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The article mentions this choice being made in 2018. I don't know the ML industry, but as a gamedev I had been mystified about Nvidia's strategy since about 20
by EarthLaunch 3y ago
The article mentions this choice being made in 2018. I don't know the ML industry, but as a gamedev I had been mystified about Nvidia's strategy since about 2018.
It felt like they weren't leaning into crypto, which surprised me. Instead it looked like they were trying to maintain gamer goodwill by not increasing consumer card costs during the boom. Of course scarcity raised secondary market princes, but Nvidia kept MSRP lower than the boom dictated.
It seemed like they were betting against crypto during the craze. And sticking to their strategy on the consumer side. So maybe that's how they stuck to a ML strategy too.
So they had all this CUDA stuff, which they must have invested in heavily because AMD showed what happens when you don't. That led to a software ecosystem for ML.
Maybe it was all luck, but a strategic choice explains some of this in hindsight.
- nerdponx 3y ago> So they had all this CUDA stuff, which they must have invested in heavily because AMD showed what happens when you don't. That led to a software ecosystem for ML. CUDA was already digital gold in 2018. ML had moved to GPUs several years prior, and CUDA was a primary enabler of that transition.
- bonton89 3y agoNvidia had already been through one crypto bust at that point. The long view was that there will be another one and they wanted to keep their more stable markets viable for the future and not get demand slaughtered by mass dumping of used cards on the market when crypto dipped again. Of course, the AI thing exploded afterwards this time so the demand dip didn't happen.
- epolanski 3y ago> Instead it looked like they were trying to maintain gamer goodwill by not increasing consumer card costs during the boom. They've been selling mid-sized GPUs like the GTX 1080 at 800$ 8 years ago. A 300 mm2 GPU. They have been rising and rising costs for a long time to milk as many dollars as they could. People seem to forget even before the crypto craze the company had insane margins in their revenue. They weren't selling 800$ chips because those costed 600 or 500$ to produce... Even the most expensive 4090 is hardly more than a 400$ chip, memories included to build.
- sevagh 3y agoNVIDIA even produced hardware for miners. I don't think they ever cared about discouraging miners or crypto usecases.
- 15155 3y agoThis was about controlling proliferation, increasing yield, and preventing inter-product cannibalization.