a) owns the high end deep learning space right now, (b) has shown with the Nintendo Switch arguably the future of gaming, (c) by abandoning PS4 etc they are moving to higher margin businesses.
For me they are looking pretty damn good.