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What is Nvidia's gold mine? They don't make their own chips, right? Doesn't that mean that other companies can quickly catch up, if they are even behind?

xtracto 3y ago
Look at the history of 3dfx . They were up there with envidia at the dawn of 3D graphic cards wars. But bad logistics brought them down. Mainly they decided to manufacture their tech here in Mexico instead of in Asia. But here on Mex we dont have the skills to to such high tech manufacturing.
tverbeure 3y ago
What does Microsoft make? You download bits over a wire and store them on your personal SSD. They don’t make SSDs so it should be trivial for other companies to quickly catch up. For the sake of argument, let’s reduce Nvidia (my employer but I don’t speak for them) to just a silicon vendor. You’re not only ignoring the work of thousands who design the stuff that goes on that silicon, the billions of $ in R&D, you’re also dismissing the decisions about what to put in that design, way before other people do it. Some of those decisions were made years before the actual implementation started. It happens to be something a few people at Nvidia are very good at.
- rnikander 3y ago
  Yes, my short post may sound dismissive, but I work in tech and I'm aware that our industry has lots of legitimate creativity and intellectual property. Of course we also have hype, marketing, BS, and herd stampedes. Some aspects of GPU/parallel design are commonly understood and other companies make such chips. So I guess I was just wondering if Nvidia had a secret sauce, are they ahead of others, and if so by what measure? I work more in software, and I'm not in a position now to evaluate their hardware on the merits.
  - tverbeure 3y ago
    I think your biggest mistake is ignoring the amount of software that runs on top of the hardware. There were times in the past where others had a higher number of FLOPS, but it didn’t make a dent in the usage of CUDA. My standard assumption about anything in tech (and beyond) is that you don’t win on first principles alone (“parallel design is well understood”). It’s the details that make you stand out. Bill Daly gave a great presentation at Hot Chips a few weeks ago that explains how Nvidia’s AI performance was only in small parts due to process improvement. The rest was doing things smarter: matrix sparsity, different number representations and so forth. https://youtu.be/rsxCZAE8QNA?si=IZneUQQ1J7Gtu81H https://youtu.be/rsxCZAE8QNA?si=IZneUQQ1J7Gtu81H
JonChesterfield 3y ago
They built cuda and embedded it as a foundational technology through university partnerships and generally paying attention to developers. Wrote documentation, talked about their tech a lot, generally made the onboarding broadly work. They then had the good fortune that their competitors tried to leverage open source and cross company collaboration. While misc open source winning is sometimes thing, the industry built all their stuff on cuda instead of opencl or openmp. Nvidia thus built their gold mine. I don't think it's impenetrable. There are some design mistakes baked into their system that are going to be difficult to unravel without breaking backwards compatibility.
- TechnicolorByte 3y ago
  Any insight into what those design mistakes are?
somsak2 3y ago
Take a peek at CUDA
throwaway2037 3y ago
They don't make their own chips, right? In 2023, this is a moot point. Neither does Apple. Neither does AMD. Neither does Qualcomm (which makes the vast majority of mobile phone CPUs). Neither does Broadcomm. To your second point: I am surprised that AMD hasn't tried harder to chase the high-end enterprise GPU market. Maybe that is a longer term secret plan after they gain more CPU market share. It is possible that a GPU ecosystem cannot out-compete NVidia's CUDA at this point.

xtracto 3y ago

Look at the history of 3dfx . They were up there with envidia at the dawn of 3D graphic cards wars. But bad logistics brought them down. Mainly they decided to manufacture their tech here in Mexico instead of in Asia. But here on Mex we dont have the skills to to such high tech manufacturing.

tverbeure 3y ago

What does Microsoft make? You download bits over a wire and store them on your personal SSD. They don’t make SSDs so it should be trivial for other companies to quickly catch up. For the sake of argument, let’s reduce Nvidia (my employer but I don’t speak for them) to just a silicon vendor. You’re not only ignoring the work of thousands who design the stuff that goes on that silicon, the billions of $ in R&D, you’re also dismissing the decisions about what to put in that design, way before other people do it. Some of those decisions were made years before the actual implementation started. It happens to be something a few people at Nvidia are very good at.

rnikander 3y ago
Yes, my short post may sound dismissive, but I work in tech and I'm aware that our industry has lots of legitimate creativity and intellectual property. Of course we also have hype, marketing, BS, and herd stampedes. Some aspects of GPU/parallel design are commonly understood and other companies make such chips. So I guess I was just wondering if Nvidia had a secret sauce, are they ahead of others, and if so by what measure? I work more in software, and I'm not in a position now to evaluate their hardware on the merits.
- tverbeure 3y ago
  I think your biggest mistake is ignoring the amount of software that runs on top of the hardware. There were times in the past where others had a higher number of FLOPS, but it didn’t make a dent in the usage of CUDA. My standard assumption about anything in tech (and beyond) is that you don’t win on first principles alone (“parallel design is well understood”). It’s the details that make you stand out. Bill Daly gave a great presentation at Hot Chips a few weeks ago that explains how Nvidia’s AI performance was only in small parts due to process improvement. The rest was doing things smarter: matrix sparsity, different number representations and so forth. https://youtu.be/rsxCZAE8QNA?si=IZneUQQ1J7Gtu81H https://youtu.be/rsxCZAE8QNA?si=IZneUQQ1J7Gtu81H

JonChesterfield 3y ago

They built cuda and embedded it as a foundational technology through university partnerships and generally paying attention to developers. Wrote documentation, talked about their tech a lot, generally made the onboarding broadly work. They then had the good fortune that their competitors tried to leverage open source and cross company collaboration. While misc open source winning is sometimes thing, the industry built all their stuff on cuda instead of opencl or openmp. Nvidia thus built their gold mine. I don't think it's impenetrable. There are some design mistakes baked into their system that are going to be difficult to unravel without breaking backwards compatibility.

TechnicolorByte 3y ago
Any insight into what those design mistakes are?

somsak2 3y ago

Take a peek at CUDA

throwaway2037 3y ago

They don't make their own chips, right? In 2023, this is a moot point. Neither does Apple. Neither does AMD. Neither does Qualcomm (which makes the vast majority of mobile phone CPUs). Neither does Broadcomm. To your second point: I am surprised that AMD hasn't tried harder to chase the high-end enterprise GPU market. Maybe that is a longer term secret plan after they gain more CPU market share. It is possible that a GPU ecosystem cannot out-compete NVidia's CUDA at this point.