I put together some information today, hopefully it helps people.
I decided to track both AMD and NVIDIA's last financial year and try to compare that with bitcoin. I think I saw enough to say that AMD has likely directly benefited from a flourishing and healthy PoW cryptocurrency scene, reliant on Graphics cards. But as ASIC chips came to dominate Scrypt cryptocurrencies, they returned to where they started.
My interest here hinges on a couple of claims that ASIC devices for cryptonight could possibly be not as dominant over GPU's/CPU's as they were for Scrypt and Sha PoW currencies, and the emergence of a mobile market becoming highly competitive again due to the entrance of Qualcomm into the ARMs race for seemingly both datacenters, taking on xeon processors head on, and the newly emerging Internet of things. Being the worlds top mobile chip maker, they will have to make heavy and powerful moves to take on intel, and after observing the previous year with AMD and cryptocurrencies, I think that PoW cryptocurrencies may again come to benefit from this newly emerging giant in this sector.
So, first let's take a look at both AMD and NVIDIA's charts over the last year, and a summary of where they are today over the next three pictures:
Quick Summary:
AMD last year:
NVIDIA last year:
Note the distinct spike that is present in AMD from april last year (about the time BTC stopped going down for months) to after june this year (pretty much when money seemed to leave here), that is not so present in NVIDIA. Understand also that AMD dominated cryptocurrency mining.
Moving on, AMD is now taking on new challenges:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-16/amd-sales-may-miss-estimates-as-intel-gains-pc-orders.html"Su will have to speed up AMD’s efforts to expand in new markets where it doesn’t
face direct competition from the world’s largest chipmaker, such as chips for
game consoles. Her company is the provider of processors for Microsoft Corp.’s
newest Xbox and Sony Corp.’s latest PlayStation."
http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/21/amd-ceos-2014-outlook-pc-market-weaker-gaming-stronger-and-arm-server-chips-coming/"Q1 revenues for PCs and graphics will be down, per seasonal and product launch
patterns. Read said that one closely watch product category, chips for ARM-based
servers, will have news soon. He said AMD expects to complete designs on its
first 64-bit ARM-based server chips in the first quarter. ARM servers are a
potential big market as a larger number of vendors will invade the x86-based
server chip market that is traditionally dominated by Intel."
...
"With the successful launch of the Sony PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Xbox One game
consoles (both of which have AMD chips), Read said that semi-custom and embedded
chips exceeded the company’s goal of being more than 20 percent of revenues at
the end of 2013. By the end of 2015, Read said that category would be more than
half of AMD’s revenue by the end of 2015."
Noting the move away from PC's and the renewed concentration on consoles, I'm making the leap that their new concentration will be on microprocessors using the ARM architecture. For more AMD news, see here :
http://www.extremetech.com/tag/amdNow, we should observe where Qualcomm fits into this.
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/194701-qualcomm-will-enter-arm-server-market-with-major-partners-broad-solutionsQualcomm could push ARM deep into the datacenter
With the collapse of Calxeda, companies like AMD and Applied Micro appear to be the best near-term challengers to Intel’s x86 datacenter business, and both should have hardware in the field before Qualcomm has shipping products to launch.
What does Qualcomm have that these other companies don’t? To be blunt: money. AMD and Applied Micro are taking similar strategies, with an emphasis on particular markets and unique features where the ARM architecture is best positioned. There’s nothing wrong with that — it is, in fact, the smart strategy to take, particularly for companies with limited cash flow.
Qualcomm, however, has the ability to challenge Intel on its own turf. That’s not to say that this is an automatic win — if large companies could be assured victory simply by spending money, Windows would already own the Android ecosystem and Intel’s Atom would power all but the cheapest tablets.
With massive giants like Qualcomm moving on taking on intel's xeon line, we're likely going to see some new competition come along probably late 2015, early 2016, as the push begins. Now is the time to get in contact with the people in these areas, and work with them to get the cryptonight algorithm successfully hashing on an ARM server processor, and maybe even whatever 64 bit chip Qualcomm is working on. If not the algorithm, at least Monero software could operate on what they're planning on pushing out (below)
These are the chips that will be in direct competition for dominance within the Internet of Things, as well as major datacenters.
http://www.eweek.com/servers/qualcomm-to-build-arm-based-server-chips.html"That said, the trend toward cloud computing is fueling interest in low-power
processor platforms. Cloud infrastructures demand high-performance servers that
are small and highly energy-efficient, making power consumption as important a
metric as compute capabilities. Intel has been aggressive in driving down the
energy usage of its x86-based Xeon and Atom chips, while ARM and its partners are
looking to address what they see as a significant opportunity.
At the same time, major Web companies such as Google and Facebook are building
their own highly efficient systems that run open-source software like Linux, and
are open to trying data center technologies—from processors and servers to
networking and storage—that are not made by the likes of Intel and Cisco. They
also are looking for greater customization from component makers."
So, where is the ultimate goal of cloud-based infrastructures going to lie? Surely more than standard home computer usage...
http://www.cnet.com/news/internet-of-things-gets-a-hand-from-arm-operating-system/"The UK-based chip designer's Mbed operating system is among several efforts, including the work of standards groups and a new wireless protocol, designed to speed the adoption of the Internet of Things."
ARM will likely end up matched for a new OS, that's specifically designed to plug into the Internet of Things.
http://www.arm.com/products/internet-of-things-solutions/index.phpAs the next major evolution of the Internet, devices and machines of all different shapes and sizes are being connected to the Internet, to each other, and to people. With more than 10 billion microcontrollers being shipped each year, all potentially connected through the Internet, a huge variety of intelligent devices are being enabled, from motion sensors, to pool pumps, to gas/electric meters, to street lights. The development of embedded devices today is highly fragmented, expensive and slow, often using custom or proprietary embedded software and communication protocols. Most existing M2M and IoT systems are in practice "walled gardens" with limited growth potential.
ARM and its Partners share a disruptive vision where creation and deployment of commercial, standards-based IoT devices is possible at scale. ARM® mbed™ IoT Device Platform enables a software ecosystem that solves these problems by providing a common platform for developing connected IoT devices.
So, I think we should try to get all Monero applications in line with operating on mbed, on ARM hardware, as soon as possible. I would like to see a healthy and active relationship with any manufacturer of any of the hardware that will be in these devices. These types of hardware might see an ease of introduction to a consumer base with a cryptocurrency, and it might be a good match.
Additionally, we should be in heavy conversation with anyone willing to communicate about cryptocurrencies and IoT, espcially consumer goods manufacturers who are aiming on being a part of this. If Monero could be an app that even ships as standard bloatware on some of these things, then that would be a major push, let alone an 'alternative' payment system offered right from when the people purchase the device, or even some minor part of the p2p network itself would be a major undertaking and step.
I think we should also seek to communicate with any other developers that are currently working on IoT integration. Probably not BitBay due to apparent scamminess, but maybe the project they were attempting to hijack the idea from.
Add: mbed is free, and is planning a full release in Oct, 2015. For good mbed info please check out
http://mbed.org/ and for development information please look here :
http://developer.mbed.org/Also:
There are thousands of open source code repositories being shared and all members can contribute to the central cookbook wiki, so you can learn a lot just browsing around the site and using the internal search engine.
I could imagine something along the lines of a hardware router, integrating the i2pd system that Monero will use operating on mbed with arm architecture, or something else. You tell me I guess :
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2014/09/18/qualcomm-eyes-future-full-connected-cars-and-smart-routers/ 
