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>a justifiable reason for the price discrepancy between the RTX 4090 and the A100 1. they're a publicly listed company operating in a free market in an industr

>a justifiable reason for the price discrepancy between the RTX 4090 and the A100 1. they're a publicly listed company operating in a free market in an industry they themselves helped develop who's purpose is to make returns for their investors, not be liked by the public, they don't need to justify their pricing to their buyers. They're not selling essentials for survival like insulin, baby formula, or housing, they can charge as much as the market will bear for their consumer electronics products. Don't like the pricing? Don't buy it. Simple. Buy from the competition instead or older generations off the second hand market that fit your budget. 2. the price justification is that cutting edge silicon is and will always be in short supply, and buyers of the silicon in A100 form, like datacenters, use it to make money, therefore it's an investment that will yield returns, therefore they can justify spending way more money to outbid the gamers who buy the same silicon in RTX 4090 form and don't use it to make money but use it to play games therefore for them the product is worth less and it makes Nvidia smaller margins than what selling it to datacenters can. It's basic price segmentation that's been going on for decades. I also don't like the GPU pricing situation but that's the market reality I can't change and downvoting the messenger won't change it either. My 2 cents.

ActorNightly 3y ago
Yeah but the issue is that they can make more money if they actually did affordable ML hardware and didn't purposefully gimp the gaming cards. LLms running on standalone affordable boxes could become a ubiquitous home accessory, not to mention the potential for things like being able to leverage learning from widespread use to retrain the models, like Tesla does with their fleet.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  >Yeah but the issue is that they can make more money if they actually did affordable ML hardware and didn't purposefully gimp the gaming cards. It's a dick move but it's not illegal (at least not now). Their purpose is to make greater returns for their investors, not make affordable ML hardware for every consumer. >LLms running on standalone affordable boxes could become a ubiquitous home accessory They could be, but why is it Nvidia's fault if they don't happen? They're in the business of making money, not fulfilling dreams, and currently they can barely fulfill their orders for the datacenter customers. Consumers could move the LLM stuff on cheaper Apple HW or Intel or AMD SoCs if they can't outbid the datacenter companies for Nvidia silicone. Seems like a market opening for Nvidia's competitors to price cut them. If they don't exploit it and let Nvidia dominate, it's their fault. It's not Nvidia's fault their competitors were asleep at the wheel since they launched CUDA in 2007 and were helping researchers put their GPUs to use for parallel computing for over 15 years.
  - gremlinsinc 3y ago
    If AMD were smart(er), their cpu's are awesome at least... They would team up with intel, google, apple, etc to create a machine learning open cuda alternative, such that all GPU's could essentially be used by ML software equally, I think Nvidia's real hold on AI is that most AI libs use CUDA, and nobody else can really compete when all the tools use X, it's like if firefox launched with their own different HTML syntax because HTML was proprietary, and every other browser did the same thing. Something like chrome : chromium dynamic would work wonders for bringing a sort of standard, not to mention more minds could create better and better implementations.
    - ornitorrincos 3y ago
      They did try, apple made OpenCL and released it to khronos to make a standard, but never got wide support(well, they got plenty of manufacturers on board, not so much users). By that time nvidia already had an advantage with CUDA and their opencl support always lagged.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- WheatMillington 3y ago
  NVIDIA are not stupid, they understand their marginal revenue and marginal cost analysis, and they obviously decided they're making the most money doing what they're doing. It's asinine to believe we, with access to almost none of the requisite data, could tell NVIDIA how to turn a better profit.
  - ActorNightly 3y ago
    >decided they're making the most money doing what they're doing Yes, exactly like all the big tech companies with vast departments for market research that hired a shitload of people, then when economy turned, they started doing layoffs. A.k.a short term profit seeking.
scld 3y ago
It's because you're responding as if OP said it wasn't justifiable legally. They're just saying that AMD is, in their estimation, making a bad business decision.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  That's was really not his point. His point was that Nvidia is price gouging and I explained him why they can get away with it since the current market conditions favor their products a lot. AMD has been consistently making bad business decisions in the GPU space for years now. What's new? They're pricing their hardware near NVidia but with less performance and way less features and poor track record, especially for the ML users.
  - wwtrv 3y ago
    Nvidia is price gouging because there is no credible competition. That's the entire explanation and there is nothing more to it.
    - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
      Why are people here continuously surprised by this and keep asking the same redundant questions: "Why does Nvidia charge so much?" I just don't get it. Thinking that Nvidia is some evil villain doing it to consumer out of spite, when they're just doing what any other company in their dominant position would do: charge as much as the market will bear. Apple also doesn't have to charge you $200 for configuring the 512GB SSD over the 256 SSD which only costs them an extra $5 NAND chip, but they do it because they can. So does Nvidia and any other company in a dominant position with virtually no competition.
  - The_Colonel 3y ago
    > His point was that Nvidia is price gouging You might be reading into their comment too much, they don't really blame NVidia, just wish for more competition. IMHO you're being downvoted because you come across as needlessly confrontational to an innocent comment.

ActorNightly 3y ago

Yeah but the issue is that they can make more money if they actually did affordable ML hardware and didn't purposefully gimp the gaming cards. LLms running on standalone affordable boxes could become a ubiquitous home accessory, not to mention the potential for things like being able to leverage learning from widespread use to retrain the models, like Tesla does with their fleet.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
>Yeah but the issue is that they can make more money if they actually did affordable ML hardware and didn't purposefully gimp the gaming cards. It's a dick move but it's not illegal (at least not now). Their purpose is to make greater returns for their investors, not make affordable ML hardware for every consumer. >LLms running on standalone affordable boxes could become a ubiquitous home accessory They could be, but why is it Nvidia's fault if they don't happen? They're in the business of making money, not fulfilling dreams, and currently they can barely fulfill their orders for the datacenter customers. Consumers could move the LLM stuff on cheaper Apple HW or Intel or AMD SoCs if they can't outbid the datacenter companies for Nvidia silicone. Seems like a market opening for Nvidia's competitors to price cut them. If they don't exploit it and let Nvidia dominate, it's their fault. It's not Nvidia's fault their competitors were asleep at the wheel since they launched CUDA in 2007 and were helping researchers put their GPUs to use for parallel computing for over 15 years.
- gremlinsinc 3y ago
  If AMD were smart(er), their cpu's are awesome at least... They would team up with intel, google, apple, etc to create a machine learning open cuda alternative, such that all GPU's could essentially be used by ML software equally, I think Nvidia's real hold on AI is that most AI libs use CUDA, and nobody else can really compete when all the tools use X, it's like if firefox launched with their own different HTML syntax because HTML was proprietary, and every other browser did the same thing. Something like chrome : chromium dynamic would work wonders for bringing a sort of standard, not to mention more minds could create better and better implementations.
  - ornitorrincos 3y ago
    They did try, apple made OpenCL and released it to khronos to make a standard, but never got wide support(well, they got plenty of manufacturers on board, not so much users). By that time nvidia already had an advantage with CUDA and their opencl support always lagged.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
WheatMillington 3y ago
NVIDIA are not stupid, they understand their marginal revenue and marginal cost analysis, and they obviously decided they're making the most money doing what they're doing. It's asinine to believe we, with access to almost none of the requisite data, could tell NVIDIA how to turn a better profit.
- ActorNightly 3y ago
  >decided they're making the most money doing what they're doing Yes, exactly like all the big tech companies with vast departments for market research that hired a shitload of people, then when economy turned, they started doing layoffs. A.k.a short term profit seeking.

scld 3y ago

It's because you're responding as if OP said it wasn't justifiable legally. They're just saying that AMD is, in their estimation, making a bad business decision.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
That's was really not his point. His point was that Nvidia is price gouging and I explained him why they can get away with it since the current market conditions favor their products a lot. AMD has been consistently making bad business decisions in the GPU space for years now. What's new? They're pricing their hardware near NVidia but with less performance and way less features and poor track record, especially for the ML users.
- wwtrv 3y ago
  Nvidia is price gouging because there is no credible competition. That's the entire explanation and there is nothing more to it.
  - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
    Why are people here continuously surprised by this and keep asking the same redundant questions: "Why does Nvidia charge so much?" I just don't get it. Thinking that Nvidia is some evil villain doing it to consumer out of spite, when they're just doing what any other company in their dominant position would do: charge as much as the market will bear. Apple also doesn't have to charge you $200 for configuring the 512GB SSD over the 256 SSD which only costs them an extra $5 NAND chip, but they do it because they can. So does Nvidia and any other company in a dominant position with virtually no competition.
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  > His point was that Nvidia is price gouging You might be reading into their comment too much, they don't really blame NVidia, just wish for more competition. IMHO you're being downvoted because you come across as needlessly confrontational to an innocent comment.