3 ms·

The article kind of led with Crypto, but could have easily started and ended with Crypto. Full Stop. Overlay Ethereum-USD and Nvidia charts for the past 5 year

The article kind of led with Crypto, but could have easily started and ended with Crypto. Full Stop. Overlay Ethereum-USD and Nvidia charts for the past 5 years and what does that tell you? My take is both Nvidia's stock price and Ethereum-USD price were products of helicopter money. Sure some gamers bought cards, but not on the scale to which miners acquired them. Analysis of mining hash rate post-merge bears this out[0]. With some estimates being $5 to $20 Billion(USD) in newer GPU's that are no longer "profitable."[1] The 'chip' shortage meant Nvidia could not satisfy demand for their products. I posit no amount of chips would have satisfied demand. They, along with many other companies, made record profits during the pandemic. There was just soooo much 'extra' money flowing around with stimulus, overly generous unemployment, PPP, and more. I can't tell you how many people were YOLO'ing every cent of their stimulus into Crypto and WSB stonks. It was an enormous cohort of people based on the explosion of Robinhood and Coinbase use mentioned in WSB subreddit. Mooning and Diamond hands FTW, eh? Mining crypto with gainz from a roulette spin with Robinhood options? Yeah, while we are at it, lets buy 4 mining rigs because mining Ethereum is very, very profitable during this time. The thinking that one can literally turn electricity to heat while making money (even while one sleeps no less) and trade options while one is awake. It may look crazy right now, but the subreddits were non-stop talk like this. There are mining rigs all over my Facebook marketplace and local craigslist now. Crypto winter is here (for who knows how long) and Nvidia is not going to make those types of returns for the extreme foreseeable future. Reality check 101. [0]https://twitter.com/WuBlockchain/status/1552837630278385664 https://twitter.com/WuBlockchain/status/1552837630278385664 [1]https://www.theblock.co/post/168380/whats-left-for-ethereum-gpu-miners-after-the-merge https://www.theblock.co/post/168380/whats-left-for-ethereum-...

jejeyyy77 4y ago
After crypto it will be ML and general cloud computing.
- monkmartinez 4y ago
  How many people do you think are 'into' ML enough to spend $1k+ on a SOTA gpu and associated hardware? I am slowly getting there having moved from Colab to my own set up... However... Ethereum enabled/lured many everyday joes into buying 4+ $1k cards due to the incentive structure of; 'buy mining rig then buy a lambo.' Setting up a GPT-NeoX is orders of magnitude more difficult than pointing GPU compute at Nicehash. I really have a hard time thinking ML will have any meaningful uptake in that regard because the incentive structure isn't the same and its much, much harder. Big cloud seems to be going there own way in regards to compute. GPU's are great for ML, but that doesn't mean they will always hold the crown. TPU's, NVMe storage, and chiplets may find a better path with newer software. I just don't see how Nvidia really thrives without drastically reducing price (less margin). I don't think they are dead, but they are in big trouble as are many companies.
  - jejeyyy77 4y ago
    New Macbook Pros and workstations are now coming with powerful GPU's for ML work. StableDiffusion alone was trained on 256 x Nvidia A100 GPUs.
    - monkmartinez 4y ago
      Correct, MBP's can run stable diffusion and other ML workloads on non-nvidia hardware. I clearly see this becoming a trend. GPT-J, Neo and NeoX run really well on Colab TPU's, again these are not made by Nvidia. Training is dominated by Nvidia, I will not question that as most papers I have seen say something similar. I will say that I do not believe training will always be dominated by Nvidia's datacenter options. Two things that will hasten the withdraw from Nvidia; Cuda and hardware advances around the motherboard (ASICs, RAM proximity, PCIe lanes, data transfer planes, etc). Think about this... what if a company released an ML training/Inference ASIC that used regular DDR4/NVMe, performed like 4 x A100's and cost $8000? Would you be interested? I would! I don't think this is too far off, there has to be someone working on this outside of Google, Apple and Meta.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
        We've had several generations of ASICs already, if TPUs etc aren't much superior to GPUs why would future ASICs be any better.
justapassenger 4y ago
> Overlay Ethereum-USD and Nvidia charts for the past 5 years and what does that tell you? My take is both Nvidia's stock price and Ethereum-USD price were products of helicopter money. Sure some gamers bought cards, but not on the scale to which miners acquired them. While I do get your point, and largely agree, I don't think that stock price is a good comparison. You can overlay also Meta or Amazon stock, and get same conclusions. Last few years were across the board tech bubble.
- monkmartinez 4y ago
  Agreed, it has been very bubbly across the board. However, I think Nvidia (AMD as well) and Ethereum are especially correlated as first and second order effects seem proportional to incentive feedback into their respective ecosystems. Ethereum has been hounded by the 'wastefulness' of mining, which is to say 'proof of stake' wasn't born in a vacuum. Likewise, Nvidia GPU's were being bought at many multiples of msrp in BULK! Call it a perfect storm, call it what you want... but Nvidia has a tough road ahead.

jejeyyy77 4y ago

After crypto it will be ML and general cloud computing.

monkmartinez 4y ago
How many people do you think are 'into' ML enough to spend $1k+ on a SOTA gpu and associated hardware? I am slowly getting there having moved from Colab to my own set up... However... Ethereum enabled/lured many everyday joes into buying 4+ $1k cards due to the incentive structure of; 'buy mining rig then buy a lambo.' Setting up a GPT-NeoX is orders of magnitude more difficult than pointing GPU compute at Nicehash. I really have a hard time thinking ML will have any meaningful uptake in that regard because the incentive structure isn't the same and its much, much harder. Big cloud seems to be going there own way in regards to compute. GPU's are great for ML, but that doesn't mean they will always hold the crown. TPU's, NVMe storage, and chiplets may find a better path with newer software. I just don't see how Nvidia really thrives without drastically reducing price (less margin). I don't think they are dead, but they are in big trouble as are many companies.
- jejeyyy77 4y ago
  New Macbook Pros and workstations are now coming with powerful GPU's for ML work. StableDiffusion alone was trained on 256 x Nvidia A100 GPUs.
  - monkmartinez 4y ago
    Correct, MBP's can run stable diffusion and other ML workloads on non-nvidia hardware. I clearly see this becoming a trend. GPT-J, Neo and NeoX run really well on Colab TPU's, again these are not made by Nvidia. Training is dominated by Nvidia, I will not question that as most papers I have seen say something similar. I will say that I do not believe training will always be dominated by Nvidia's datacenter options. Two things that will hasten the withdraw from Nvidia; Cuda and hardware advances around the motherboard (ASICs, RAM proximity, PCIe lanes, data transfer planes, etc). Think about this... what if a company released an ML training/Inference ASIC that used regular DDR4/NVMe, performed like 4 x A100's and cost $8000? Would you be interested? I would! I don't think this is too far off, there has to be someone working on this outside of Google, Apple and Meta.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
      We've had several generations of ASICs already, if TPUs etc aren't much superior to GPUs why would future ASICs be any better.

justapassenger 4y ago

> Overlay Ethereum-USD and Nvidia charts for the past 5 years and what does that tell you? My take is both Nvidia's stock price and Ethereum-USD price were products of helicopter money. Sure some gamers bought cards, but not on the scale to which miners acquired them. While I do get your point, and largely agree, I don't think that stock price is a good comparison. You can overlay also Meta or Amazon stock, and get same conclusions. Last few years were across the board tech bubble.

monkmartinez 4y ago
Agreed, it has been very bubbly across the board. However, I think Nvidia (AMD as well) and Ethereum are especially correlated as first and second order effects seem proportional to incentive feedback into their respective ecosystems. Ethereum has been hounded by the 'wastefulness' of mining, which is to say 'proof of stake' wasn't born in a vacuum. Likewise, Nvidia GPU's were being bought at many multiples of msrp in BULK! Call it a perfect storm, call it what you want... but Nvidia has a tough road ahead.