NVIDIA Now Ranked World’s 3rd Largest Fabless Semiconductor Design Company Behind Broadcom And Qualcomm
In the world of integrated circuits, there are some major players that build chips that we use every day may not even realize it. Companies like Broadcom and Qualcomm make integrated circuits that find their way inside the laptops, computers, and smart devices that we use constantly. A name you might not think about being in the same league as those two major players is NVIDIA.
Many still think of NVIDIA mostly as a video card maker, and while that might be what gamers like best, there is more to Team Green than video cards and GPUs. NVIDIA has now overtaken MediaTek to become the third largest IC design company in the entire world. Directly ahead of NVIDIA is Qualcomm in second place with Broadcom sitting in the top spot. Mediatek is now pushed down into the fourth place spot.
The data on rankings comes from a research firm called Topology Research Institute. NVIDIA overtaking MediaTek isn't a big surprise, as MediaTek and Marvell were the only two IC design firms in the top ten that saw revenues decrease in Q2 2017. MediaTek revenues slid 19.9% compared to the same quarter of 2016. The firm still made $1.87 billion in the quarter. Marvell's revenue declined only 0.8% compared to the same quarter of the previous year, but it made much less money during the quarter than MediaTe, at $593 million.
NVIDIA on the other hand racked up the largest revenue increase for Q2 2017 among the top ten IC design firms with a revenue increase of 56.7% compared to the previous year for a total of $1.91 billion. Qualcomm, sitting in second place, raked in $4.05 billion for an increase of 13.1%, while Broadcom raked in $4.37 billion for 17.3% gain. Much of the growth NVIDIA enjoyed during the quarter was thanks to strong demand for hardware in the data center and professional visualization markets. This week NVIDIA launched a new Quadro vDWS with a Tesla GPU inside meant specifically for virtualized workstation rendering and computer performance.
