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What's also pretty interesting that they actually didn't sell more chips this quarter - they ... just pretty much doubled the prices (hence the huge margin). T
by TheAlchemist 3y ago
What's also pretty interesting that they actually didn't sell more chips this quarter - they ... just pretty much doubled the prices (hence the huge margin).
This is what having a monopoly looks like !
This is also why companies that manufacture their cards didn't report any uptick in profits. I'm wondering how this play out in some months ? Do they have any pricing power with respect to NVidia ? Or NVidia could just switch to another manufacturer ?
- thfuran 3y agoThere probably isn't another manufacturer they can switch high end stuff to. They recently tried moving at least some of their cards to Samsung but switched back last generation due to yield issues.
- pb7 3y ago[flagged]
- parthdesai 3y ago> Raising prices means you are a monopoly? Not sure if you're intentionally choosing to ignore their point, but what they meant is Nvidia can unilaterally choose to raise the prices and customers can't do anything since they're a monopoly. You can't just say well, i'll go to the next shop and buy something for cheaper.
- issafram 3y agoNot that it's much better, but wouldn't it be a duopoly considering that AMD is also a big player? Hopefully Intel continues to improve it's GPU offerings
- tric 3y ago> wouldn't it be a duopoly considering that AMD is also a big player? I don't think GPUs are commoditized. You can't swap a Nvida GPU with a AMD GPU, and get the same performance/results.
- midhir 3y agoAMD seem to be catching up quickly lately. I'm running Stable Diffusion, Llama-2, and Pytorch on a 7900XTX right now. Getting it up and running even on an unsupported Linux distro is relatively straightforward. Details for Arch are here: https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2584462 https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2584462 The HIP interface even has almost exact interoperability with CUDA, so you don't have to rewrite your code.
- capableweb 3y ago> Not that it's much better, but wouldn't it be a duopoly considering that AMD is also a big player? Not sure AMD would be considered a big player, what would be the percentage threshold for that? According to the Steam Hardware (& Software) Survey (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...), ~75% of computers with Steam running has a NVIDIA GPU, while ~15% has a AMD GPU. AMD is the closest to a competitor NVIDIA has, but they are also very far away from even being close to their market-share. I'm sure in AI/ML spaces, NVIDIA holds a even higher market-share due to CUDA and the rest of the ecosystem, at least in gaming things are pretty much "plug and play" when it comes to switching between AMD/NVIDIA hardware, but no such luck in most cases with AI/ML.
- kelvie 3y agoFor my sake, what number did you look at to come to this conclusion? I'm not used to reading these quarterly reports.
- TheAlchemist 3y agoYou can look at cost of revenue to get an idea.
- Mistletoe 3y agoHow does the Nvidia stranglehold on AI compare to US Steel, Standard Oil and Bell Telephone etc., other monopolies that were broken up?
- zirgs 3y agoThere isn't a monopoly. Their competitors just are really bad at it.
- PheonixPharts 3y ago> This is what having a monopoly looks like ! As someone who has been in the AI/ML space for over a decade, and even had an AMD/Radeon card for more than half of that, I can't help but feel that this is partially AMD's own fault. For many, many years it seemed to me that AMD just didn't take AI/ML seriously whereas, for all it's faults, NVIDIA seemed to catch on very early that ML presented a tremendous potential market. To this day getting things like Stable Diffusion to run on an AMD card requires extra work. At least from my perspective it seems like dedicating a few engineers to getting ROCm working on all major OSes with all major scientific computing/deep learning libraries would have been a pretty good investment. Is there some context I'm missing for why AMD never caught up in this space?
- edgyquant 3y ago100% this. I, and many others, bought multiple AMD cards due to disliking NVidia and tried to get ROCm set up to no avail. It just never worked except under hard to maintain configurations. I switched to an nvidia card and within the hour import tensorflow just worked
- fleischhauf 3y agoto be fair Nvidia drivers are also a nightmare under linux
- jacooper 3y agoNot anymore
- kristopolous 3y agoUntil they are. When the system breaks it breaks real bad. Nvcc/gcc/cuda/kernel mismatches are a pain to match up right. It gets gnarly super fast. All systems hit snags. In most, you skid the tires a bit, maybe lose balance. With nvidia you're flying over the handlebars on to the asphalt. I got snagged by this just about 2 weeks ago. It gets nasty. Not as bad as CUPS, but probably #2.
- BbzzbB 3y agoIsn't this more a case of supply and demand? Huge ramp on chip demand by every FAAMG, every dev and their grandmothers for AI with a mostly inelastic supply (foundry constrained and very specialized atoms tech involved). It's not like Intel and AMD don't exist, but if everyone is pushing each other at the door for Nvidia chips..
- jfoutz 3y agoAmazon, Alphabet, Meta. Who are the F and G, and where is apple?
- buzzerbetrayed 3y agoFacebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google
- SAI_Peregrinus 3y agoWhile I hate using the stupid "meta" name, MAGMA is a much more fun acronym than FAAMG, or GMFAA, or MAGAF, etc.
- aiisjustanif 3y agoMeta Apple Microsoft Alphabet Amazon MAMAA
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- BbzzbB 3y agoIt's cornier and yet still technically incorrect by not using Alphabet. And MAMAA is even cornier without putting in another vowel; arguably Nvidia's N but I feel like it doesn't quite belong. So I stand by my FAAMG, it sounds right, and everyone uses Facebook and Google rather than Meta and Alphabet anyway.
- 3y ago
- JB_Dev 3y agoNvidia and really all chip designers are limited by the fab companies who are trying to scale as fast as they can. But all the cutting edge fabs are limited by one single supplier - ASML. ASML make the lithography machines and have a total monopoly. Even they cannot make lithography machines fast enough to satisfy demand - their lithography machines are sold out 2 years in advance
- paulmd 3y agoThe current limitations are not about litho at all but actually about CoWoS stacking capacity.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- riow 3y ago``` CoWoS stands for Chip on Wafer on Substrate. It is a high-density packaging technology for high-performance chips. TSMC developed CoWoS in 2012. In CoWoS, multiple silicon dies are placed on a silicon interposer, which is an intermediate layer on the package board. The interposer acts as a communication layer for the active die on top. CoWoS is a 2.5D packaging technology. It is widely used in high performance computing. ```
- dekhn 3y agonvidia deserves their monopoly and it's in the US's best interest to let it continue. the other companies have to up their game to compete with a company that has been executing well for 20+ years.
- tomnipotent 3y ago> just pretty much doubled the prices They prices were already double, it was just scummy resellers capturing that value rather than Nvidia.
- ttunguz 3y agoI'm curious where did you find the data point that they sold an equal number of units quarter over quarter?
- hospitalJail 3y ago>This is what having a monopoly looks like ! Yep and we are suffering as a result. Want the best in computing and CUDA? Give M$ and Nvidia money. Linux and Nvidia don't play well. Apple doesn't even attempt to try. The absolute state of computing right here.