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Sales of personal computers have been stagnating for a couple of years now for various reasons. Many industry executives and market observers believe that to revive the PC market, new programs that demand more resources than contemporary computers can provide are needed. Mark Papermaster, chief technology officer of Advanced Micro Devices, believes that virtual reality could be such technology.
“There’s really what I think will be a rebirth of the PC industry and that is around virtual reality,” said Mr. Papermaster at the at Pacific Crest annual global technology leadership forum, reports Tech Trader Daily. “You have to experience it to understand what virtual reality means. If you have ever put on one of the newer headmount displays, you’ll see it’s going to be a new category and it needs PC-class compute and graphics to have that wonderful experience. If you underpower it, it’s not a great experience.”
Initially virtual reality headsets and software will be aimed at gamers, which means that the market of VR-equipped systems will be a subset of the gaming PC market. Different industry observers express different expectations regarding sales of VR gear in 2016 – 2017. Some claim that Oculus VR, HTC and other suppliers of VR headsets will sell four to five million devices next year, but some believe that shipments of such products will hit 14 million units or even higher.
AMD hopes that gamers, who will buy virtual reality headsets will also acquire high-end graphics cards, which means additional revenue and profits for the company. However, nobody knows for sure, how many VR devices will be sold in 2016 – 2017 and what impact they will have on the market.
It is possible that virtual reality headsets will evolve rather quickly because today's solutions hardly provide very immersive experience. If companies like Oculus Rift as well as game developers release radically better hardware and software every year within the next decade, they will catalyze gamers to upgrade their PCs frequently, which is a good news for AMD. However, it is unclear how significantly the evolution of VR hardware will help Advanced Micro Devices, who has been losing market share for years now.
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KitGuru Says: It is hard to predict how significantly virtual reality will affect the market of personal computers and entertainment in general. For example, stereoscopic 3D video has never really taken off. As a result, it is rather surprising to see a high-ranking executive from a company of AMD’s size to believe that virtual reality will have a major impact on the whole PC market any time soon.
Virtual reality has been around for a long time. I remember first putting on a VR headset in 1994 and I thought the technology gave an amazing and unique experience. So fast forward to 2016 and I can certainly believe what Papermaster is saying (although of course he has a vested interest in doing so). But he is certainly right in so far as gaming is now the biggest area of software pushing hardware technology development for the PC. The next designs of AMD and Nvidia GPUs on 14nm/16nm FinFET with HBM2 should be way more powerful than today’s 28nm GDDR5/HBM1 ones and I’m looking forward to the games that will be made for them.
Problem is, it isn’t going to be worth looking at until the 3rd/4th Gen headsets come out and that’s a loooooooooooong time away!! I love a good gadget or two but even I’ll be waiting 🙂
What is that a joke? Rebirth of the PC industry– only if smartphones and consoles died today would anything like that happen; high-end users can’t save the whole industry. The tone is set by the mass market majority, and what route are they taking? They aren’t all buying laptops and desktops as their primary computing device.
The fault goes to the majority that purchase non-PC devices, they are taking sales away from traditional PC. Whatever PC tries to do to stay relevant only lasts a few years until non-PC catches on; then we’re back to square one. Within 5-7 years, tablet GPUs will achieve performance levels up to where GM200 and Fiji are today, i.e. Tegra X1 = 8800 Ultra. If we are going about 4k30-4k60 today, that level of performance will be fluid on a phone in less than a decade. With 4K content out this winter and 4 phones on the horizon for next year, it may not take long for VR capability on a phone. By then, who the hell needs a desktop PC, for 16K120 maybe?
They are gonna be Kick-ass.I can see Raja Koduri devoting his resources more on developing the R400s.I hope AMD gets back to its feet esp in Power Consumption and Cooling.Hey,It’s not my words.Its the stupid consumers and Nvidiot’s Word because They just can’t understand Desktop is for Pure Raw Performance,Nothing else.
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” Within 5-7 years, tablet GPUs will achieve performance levels up to where GM200 and Fiji are today”
got any proof of this. any type of data that shows this is possible. they would have to do somthing about the heat generated by those gpu, then deal with the power consumption and on top of that shrink those gpus down to the size of a nickle to fit them inside of a phone or tablet.
i just dont see that happening that fast. not by AMD or nvidia. nor any company in the mobile market either.
AMD/Nvidia would need to be on a much smaller node in order to cut power consumption and size and they cant just magically spawn a new node out of thin air. they have to wait for TSMC or GloFlo to make a new node and somthign like that takes time. look at how long we have been stuck on 28nm for GPUs
The trend has been the case for years, I simply projected it to happen continuously with all necessary shrinks; so no, no proof of what could happen. Like I said, nVidia themselves that claimed their Tegra X1 is comparable to their older 8800GTX card. http://www.kitguru.net/laptops/mobile/anton-shilov/nvidia-confirms-plan-to-show-new-tegra-chip-at-ces/
Going by AMD’s IGP progress rate, the numbers are similar where 28nm Kaveri is about where 40nm HD4770 was. Of course Intel themselves claim their Haswell Iris Pro is about 100 times faster than their own IGP from a decade ago. But somewhere in the last 6 years, IGP got a push and are being pursued by many microprocessing companies.
The gap is closing, eight years ago I clearly remember benchmakrs where a GeForce 7300GS was 40 times slower than the flagship 7900GTX, now the gap is just ten times slower when comparing Kaveri with R9-290X.