The preparation for Fudzilla's launch started just a few weeks ahead fo the launch date, so the website needed a simple CMS. We stitched up our first engine in a matter of weeks, thanks to the enormous effort on the part of the dev team. Then we realised that we cannot just launch a website on March 1, without much in the way of content, and we decided to write a few reviews of Windows Vista, on different hardware. Of course, since tech news is a big part of DNA, we had to write a few news pieces too.
This is how it all started and Fudzilla gained a lot of popularity by the summer of 2007. The fact that AMD R600 was the big deal back in the days helped a lot, as we gained a lot of early information about this GPU. Later in 2007 we expanded our interest from GPU only to CPUs, memory, motherboards, storage, as well as software and operating system. We learned that every bit of this PC business has its audience.
Very early after the start we realized that a big change is about to transform our industry. At the sidelines of the Intel Developer Forum in September 2007, we bought our first iPhone 2G. It was not hard to imagine that this device would change a lot of things. Our 2008 interview with Nvidia CEO Jen Hsun Huang was another eye opener. Back then, we learned that everything will go mobile and will be subscription based. Technologies like Netflix, Spotify changed the way we enjoy movies and music, and advanced mobile internet speeds including 3G and later 4G changed the way we use our phones. So, Fudzilla had to adapt, moving from a PC component business model, to start writing about a new generation notebooks, mobile phones and soon to happen tablets. Huang was right about this things, years before they became relevant, but not every move the industry pulled turned to gold.
AMD is hoping that Zen and Greenland will bring company to profits in the next few quarters, Nvidia abandoned doing mobile phones as the market commoditized, and the company wants to lose the Icera LTE team too. AMD hopes to start selling servers later this year based on Zen, as well as high end desktops, something that it didn’t do for a long time. Nvidia is trying to make up for the loss of mobile business with sales in the highly profitable car infotainment and assisted/self driving market, and it is doing quite a good job so far.
Back in 2007 we could not predict that Lucas will sell Lucas Arts to the evil Mickey Mouse empire, and that we will see another Start Wars, that there will be another Star Trek movie / CBS TV show, and that Netflix and Amazon will produce really good TV shows.
It is already 2016 and in this year, we have Virtual Reality (VR) making its first baby steps in retail. This will change the industry once again, at least a small bit of it. For years now we have a smart TV's capabile of going online and running applications, enabling audio and video streaming, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. (twitter for illiterate ed.)
The future promises faster internet speeds and 5G internet on a mobile device should reach speeds faster than 20 Gbit a second. Yes, this means at 2.5GB/s should be possible on 5G devices at some point. Things will just go faster and this 5G is expected in 2020. We are on a verge of seeing our first 10nm chips, probably by the end of the year, or next yeare at the latest. By 2020, things will get even smaller as 7nm and 5nm SoCs are in the pipeline.
The future means that computers, mobile devices will get faster, will need less energy and desktop GPUs will a lot of power but they will give you a few times faster performance that is now necessary for good VR experience. We expect Nvidia to introduce Pascal 16nm, and AMD's Polaris – Greenland 14nm GPUs are also coming this year. Intel is going to introduce third generation Kaby Lake 14nm parts as well.
In the meantime, Apple and Samsung make serious SoCs for their phones and tablets, Qualcomm is trying to dominate the LTE speeds and SoC performance with its chips, and MediaTek, a relatively new player, is messing up many plans with its new, cost-effective approach to mobile SoC design.
There is no way things will get boring, as 2016 sounds like an exciting year. 2017 should be a year marked by 10nm products, which should yield a nice performance performance gain.
