[Peace&Chips] How Did Nvidia Become the No.1 GPU?

NVIDIA Holds 90% Market Share in Server GPU
Leading AMD and Intel with CPU Business Combined
CEO Jensen Huang: "GPU Dominates Data Center"

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[Peace&Chips] How Did Nvidia Become the No.1 GPU?

American company Nvidia is emerging as a jackpot in the semiconductor industry. The recent attention on Nvidia is due to artificial intelligence (AI). With the popularity of ChatGPT, AI demand is surging, and to support this, servers need to be equipped with GPUs.

Nvidia is a dominant player in the GPU industry. GPUs are almost synonymous with Nvidia. Although American companies AMD and Intel also offer GPU products, their influence is smaller compared to the central processing unit (CPU) market where these two mainly compete. In particular, about 90% of GPUs installed in servers are Nvidia products.

Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, is delivering the keynote speech at Computex 2023 held in Taiwan on May 29. /

There are several factors behind Nvidia's ability to outpace competitors and dominate the GPU market. These include Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO's technical leadership and strengthening of high-performance GPU dominance, securing various distribution channels, close business cooperation with partners, and recruitment of top talent. Of course, the original brand value of having established the GPU concept was the biggest factor.

Nvidia first introduced the GPU brand 'GeForce' in 1999. This is often described as the 'invention' of the GPU. Although in 1994, Japanese company Sony introduced a graphics device called a GPU in its PlayStation 1 console, the GeForce product completed the concept of today's GPU.

As the name suggests, a GPU is a processor specialized for graphics tasks. It is a type of system semiconductor. While similar to a CPU in that it performs calculations, its usage differs. Processors have components called 'cores,' and a GPU arranges a large number of mid-level cores in parallel to handle relatively simple tasks simultaneously. This contrasts with a CPU, which uses a few high-performance cores to quickly process a single advanced computational task.

An image of the RTX 4060 graphics card, a new product unveiled by Nvidia last month. A graphics card is a hardware device used in PCs to handle graphic processing and contains a GPU. / [Image source=Nvidia Newsroom]

The field where GPU characteristics can be maximized is gaming. To render the vivid graphics in games, a large number of pixel (the smallest unit of a screen, or 'dot') calculations are required, and this is where GPUs are used. Artificial intelligence (AI), which requires large-scale data training, is also a field where GPUs perform well.

Market forecasts predict that as AI server shipments rapidly increase, demand for high-performance Nvidia GPUs will also surge. Jensen Huang, CEO, recently stated in an interview with CNBC, "(In the future data centers) instead of millions of CPUs, a small number of CPUs will be connected to millions of GPUs."