As its current generation of Xeon CPUs appear to hit a performance plateau, analysts are predicting that, for the first time, NVIDIA is about to overtake Intel in the semiconductor stakes and become the US’s largest processor supplier by market capitalisation, according to this article in Barron’s.
NVIDIA GPUs are getting more powerful and the company’s fortunes are being found in the data centre more than in games consoles and workstations or laptops.
NVIDIA’s value has risen 70% in 2020 to about $245 billion. Intel is valued at $249 billion. NVIDIA seems to be on schedule to become the third largest chipmaker in the world, behind Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung Electronics Co..
With more people working from home and connecting to centrally-hosted systems or to the cloud, sales of desktops and notebooks to businesses – one of Intel’s biggest markets – are expected to decline, while NVIDIA’s data centre business is set to skyrocket.
AMD’s Epic 2 processors are also more than giving Intel a run for their money in the HPC market – render, life sciences, machine learning etc..