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At this point nVidia is an AI and HPC accelerator company that happens to attach video outputs to the accelerator cards for that niche use case. They are still

by api 3y ago

At this point nVidia is an AI and HPC accelerator company that happens to attach video outputs to the accelerator cards for that niche use case. They are still good video cards but that’s a side effect of their main focus.

gtirloni 3y ago
That's true today but it's a really recent development that doesn't justify the current situation with their proprietary blobs. I vaguely remember they made some announcement about planning to push things to the mainline kernel but I've stopped following most of the drama.
- hnfong 3y ago
  CUDA is their main moat, so presumably they don't want to risk having open source drivers provide outsiders an insight to how their hardware works...
thomastjeffery 3y ago
Before that was the case, you could just say "gaming" instead. There is nothing new here from the perspective of Linux users.
torginus 3y ago
Yet said company has a 90%+ market share in its 'side hustle' of gaming GPUs, and makes the SoC for the world's best selling console (the Switch).
- xbmcuser 3y ago
  They sell their non consumer gaming hardware for multiple times the profit. As llm usage keeps increasing I would not be shocked if Nvidia exited the consumer gpu market as it becomes smaller and smaller part of its business.
  - torginus 3y ago
    I feel like this is a perilous outlook - LLMs and other AI might not turn out to be the success stories we want them to be - we are still banking on their future potential instead of their present capabilities. We are with AGI at a similar point we were with self-driving cars circa 2016(?). Back then it was predicted that each car will need a super powerful AI brain to be able to drive itself. We didn't get self driving and I'd bet these fancy driving assistants that we have today in cars don't justify the technological expense that went into them. Gaming is a solid, established business and has been the backbone of NVIDIA's profits. The AI hype is very high now, and it's not clear where its going to go in the future, but it's not going to be stable.
    - nucleardog 3y ago
      Same arguments apply to crypto it seems, but that didn’t stop nvidia basically leaving the gaming market high and dry while the crypto market vacuumed up all of their cards. I agree that’s a perilous approach for nvidia… but based on past behaviour that doesn’t seem to bother them.

by api 3y ago

gtirloni 3y ago

That's true today but it's a really recent development that doesn't justify the current situation with their proprietary blobs. I vaguely remember they made some announcement about planning to push things to the mainline kernel but I've stopped following most of the drama.

hnfong 3y ago
CUDA is their main moat, so presumably they don't want to risk having open source drivers provide outsiders an insight to how their hardware works...

thomastjeffery 3y ago

Before that was the case, you could just say "gaming" instead. There is nothing new here from the perspective of Linux users.

torginus 3y ago

Yet said company has a 90%+ market share in its 'side hustle' of gaming GPUs, and makes the SoC for the world's best selling console (the Switch).

xbmcuser 3y ago
They sell their non consumer gaming hardware for multiple times the profit. As llm usage keeps increasing I would not be shocked if Nvidia exited the consumer gpu market as it becomes smaller and smaller part of its business.
- torginus 3y ago
  I feel like this is a perilous outlook - LLMs and other AI might not turn out to be the success stories we want them to be - we are still banking on their future potential instead of their present capabilities. We are with AGI at a similar point we were with self-driving cars circa 2016(?). Back then it was predicted that each car will need a super powerful AI brain to be able to drive itself. We didn't get self driving and I'd bet these fancy driving assistants that we have today in cars don't justify the technological expense that went into them. Gaming is a solid, established business and has been the backbone of NVIDIA's profits. The AI hype is very high now, and it's not clear where its going to go in the future, but it's not going to be stable.
  - nucleardog 3y ago
    Same arguments apply to crypto it seems, but that didn’t stop nvidia basically leaving the gaming market high and dry while the crypto market vacuumed up all of their cards. I agree that’s a perilous approach for nvidia… but based on past behaviour that doesn’t seem to bother them.