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Imagine being seriously convinced Nvidia is a good example of a successful tech company, and that Jensen is just a quirky startup CEO and should be worshipped l

Imagine being seriously convinced Nvidia is a good example of a successful tech company, and that Jensen is just a quirky startup CEO and should be worshipped like how people worship Steve Jobs (which is also wrong to do, fwiw). Again and again, Nvidia does everything possible to make shareholder value look good, while robbing both shareholders and customers of value.

epolanski 3y ago
Those are opinions not facts. Anyway, I was writing a longer post but I'll summarize it very simply: lack of competition in the GPU market (which is the cause of your overblown points) isn't Nvidia's fault.
- DiabloD3 3y ago
  How isn't it Nvidia's fault? Nvidia refuses to compete. They refused to compete for the Sony contract, they refused to compete for the Microsoft contract, they've refused to compete for countless Top500 supercomputer contracts. They didn't just not win the bid, they didn't even bother bidding in some cases. They "competed" for the Switch contract because they had a warehouse of SoCs that were made for an era of gaming phablet that never happened and selling them at cost to Nintendo was the best they could do. You know how they chose to compete? They bought Mellanox, a smaller but extremely competitive company in the high bandwidth interconnect market.... which after the Nvidia acquisition, Nvidia dropped the Mellanox name (maybe the most valuable thing in the entire acquisition!) I'm straight up glad I don't own Nvidia stock. I'd have an ulcer if I did. I'm not saying AMD is magically better here, AMD has all of their corporate and technological warts too... but at least they show up and do the job. Nvidia doesn't even show up.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    Why is Nvidia obligated to compete in those arenas? They reserve every right to turn down contracts they don't want. You can't blame Nvidia for products they never released. Plus, all of the situations you listed make sense: - Nvidia didn't have their own x86 core design, so there's no reason to bid on Sony/Microsoft contracts against AMD. - Until recently, Nvidia didn't have a complete system capable of scaling into the Top500 list. - The Switch made sense as it was a mobile device, and Nvidia had been deploying ARM SOCs for almost a decade. > You know how they chose to compete? They bought Mellanox ...and used their technology to replace the outdated NVlink bridge on their datacenter products? The value of that acquisition was in the networking technology, Nvidia spends more on securing TSMC contracts than they did buying Mellanox. It was means to an end for them, and nothing really backfired. It's dumbfounding how people are foaming at the mouth over Nvidia right now. They've published more AI papers than Microsoft and Apple combined, yet everyone pretends like it's dumb luck that they're the platform-of-choice. Nvidia has a lot of places where they could improve, but I don't think you listed any of them.
    - DiabloD3 3y ago
      Nvidia is one of the few companies that were not Intel or AMD to ever ship an x86 core. They used this to great effect in their GPUs as their command processor, they would offload parts of the driver binary into the GPU and execute locally for job setup; they later became an ARM licensee and changed that core out for an ARM one. Their hybrid CPU+GPU design they're trying to sell to customers (Ada Lovelace) is their full sized ARM core (a Tegra descendant) plugged into where the tiny ARM core (to be the command processor) goes. This is also how the Tegra X1 work; in a lot of ways, Ada Lovelace is just a really really big Nintendo Switch SoC, and not too dissimilar to how PASemi designed the M series SoCs, its a very common way to keep designs from ballooning silicon and power requirements in embedded land. Also, I'm not saying Nvidia's Mellanox acquisition was dumb; it was very smart. They bought the company that helped make AMD a household name in the supercomputer world: AMD famously used semi-stock Mellanox IB NICs, with custom firmwares, as their external facing hypertransport links combined with Mellanox IB switches; nothing else made could handle RDMA traffic as low latency AND has high bandwidth they needed, while also being flexible enough to be able to natively speak HTX directly on the bus. AMD had proven over a decade earlier that Mellanox knows how to be part of this. Nvidia could have used Mellanox parts at any point, btw. They just chose not to compete.
      - smoldesu 3y ago
        > Nvidia is one of the few companies that were not Intel or AMD to ever ship an x86 core You are talking about embedded 32-bit microcontrollers. By your logic, Rockchip, Motorola and Texas Instruments should have also been bidding on Sony and Microsoft's contracts. I don't think this even warrants a response. > Nvidia could have used Mellanox parts at any point, btw. They just chose not to compete. They certainly showed up to compete. You might not think their moves are fair or friendly, but that's how things go in love and war. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
- lmm 3y ago
  Lack of competition may not be their fault, but it can be the reason they're sitting on third base thinking they hit a triple. Being successful while you're in a low-competition position doesn't necessarily mean you're running your company well.

epolanski 3y ago

Those are opinions not facts. Anyway, I was writing a longer post but I'll summarize it very simply: lack of competition in the GPU market (which is the cause of your overblown points) isn't Nvidia's fault.

DiabloD3 3y ago
How isn't it Nvidia's fault? Nvidia refuses to compete. They refused to compete for the Sony contract, they refused to compete for the Microsoft contract, they've refused to compete for countless Top500 supercomputer contracts. They didn't just not win the bid, they didn't even bother bidding in some cases. They "competed" for the Switch contract because they had a warehouse of SoCs that were made for an era of gaming phablet that never happened and selling them at cost to Nintendo was the best they could do. You know how they chose to compete? They bought Mellanox, a smaller but extremely competitive company in the high bandwidth interconnect market.... which after the Nvidia acquisition, Nvidia dropped the Mellanox name (maybe the most valuable thing in the entire acquisition!) I'm straight up glad I don't own Nvidia stock. I'd have an ulcer if I did. I'm not saying AMD is magically better here, AMD has all of their corporate and technological warts too... but at least they show up and do the job. Nvidia doesn't even show up.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  Why is Nvidia obligated to compete in those arenas? They reserve every right to turn down contracts they don't want. You can't blame Nvidia for products they never released. Plus, all of the situations you listed make sense: - Nvidia didn't have their own x86 core design, so there's no reason to bid on Sony/Microsoft contracts against AMD. - Until recently, Nvidia didn't have a complete system capable of scaling into the Top500 list. - The Switch made sense as it was a mobile device, and Nvidia had been deploying ARM SOCs for almost a decade. > You know how they chose to compete? They bought Mellanox ...and used their technology to replace the outdated NVlink bridge on their datacenter products? The value of that acquisition was in the networking technology, Nvidia spends more on securing TSMC contracts than they did buying Mellanox. It was means to an end for them, and nothing really backfired. It's dumbfounding how people are foaming at the mouth over Nvidia right now. They've published more AI papers than Microsoft and Apple combined, yet everyone pretends like it's dumb luck that they're the platform-of-choice. Nvidia has a lot of places where they could improve, but I don't think you listed any of them.
  - DiabloD3 3y ago
    Nvidia is one of the few companies that were not Intel or AMD to ever ship an x86 core. They used this to great effect in their GPUs as their command processor, they would offload parts of the driver binary into the GPU and execute locally for job setup; they later became an ARM licensee and changed that core out for an ARM one. Their hybrid CPU+GPU design they're trying to sell to customers (Ada Lovelace) is their full sized ARM core (a Tegra descendant) plugged into where the tiny ARM core (to be the command processor) goes. This is also how the Tegra X1 work; in a lot of ways, Ada Lovelace is just a really really big Nintendo Switch SoC, and not too dissimilar to how PASemi designed the M series SoCs, its a very common way to keep designs from ballooning silicon and power requirements in embedded land. Also, I'm not saying Nvidia's Mellanox acquisition was dumb; it was very smart. They bought the company that helped make AMD a household name in the supercomputer world: AMD famously used semi-stock Mellanox IB NICs, with custom firmwares, as their external facing hypertransport links combined with Mellanox IB switches; nothing else made could handle RDMA traffic as low latency AND has high bandwidth they needed, while also being flexible enough to be able to natively speak HTX directly on the bus. AMD had proven over a decade earlier that Mellanox knows how to be part of this. Nvidia could have used Mellanox parts at any point, btw. They just chose not to compete.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      > Nvidia is one of the few companies that were not Intel or AMD to ever ship an x86 core You are talking about embedded 32-bit microcontrollers. By your logic, Rockchip, Motorola and Texas Instruments should have also been bidding on Sony and Microsoft's contracts. I don't think this even warrants a response. > Nvidia could have used Mellanox parts at any point, btw. They just chose not to compete. They certainly showed up to compete. You might not think their moves are fair or friendly, but that's how things go in love and war. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
lmm 3y ago
Lack of competition may not be their fault, but it can be the reason they're sitting on third base thinking they hit a triple. Being successful while you're in a low-competition position doesn't necessarily mean you're running your company well.