how come GPUs are made by many third parties, but CPUs are only made by the original designer?

[Dougiefresh181]

You can find GPUs made by nvidia and ati as reference cards, or third parties like galaxy and evga, but CPUs are only made by Intel and and. you used to be able to buy clone cpus from Motorola, cyrix and st back in the early 90's. What happened?

 

[Nightman]

Most gpus are made by AMD or Nvidia. When you see another brand like ASUS or EVGA, that just means that they've added their cooler to the card.

 

[DonQuixoteMC]

Well, technically the GPU is still made by the manufacturer. By technically, I mean the actual graphics processing unit. Nvidia and AMD also release stock models, but the build quality focuses more on looks than performance (certainly for AMD).

The board partners take the nvdia/AMD GPUs and put them on their own custom PCB (sometimes) with their own custom coolers. These customized cards are generally more expensive, but they also feature better cooling, often are factory overclocked, and have different features.

 

[skit75]

Those companies still manufacture chips but not for multimedia PC/laptops. It is likely a whole bunch of stuff that factors into why they could not compete in this market anymore.

Manufacturers still buy flash memory from Cyrix and EEPROMs from ST. They just aren't sold to consumer markets anymore is all. They do what they do, very well.

I am not saying your won't find a chip/IC in your PC or laptop that says Motorola or Cyrix.... it just wont be a CPU. Microcontrollers/Buffers/logic chips/DSPs, all up in there.

 

[mbarnes86]

Hi

Many of the companies from the 90's got taken over by the bigger more successfully companies leaving only 3 big companies left if you count Intel

I still have some PCI graphics cards in an old spares box from S3, Matrox , voodoo
They sometimes come in useful when diagnosing old desktop pc's without integrated graphics Chips

(and and. .. and AMD)

Regards
Mike Barnes

 

[Akhil Potukuchi]

You can find GPUs made by nvidia and ati as reference cards, or third parties like galaxy and evga, but CPUs are only made by Intel and and. you used to be able to buy clone cpus from Motorola, cyrix and st back in the early 90's. What happened?

This might be bcoz everyone who uses a pc uses a processor(cpu) . So intel and amd sell to larger audiences and hav larger profits. and so they hav more profits then they wud hav had if they had partnerships with third parties providing their chips and designs to them. However not every1 who uses a pc uses a dedicated gpu. I am yet to see an office which does not deal into graphics designing/gaming which provides dedicated gpus to each and every pc. And offices are the main customers of the pc. SO nvidia and amd make chips for gamers/ graphics designers/3d modelers. If they had mass manufacturing units for these, they wud hav gone into losses, bcoz of supply being more than demand. So they sell their designs to smaller scale manufactureres who manufacture and cater to a smaller audience(gamers). In this way they make money. in the end everything said and done, all their chips arre for profit. and selling them to third parties is more profitable. After all the whole worldruns on money. this is my hypothesis

 

[rounakr94]

The Third parties like Sapphire, MSI, Asus only manufacture the PCB and Cooling for the GPU and they buy the Graphics chip from the Original Designer(AMD, Nvidia).
Whereas manufacturing a cpu needs extreme precision and if 3rd parties manufacture it they will not profit from it, so the original designer makes and sells it.