4 dispatches
Historically, Intel has (1) designed and (2) manufactured its chips that it sells (primarily into computer and server systems). It prided itself on having the most advanced (1) designs and (2) manufacturing technology, keeping both close to its chest. In the late 90s/00s, semiconductor companies increasingly embraced the “fabless model”, whereby they would only do the (1)...
Every standard products company (like NVIDIA) eventually gets lured by the prospect of gaining large volumes and high margins of a custom products business. And every custom products business wishes they could get into standard products to cut their dependency on a small handful of customers and pursue larger volumes.
Market phase transitions have a tendency to be incredibly disruptive to market participants. A company or market segment used to be the “alpha wolf” can suddenly find themselves an outsider in a short time. Look at how quickly Research in Motion (makers of the Blackberry) went from industry darling to laggard after Apple’s iPhone transformed the phone market.
While code names are not rare in the corporate world, more often than not, the names tend to be unimaginative. NVIDIA’s code names, however, are pure marketing glory. Take NVIDIA’s high performance computing product roadmap (below) – these are products that use the graphics processing capabilities of NVIDIA’s high-end GPUs and turn them into smaller, cheaper, and more...