The Nvidia Arm race has just put Microsoft, AMD, and Intel on notice | PC Gamer This is the most exciting news in video games since the original Doom was released. Earlier this year Nvidia announced they are having success developing their own ARM cpu, and now it looks like they are going for a price war with Intel and Microsoft. Consumer electronics were setback fifteen years by an unexpected limitation in silicon, but Nvidia putting this kind of pressure on Intel and Microsoft is the most hopeful sign yet. There's no damned reason whatsoever that laptops should not cost half as much as they charge, except the oligopolies prefer to set their own prices. Thankfully, Microsoft and Intel have been so successful with combating high prices and hackers, that Nvidia should have an easy time stomping them into the fucking dirt.
Its just a laptop, and you can install whatever operating system you want, or install two or more operating systems, but Nvidia intends to sell them with Linux installed. Price is the issue, and if Nvidia starts selling their own laptops with Linux installed, you can bet they will make sure its competitive.
Back over 10 yrs ago I got an Acer Aspire One (ZG-5) netbook that had WinXP installed. It was one of the last units to come with it, and Microsoft extended their service for those units. I shrunk the partition and installed PC-BSD & Slackware on two partitions I created in the empty space. Later I found that all of the units that were shipped with linux on them had some dismal variant of it that wasn't worth a broke dong. Everyone that got one returned them and exchanged them for WinXP units like mine. The same problem occured with the original netbook, called "One Laptop Per Child" (OLPC) which shipped with Sugar OS. Most I encountered were wiped and Ubuntu or Puppy was installed in them, which was far more familiar to linux users. I seldom boot the WinXP partition on mine. I hope Nvidia doesn't make the same mistake the makers of OLPC made. Come to think of it, I hope the CPU runs along at least 1.6ghz instead of the slower rates I've seen on many portables.
Nvidia is making more money than Intel or Microsoft, because they are the leading experts in AI. Selling cheap crap nobody wants to buy is not on their list of things to do. Already Microsoft is among the largest investors in Linux, and the entire gaming community is moving in thanks to Steam, and if Nvidia jumps in too, all bets are off.
My son is quite a gamer, but he never mentioned anything about the community jumping aboard with linux. I'd told him and his sister when they were kids that linux is going to be the way to go in the future due to it's robust nature, as well as being largely open source. These changes will be nice to see in the future. I understand a lot of gaming is done online with servers these days, but I didn't know the extent of it. Thanks for the update.
Also, Nvidia has been making their own ARM processors for ages now. They are called Tegra SoCs. Used in phones, tablets, TV boxes, Android consoles, Chromebooks, the Nintendo Switch...
PC gamers commonly consider laptop gaming to be equivalent to console gaming, and the only issue for many is how cheap their laptop can be, and still provide portable gaming. VR headsets will require external computers, like laptops, for the foreseeable future, but Linux is perfectly capable of handling VR gaming. Valve, Nvidia, AMD, and many others are extremely interested in developing a cheap alternative to Windows. The real issue for gamers right now is AI, with Linux being supported by Nvidia, Valve, AMD, and everyone else who just loves Intel and Windows. Frame rates are what video games are all about, but Nvidia's new DLSS and upcoming works are aimed at providing up to 600fps at 4k resolutions, and frame rate is truly a non-issue for the next gen. Forget about operating systems, your computer should be an AI instead. Using analog circuitry, an AI can use any operating system you prefer, or whatever works better for it. Nvidia has their own ARM cpu chips, and these should be approaching at least the performance of a last gen i7, with the new issue being how many cores it can support. You want at least eight for crunching large numbers, and the increase in both core count and efficiencies are rapidly making frame rate issues a thing of the past, which is obviously what Nvidia is capitalizing on.
