This year’s CES displayed a pretty broad mix in terms of production areas, with plenty of representation for categories ranging from wearables, to health, to VR and beyond – but the clear winners were two companies, and both succeeded primarily through partnerships than by direct demonstration of their own consumer products.
Of the two, Nvidia had a much more direct presence; the GPU-maker’s CEO Jen-Tsun Huang had the opening keynote, and packed a lot of news into the three-part presentation. Nvidia also had its own showfloor presences, including a self-driving car demonstration featuring BB8, its own test car, and an Audi Q7 equipped with the same software and hardware that could also drive itself, with no human behind the wheel.
Nvidia’s core business has become the core business of virtually every other tech company of size and significance ; AI is one of, if not the primary area of interest and investment at Google, Facebook, Apple and others, and Nvidia’s GPUs make it possible to create the neural nets and server systems that back machine learning, image recognition and other technologies under the broad AI umbrella.
Meanwhile, Nvidia’s consumer business is also making some big leaps. The new Shield TV looks great, for instance, with Google Assistant features coming later this year that could help it reach its goal of becoming the only living room entertainment and smart home device you ever need.
Likewise Nvidia’s streaming service, which also takes advantage of its dramatic progress in GPU tech to provide better-than-console quality game streaming remotely to devices like underpowered PCs and Macs that would not normally be able to offer high-level gaming experiences.
