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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 ne

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 They bought Mellanox ...and used their technology to replace the outdated NVlink bridge on their datacenter products?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.

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.