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Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market
- nabla9 3y agoWhen 2.5D and 3D packaging is the bottleneck, what are the companies that produce CoWoS materials and equipment?
- mjevans 3y agoIt would be nice if... Maybe some regulatory body could declare this an obvious 'monopoly' and at least force the 'language spoken' to be free for anyone to implement without patent worries?
- anotherhue 3y agoNah, that might offshore the dominancy.
- bachmeier 3y agoSo they'd give up the US market? That doesn't seem likely to happen.
- nabla9 3y agoMonopolies are not illegal per se. Misusing monopoly power is illegal. Nvidia has monopoly in the market, but unless they use their position illeagally, that's OK. GPU market is competitive and Nvidia has put in the work others like AMD or Intel never bothered to do.
- cdchn 3y agoThis is it. Having a monopoly is OK. Being anticompetitive is when you run into trouble, even potentially without a monopoly.
- lumost 3y agoLikely part of the move to merge their drivers into the linux kernel etc.
- elefanten 3y agoWhile this has mostly held, there’s a big push to redefine anti-trust. That’s what the MSFT-Activision case was actually about beneath the surface narrative. The challenger jurisprudence lost, but it got pretty close and has lots of political support. (see: Lina Khan’s management of the FTC, or “New Brandeis movement”)
- nabla9 3y agoThe push is not to make monopoly (defined as market share) illeagal. Lina Khan and others are fighting good fight against misuse of monopoly powers, two sided markets, anticompetitive effects of platform-based business models and so on. GPU market is not natural monopoly, nor is the market structured as monopoly. Nvidia just has a competitive advantage.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoLegal? Sure. OK? I sincerely disagree.
- pests 3y agoWhat about Alcoa?
- temp_praneshp 3y agoOr it would be nice if the regulatory body would fuck off
- HeatrayEnjoyer 3y agoWe need more anti monopoly action, not less.
- Xirgil 3y agoWe need more anti-anticompetitive action. Why should NVidia and those who use their products be punished because their competitors have not stepped up to the plate?
- HeatrayEnjoyer 3y agoNo one is being punished here. Where did anyone talk about prison or criminal charges? Company profits are not the top priority, if it stuffers so that actually important values are preserved, there's no problem with that at all.
- temp_praneshp 3y agoExactly what Xirgil said, Nvidia shouldn't be punished for being good at their job
- echelon 3y agoIt would be nice if AMD got their act together a couple of years ago and wrote good software and drivers, you mean? This lead won't last forever. Everyone in the industry has a vested interest in this collapsing, and there are ongoing assaults from all angles. George Hotz' new company is working to undo this, and there are lots of others. All potential AMD acquisition targets, too. There are lots of little OpenCL-like projects, and consensus is starting to form. Then there's the growing TPU market... Give it two years.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago> George Hotz' new company is working to undo this Is that before or after George Hotz solves homelessness and drug addiction and saves democracy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39206959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39206959)
- rpmisms 3y agoGeohotz is baby Musk. He'll eventually find an area where he can put his brain to ideal use and change the world a bit. He's obviously sharp, but hasn't found the niche that works for him. Musk is obviously a transportation guy. Maybe Hotz will end up in Infra?
- adventured 3y agoIt will take a minimum of 5-10 years to see a meaningful change, if it's not already too late. Absolutely nothing will change about the context in two years, other than Nvidia will be far stronger at that point with $50+ billion per year in operating income (formally joining the hyper profitable US tech giants). It's going to be extraordinarily expensive to build in the GPU data center space at scale. Nvidia will have the money to do it and most of their smaller competitors will not (that includes AMD, which doesn't generate anywhere near enough cash to outlay billions of dollars in a single high risk capital investment pointed at the GPU data center space; AMD's operating income over the last four quarters is negative, and they have a mere $3b in cash). Nvidia will use their new cash spigot to build infrastructure moats in the space. Large governments, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Google, TSMC are the only entities capable of keeping up on spending.
- wongarsu 3y agoOpenCL is only about a year younger than Cuda. Nobody stopped AMD from investing into it. But where Nvidia spent the last 16 years continuously investing into providing the best performance and development experience, AMD rarely invested into either. Instead they focused on video games, with some projects that helped them profit from the crypto hype but lacked the necessary commitment to achieve much of anything beyond that.
- samspenc 3y agoI think this is the right answer, NVidia struck a gold mine with CUDA. It's powerful enough not only for games, graphics and creatives; but could somehow also be easily retrofitted to work in other scenarios such as data center and AI / ML (language and image processing). AMD and Intel's software solutions seem to be pretty lacking and it looks harder to get a full end-to-end AI/ML stack working efficiently on those.
- pjmlp 3y agoThey offered what people where looking for, way to program their GPU that wasn't C. C++, Fortran, anything else with a compiler toolchain against PTX, graphical debugging and IDE integration, and a library ecosystem. Khronos was sceptical that Fortran was even meaningful, and SPIR only came up after NVIDIA was approaching the finish line. Intel and AMD only have themselves to blame.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago16 years ago AMD was on the verge of bankruptcy and was already smaller than Nvidia despite being a company that makes GPUs and CPUs and, at the time, had their own fabs. They had no money to invest in anything, and that didn't really change until Ryzen. You may be able to identify its release date from this graph: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMD/amd/market-cap https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMD/amd/market-cap Now they have to take the money and use it to fix their software. It's pretty obvious why they didn't do that in 2008.
- latchkey 3y ago
- Havoc 3y agoDominating a market is not enough for a monopoly declaration. you’d need to prove some sort of anti competitive practice or similar abuse of said dominance
- bryanlarsen 3y agoIIRC, Intel peaked at 98% of the Data Center CPU Market. AMD released an arguably superior CPU almost 7 years ago, but Intel still has 70%. You might be able to argue that MI300 is competitive, but it is certainly hard to argue it's superior, so we're not yet at the GPU equivalent of the 2017 release of EPYC.
- incrudible 3y agoIntel never had a software moat. AMD has a terrible reputation for software that will be hard to shake.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoReputation is basically meaningless here. If they fix the software, people will figure that out in short order. They just have to actually do it.
- incrudible 3y agoThey are not fixing the software though, and they never do. You have this problem with every new generation, it launches broken and never gets fixed by the time it is obsolete. If you told me they fixed it, I would not even believe you.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoIt doesn't matter if you believe the first person who figures it out. Ten other people will try it and then there will be ten people saying they fixed it and a hundred people will try it. At some point you either believe everyone who has tried it or you lose business because your competitors have figured it out and you haven't.
- incrudible 3y agoTen people saying “it works now” is not going to lead to ten times that many risking their time and money on AMD. “Works for me” is a meme for a reason.
- autoexecbat 3y agoAMD investors must be salivating at taking some of that market share
- incrudible 3y agoAMD should have laid the groundwork a decade ago, instead they basically gave up. Who needs GPGPU anyway, right?
- arcanus 3y ago> Who needs GPGPU anyway, right? The world's largest computer, Frontier at oak ridge national laboratory, runs AMD GPUs. AMD is undisputably the #2 in the GPU space. https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2023/11/ https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2023/11/
- incrudible 3y agoThat is great, did someone ask the programmers about it though? Or did someone else see the higher FLOPs per dollar and bought in? If your job is literally programming a supercomputer and you can get AMD to fix stuff for you, maybe it aint so bad. That is not where most software comes from though.
- autoexecbat 3y agoIt creates demand for the software to be fixed though, helping with the chicken/egg
- latchkey 3y agoThat's why I'm building my own AMD supercomputer, for rent. Let's build the developer flywheel!
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoThis illustrates the power of building a software ecosystem that supports the hardware you are building. Nvidia has committed to CUDA and created an ecosystem. This has been a long term commitment. Meanwhile, Intel (new libaries/paradigms all the time) and AMD (software/drivers/libraries are an afterthought) have struggled in this arena.
- wongarsu 3y agoStrangely Intel manages to do this pretty well in other markets. For example for high-performance computing they have well established libraries like the mkl and, a Fortran compiler and a great C++ compiler. But when it comes to GPUs or accelerator cards they lack commitment, with most projects fizzling out.
- latchkey 3y agoOn Dec 6th, AMD released the MI300x. This is effectively their entry into the AIA (ai accelerator is the new GPU) market. The previous generation (MI250) cards were good, but this new release leapfrogs everything. These cards offer 192gb of ram and pretty great performance. 8 cards in a chassis. Great for training and inference. Sure, we all know that the AMD software needs work, but I think the long bet here is on Lisa. Reminds me of the Mac vs. Windows days. If NVIDIA owns this much of the market, then I'd want to work to decentralize my AI business off a single point of failure. So, I've been working to launch a business to buy up as many of these chips as I can and make them available as bare metal rentals, even with IPMI access. This is something that hasn't been done before. Usually these sorts of AMD cards end up in super computers (ie: Frontier) and/or only accessible to a few people. Azure is catching on with their recent product, but that is a big cloud... I believe people will still want private clouds. To start with, we're loading up the MI300x chassis with tons of RAM/nvme, top end AMD CPUs and dual 400G networking. We've also got top end management servers for Ray/k8s/slurm. We are interested in feedback on what people want and can be agile enough to customize our purchases for your needs. My background is that I built a cluster of 150k AMD GPUs across 7 data centers. Deploying and running a lot of compute is something I've gotten very good at. Feel free to reach out.
- fragmede 3y agothat's awesome! what support are you giving for the rewriting that has to happen for things to run on ROCm or whatever instead of CUDA?
- latchkey 3y agoThanks! Because we are just starting out, in order to stay lean, we are focused on the hardware side at this point. The capex/opex involved with deploying this level of compute is rather insane and I feel that it will be too distracting to solve both problems at the same time. I do fully recognize that in order to build the developer flywheel, we need to solve both problems in the long run. For now, there are other great companies that are focused on solving the software side, such as NeuralFabric, EmbeddedLLM, Lamini and MK1. Our intention is to partner and be friends with all of them. There is a lot of room in the picks/shovels ecosystem for all of us.
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoAs for their market share, it’s only down from here.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]