Nvidia plays the diversification game

THE CHIP-DESIGN business is enjoying a "golden age", declared John Hennessy and David Patterson, two gurus of computer design, earlier this month (Mr Hennessy chairs Alphabet, Google's parent company). The shift to cloud computing, the rise of specialised computing tasks such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the slow death of Moore's Law have conspired to create a growing market for "accelerator" chips designed to speed up drastically certain common types of calculation. One of the standard-b...