Nvidia Corp is trying to pull a fast one on Intel Corp. Over the years, the latter has grown quite popular among the business computing market, and now Nvidia has decided it also wants a bigger piece of that market.
This development comes after Nvidia launched a set of new software tool last Wednesday targeting the business computing market. Dubbed the RAPIDS, this software could see Nvidia make headway into the relatively small but rapidly growing artificial intelligence chips market. With RAPIDS, Nvidia hopes to woo business analysts in need of the computing power to do data crunching in their endeavors such as forecasting future market demands, and inventories.
Nvidia chips being used more and more outside the video game market
Nvidia has made a name for itself when it comes to graphics processing. The company is, in fact, the market leader in that space, and the world owes much of the smooth video game experience to the company. Video games have never looked more realistic than when Nvidia began operations back in the 1990s.
However, lately, Nvidia’s chips have been found their ways into more use such as an ‘accelerator’ in data centers to speed up the work of artificial intelligence. They sort of work by training computers recognize images and human speech much faster and efficiently. Oh… they have also been used by cryptocurrency miners, but that’s a topic for another article.
Though the Nvidia chips are not directly replacing Intel chips for general purpose computing. But it has been observed, when businesses utilize a lot of the Nvidia chips in their analytics works, they tend to buy less of the Intel chips.
Nvidia began positioning itself at the center of artificial intelligence about a decade ago when they began enabling developers to program their chips for a wide range of tasks outside the video games graphics space. A move that was readily welcomed by researchers in the artificial intelligence space. However, Nvidia’s strongest selling point is not in the power of the chips in and by themselves, but on the company’s efforts on the enabling software.
For RAPIDS, Nvidia has partnered with HP, Oracle, IBM…
With the release of RAPIDS, Nvidia has teamed up with a wide range of tech companies such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Oracle Corp, and an arm of the International Business Machines (IBM). The software is also already being used by Walmart for its business analytics needs.
However, it would be fair to say, this endeavor is still somewhat a work-in-progress. Intel still has a firm grip on a bigger chunk of the business analytics market. The Intel chips are still the industry standard for business analytics field. The best Nvidia can hope for is to net the early customers concerned more about the speeds over the costs of acquiring the new chips.
“In many cases where we’re talking about basic data science, it’s going to be computationally faster,” said Stephen O’Grady, an industry analyst with RedMonk. “This is their big play to get into the general purpose data science side of things.”