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Calling it a "valley" almost seems silly. They're returning to normal after a boom perpetuated on smoke. Nvidia will be fine. Investors don't like to see it be

Calling it a "valley" almost seems silly. They're returning to normal after a boom perpetuated on smoke. Nvidia will be fine. Investors don't like to see it because they somehow couldn't comprehend that the growth they saw was completely artificial (how is beyond me), but the company will be fine. Their latest decision with the 4000 series was smart though. They realized suckers will pay insane amounts for the cards, even disregarding prior crypto. So, make 4000 series insanely expensive. That will drive sales of 3000 series to empty the over-supply and make their relatively lower prices look like a steal. In the end, they get people to way over-pay on both the 3000 and 4000 series. Double dipping!

izacus 4y ago
I wonder if "the investors" are mostly just AI trading algorithms with impulse control and intelligence of a 6 year old. Nothing else explains the short sightedness of modern markets.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  I think the investors are just hopping stocks. Nvidia was generating extreme profits, now that that's over they'll jump to another hypey thing. Energy perhaps. They don't care about the companies they back. Just about money. It's causing good companies with a long-term vision to suffer (note I'm not considering Nvidia one of these) and promoting the hollow-shell money grabbers and pyramid schemes. I don't know how it can be solved though.. We've made this situation ourselves by speeding business up to "the speed of light". Perhaps a bigger role for governments in investment but I know that's cursing in the American church of the free market :) But in the long term we really have to find some stability back in the system IMO.
  - lmm 4y ago
    IMO the instability was always "really" there, but reduced information flow hid those fluctuations. Maybe we just need to get used to the instability - business is risky and will have ups and downs, responding quickly ultimately makes the system more efficient in the long run.
theandrewbailey 4y ago
Same thing happened during the last crypto boom. It was impossible to find 1000 series cards, and Nvidia saw how much people were willing to pay, so they priced the 2000 series high, just as (former) crypto miners were selling 1000 series cards.
bitL 4y ago
Whether it is smart or not remains to be seen. AMD might step up and obliterate 40x0 in price/performance.
- capableweb 4y ago
  In the price-sensitive consumer space, price/performance matters a lot. But all the other places, libraries/SDKs/interoperability matters as much or more. Most of all the Stable Diffusion stuff that is appearing is heavily powered by nvidia cores, with AMD support being spotty at best. Same goes for many other areas in AI/ML.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    AMD compatibility (via ROCM) for Tensorflow and PyTorch are perfectly workable (albeit a little finicky on old AMD cards). Stories of AMD's ML demise are greatly exaggerated.
    - capableweb 4y ago
      Sure, for Tensorflow and PyTorch, you can use shims. But there are countless of other examples. I'm not saying it's impossible, but even you have to agree that the tooling is not as mature and extensive as with nvidia?
      - sangnoir 4y ago
        AMD upstream their changes: no need for shims for either library. From my point as a dabbler in the arts - most implementations [1] of ML papers use pytorch, tensorflow or other high-level libraries. I'm yet to see one implemented in CUDA directly. 1. e.g. Huggingface transformers or stable diffusion
- izacus 4y ago
  That's about as likely as Matrox suddenly being resurrected as the leader in professional graphics. These are huge complex chips.
omegalulw 4y ago
> They realized suckers will pay insane amounts for the cards, even disregarding prior crypto. Press X to doubt. People are PISSED, and the 30 series is already excellent value. 4090 will sell but I have my doubts on the 4080 (esp 12 GB).
- izacus 4y ago
  I'm willing to bet a case of lager that 40xx will sell out like hot cakes when gamer teenage angst passes. Gamer community is known for teenage rage outbursts which are of dubious practicality or reason.
  - fragmede 4y ago
    Belittling the community, calling them teenagers, and telling them to "get over it" doesn't actually materialize $1,600 to be able to buy the card though. Especially right in the middle of a period of inflation and economic downturn. And then there's the competition Nvidia is in with themselves given then glut of used 3090 cards on the market, and the 3090 was only selling priced so high because of crypto mining in the first place, and that's gone now. Who knows, maybe you're right or maybe Nvidia's in for a valley, or Nvidia will end up dropping their prices.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    Yeah, I remember a similar fit thrown around the 20xx series release not that long ago. I had a 1080Ti at the time, so i didn't care to upgrade. Comes around the release time of 30xx, suddenly almost everyone i knew and everyone on reddit was upgrading from their 20xx series cards (or complaining how overpriced 30xx series was and how they weren't going to upgrade to it from 20xx).
- Night_Thastus 4y ago
  People say they're pissed, but open their wallets all the same. I wouldn't correlate internet outrage to anything real. Same as every time people say they're going to boycott anything online.
ckastner 4y ago
> Investors don't like to see it because they somehow couldn't comprehend that the growth they saw was completely artificial (how is beyond me) This was absolutely fascinating to watch over the past 18 months. Anyone looking for GPUs starting from February 2021 new exactly what was going on. Cards were being gobbled up by miners. They never made it to any shelf for a consumer to buy; webshops were botted, very few humans had a chance to buy. Regular consumers only got them on eBay or similar. And it was blindingly obvious that consumers weren't paying four figures markup for certain cards. When ETH skyrocketed to almost $5000, a friend of mine was reselling 3060 Tis he bought for €419 from Nvidia's webshop, using a bot he wrote, and resold them for €1250. His regular buyer took all cards he could get his hands on (dozens per month), and resold them to central European countries (popular among miners) for even more markup. Again, this was blindingly obvious. Availability of cards followed the ETH price; when ETH dipped in summer 2021, cards became available again. When ETH went up towards the end of the year, my friend was selling used 3080s for €1800 again. Then ETH started to crash again, and suddenly Nvidia was facing a massive oversupply. The fact that Nvidia to this day refuse to acknowledge the role that miners played in artificially inflating growth is weasily, to say the least.
tomatotomato37 4y ago
The pricing of their cards are probably fine once you consider how stupid expensive fab costs are going to be, but their PR both communicating that and their weirdass 4080 naming nonsense is still hot garbage. I do agree though that their long-term fundamentals are fine. They're still reactive enough to be competitive with AMD (another company with strong fundamentals), avoided amateur mistakes like going full cryptobro, and they just generally positioned themselves well in the global market.
- flumpcakes 4y ago
  Fab expenses haven't raised that much, meanwhile the margin for AIB has gone from 30% to 5%. Nvidia is making huge margins on their chips, probably the most of any company selling to consumers.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    > Fab expenses haven't raised that much, mega wrong, 5nm is 10x the product R&D cost and probably something close to 20x the wafer cost of 28nm when that was current. https://semiengineering.com/big-trouble-at-3nm/ https://semiengineering.com/big-trouble-at-3nm/ https://www.techpowerup.com/272267/alleged-prices-of-tsmc-silicon-wafers-appear https://www.techpowerup.com/272267/alleged-prices-of-tsmc-si... the estimate I've seen is that AD102 is 2.2x the cost of GA102, I personally think that might be an undercount. Samsung 8nm was cheap as fuck, NVIDIA is using a customized TSMC N5P with optical shrink, but ironically maybe yields might go up? there were always rumors about samsung 8nm sucking ass anyway it only gets worse, 5nm design costs were $542b and comparable 3nm design costs are projected at $1.5b, for a "complex NVIDIA GPU" (a Hopper successor I guess). Node costs are probably gonna roughly double again. 6nm is gonna be very popular because it's the only node that isn't zooming upwards in cost faster than the benefits can be justified to the consumer.

izacus 4y ago

I wonder if "the investors" are mostly just AI trading algorithms with impulse control and intelligence of a 6 year old. Nothing else explains the short sightedness of modern markets.

GekkePrutser 4y ago
I think the investors are just hopping stocks. Nvidia was generating extreme profits, now that that's over they'll jump to another hypey thing. Energy perhaps. They don't care about the companies they back. Just about money. It's causing good companies with a long-term vision to suffer (note I'm not considering Nvidia one of these) and promoting the hollow-shell money grabbers and pyramid schemes. I don't know how it can be solved though.. We've made this situation ourselves by speeding business up to "the speed of light". Perhaps a bigger role for governments in investment but I know that's cursing in the American church of the free market :) But in the long term we really have to find some stability back in the system IMO.
- lmm 4y ago
  IMO the instability was always "really" there, but reduced information flow hid those fluctuations. Maybe we just need to get used to the instability - business is risky and will have ups and downs, responding quickly ultimately makes the system more efficient in the long run.

theandrewbailey 4y ago

Same thing happened during the last crypto boom. It was impossible to find 1000 series cards, and Nvidia saw how much people were willing to pay, so they priced the 2000 series high, just as (former) crypto miners were selling 1000 series cards.

bitL 4y ago

Whether it is smart or not remains to be seen. AMD might step up and obliterate 40x0 in price/performance.

capableweb 4y ago
In the price-sensitive consumer space, price/performance matters a lot. But all the other places, libraries/SDKs/interoperability matters as much or more. Most of all the Stable Diffusion stuff that is appearing is heavily powered by nvidia cores, with AMD support being spotty at best. Same goes for many other areas in AI/ML.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  AMD compatibility (via ROCM) for Tensorflow and PyTorch are perfectly workable (albeit a little finicky on old AMD cards). Stories of AMD's ML demise are greatly exaggerated.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Sure, for Tensorflow and PyTorch, you can use shims. But there are countless of other examples. I'm not saying it's impossible, but even you have to agree that the tooling is not as mature and extensive as with nvidia?
    - sangnoir 4y ago
      AMD upstream their changes: no need for shims for either library. From my point as a dabbler in the arts - most implementations [1] of ML papers use pytorch, tensorflow or other high-level libraries. I'm yet to see one implemented in CUDA directly. 1. e.g. Huggingface transformers or stable diffusion
izacus 4y ago
That's about as likely as Matrox suddenly being resurrected as the leader in professional graphics. These are huge complex chips.

omegalulw 4y ago

> They realized suckers will pay insane amounts for the cards, even disregarding prior crypto. Press X to doubt. People are PISSED, and the 30 series is already excellent value. 4090 will sell but I have my doubts on the 4080 (esp 12 GB).

izacus 4y ago
I'm willing to bet a case of lager that 40xx will sell out like hot cakes when gamer teenage angst passes. Gamer community is known for teenage rage outbursts which are of dubious practicality or reason.
- fragmede 4y ago
  Belittling the community, calling them teenagers, and telling them to "get over it" doesn't actually materialize $1,600 to be able to buy the card though. Especially right in the middle of a period of inflation and economic downturn. And then there's the competition Nvidia is in with themselves given then glut of used 3090 cards on the market, and the 3090 was only selling priced so high because of crypto mining in the first place, and that's gone now. Who knows, maybe you're right or maybe Nvidia's in for a valley, or Nvidia will end up dropping their prices.
- filoleg 4y ago
  Yeah, I remember a similar fit thrown around the 20xx series release not that long ago. I had a 1080Ti at the time, so i didn't care to upgrade. Comes around the release time of 30xx, suddenly almost everyone i knew and everyone on reddit was upgrading from their 20xx series cards (or complaining how overpriced 30xx series was and how they weren't going to upgrade to it from 20xx).
Night_Thastus 4y ago
People say they're pissed, but open their wallets all the same. I wouldn't correlate internet outrage to anything real. Same as every time people say they're going to boycott anything online.

ckastner 4y ago

> Investors don't like to see it because they somehow couldn't comprehend that the growth they saw was completely artificial (how is beyond me) This was absolutely fascinating to watch over the past 18 months. Anyone looking for GPUs starting from February 2021 new exactly what was going on. Cards were being gobbled up by miners. They never made it to any shelf for a consumer to buy; webshops were botted, very few humans had a chance to buy. Regular consumers only got them on eBay or similar. And it was blindingly obvious that consumers weren't paying four figures markup for certain cards. When ETH skyrocketed to almost $5000, a friend of mine was reselling 3060 Tis he bought for €419 from Nvidia's webshop, using a bot he wrote, and resold them for €1250. His regular buyer took all cards he could get his hands on (dozens per month), and resold them to central European countries (popular among miners) for even more markup. Again, this was blindingly obvious. Availability of cards followed the ETH price; when ETH dipped in summer 2021, cards became available again. When ETH went up towards the end of the year, my friend was selling used 3080s for €1800 again. Then ETH started to crash again, and suddenly Nvidia was facing a massive oversupply. The fact that Nvidia to this day refuse to acknowledge the role that miners played in artificially inflating growth is weasily, to say the least.

tomatotomato37 4y ago

The pricing of their cards are probably fine once you consider how stupid expensive fab costs are going to be, but their PR both communicating that and their weirdass 4080 naming nonsense is still hot garbage. I do agree though that their long-term fundamentals are fine. They're still reactive enough to be competitive with AMD (another company with strong fundamentals), avoided amateur mistakes like going full cryptobro, and they just generally positioned themselves well in the global market.

flumpcakes 4y ago
Fab expenses haven't raised that much, meanwhile the margin for AIB has gone from 30% to 5%. Nvidia is making huge margins on their chips, probably the most of any company selling to consumers.
- paulmd 4y ago
  > Fab expenses haven't raised that much, mega wrong, 5nm is 10x the product R&D cost and probably something close to 20x the wafer cost of 28nm when that was current. https://semiengineering.com/big-trouble-at-3nm/ https://semiengineering.com/big-trouble-at-3nm/ https://www.techpowerup.com/272267/alleged-prices-of-tsmc-silicon-wafers-appear https://www.techpowerup.com/272267/alleged-prices-of-tsmc-si... the estimate I've seen is that AD102 is 2.2x the cost of GA102, I personally think that might be an undercount. Samsung 8nm was cheap as fuck, NVIDIA is using a customized TSMC N5P with optical shrink, but ironically maybe yields might go up? there were always rumors about samsung 8nm sucking ass anyway it only gets worse, 5nm design costs were $542b and comparable 3nm design costs are projected at $1.5b, for a "complex NVIDIA GPU" (a Hopper successor I guess). Node costs are probably gonna roughly double again. 6nm is gonna be very popular because it's the only node that isn't zooming upwards in cost faster than the benefits can be justified to the consumer.