4 ms·

It 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 im

It 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 ago
Nah, that might offshore the dominancy.
- bachmeier 3y ago
  So they'd give up the US market? That doesn't seem likely to happen.
nabla9 3y ago
Monopolies 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 ago
  This is it. Having a monopoly is OK. Being anticompetitive is when you run into trouble, even potentially without a monopoly.
  - lumost 3y ago
    Likely part of the move to merge their drivers into the linux kernel etc.
    - cdchn 3y ago
      Putting drivers in the Linux kernel isn't anticompetitive. Saying they're the only drivers allowed in the Linux kernel would be anticompetitive.
      - lumost 3y ago
        Putting them in an opensource os also helps demonstrate that they aren’t trying to be anti competitive.
- elefanten 3y ago
  While 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 ago
    The 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 ago
  Legal? Sure. OK? I sincerely disagree.
- pests 3y ago
  What about Alcoa?
temp_praneshp 3y ago
Or it would be nice if the regulatory body would fuck off
- HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
  We need more anti monopoly action, not less.
  - Xirgil 3y ago
    We 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 ago
      No 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 ago
    Exactly what Xirgil said, Nvidia shouldn't be punished for being good at their job
echelon 3y ago
It 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 ago
    Geohotz 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?
    - cdchn 3y ago
      Reading about his 8-ish hour stint at post-Musk-acquisition Twitter was really funny.
      - rpmisms 3y ago
        Yeah, it was pretty clear that wasn't gonna work.
- adventured 3y ago
  It 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 ago
OpenCL 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    They 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 ago
  16 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 ago
Dominating 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

It 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 ago

Nah, that might offshore the dominancy.

bachmeier 3y ago
So they'd give up the US market? That doesn't seem likely to happen.

nabla9 3y ago

Monopolies 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 ago
This is it. Having a monopoly is OK. Being anticompetitive is when you run into trouble, even potentially without a monopoly.
- lumost 3y ago
  Likely part of the move to merge their drivers into the linux kernel etc.
  - cdchn 3y ago
    Putting drivers in the Linux kernel isn't anticompetitive. Saying they're the only drivers allowed in the Linux kernel would be anticompetitive.
    - lumost 3y ago
      Putting them in an opensource os also helps demonstrate that they aren’t trying to be anti competitive.
elefanten 3y ago
While 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 ago
  The 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 ago
Legal? Sure. OK? I sincerely disagree.
pests 3y ago
What about Alcoa?

temp_praneshp 3y ago

Or it would be nice if the regulatory body would fuck off

HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
We need more anti monopoly action, not less.
- Xirgil 3y ago
  We 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 ago
    No 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 ago
  Exactly what Xirgil said, Nvidia shouldn't be punished for being good at their job

echelon 3y ago

It 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 ago
  Geohotz 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?
  - cdchn 3y ago
    Reading about his 8-ish hour stint at post-Musk-acquisition Twitter was really funny.
    - rpmisms 3y ago
      Yeah, it was pretty clear that wasn't gonna work.
adventured 3y ago
It 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 ago

OpenCL 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 ago
I 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 ago
  They 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 ago
16 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 ago

Dominating 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