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It seems deeply overvalued to me, as it's pretty likely that NVIDIA's competitors will have parallel computation hardware that competes well enough. I'm persona

It seems deeply overvalued to me, as it's pretty likely that NVIDIA's competitors will have parallel computation hardware that competes well enough. I'm personally not a fan of NVIDIA's drivers or the reliability of their hardware.

teaearlgraycold 3y ago
Google is actually working on 1st party datacenter chips. Although I doubt those would be user-facing GPUs.
- Laremere 3y ago
  Google Pixels have a "neural core", and they have edge TPUs in addition to their data center TPUs. However Google hardware seems much less poised to take immediate advantage of the AI gold rush.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  The last decade of Google datacenter engineering can be viewed as an elaborate plan to avoid paying either Intel or Nvidia any more money than was really necessary.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    And, yet.
    - what_ever 3y ago
      Yet, what?
      - kccqzy 3y ago
        Yet, Google's customers still demand Google to pay Nvidia exorbitantly.
        fnordpiglet 3y ago
        And intel.
        teaearlgraycold 3y ago
        Google has plenty of first party servers.
- ein0p 3y ago
  Nobody other than Anthropic and a few other large cloud customers like that really cares what Google is working on. They bet the farm on a DL framework (Jax) with 2% market share. That’s a very deep hole to climb out of, particularly considering the popularity of PyTorch in generative AI space.
dave_sullivan 3y ago
> I'm personally not a fan of NVIDIA's drivers or the reliability of their hardware. As compared to AMD or Intel? I wish there was real competition to Nvidia but there isn't. I'm not a fan of their defacto monopoly but they do have the best product on the market and their competition has been asleep for 10 years. AMD and Intel barely knew what deep learning was 10 years ago (and certainly did not appreciate the opportunity) and Nvidia was already investing heavily.
- pas 3y ago
  > Nvidia was already investing heavily that sounds very interesting, can you link/share/describe some details on it? how much did they invest? how? into CUDA? what else?
  - dave_sullivan 3y ago
    My statements based on high level meetings I had at the time with all 3 companies when I had started an early neural network PaaS company and was looking for them to invest. Nvidia knew what they were talking about and were already moving that direction, Intel heard about deep learning somewhere but didn't believe there was anything there, and AMD didn't know anything about anything.
    - wslh 3y ago
      Seems like a tale already told on "Only The Paranoid Survive" by Andrew Grove. Now Jensen should add some chapters. BTW I just discovered that their web page/brand is fully invested in AI, the title is: "World Leader in Artificial Intelligence Computing". I am curious about your PaaS because we were analyzing that business for fun first. A small thread here in HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39329764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39329764
      - dave_sullivan 3y ago
        > I am curious about your PaaS because we were analyzing that business for fun first. Here's an old tutorial video of the product: https://youtu.be/V2q9hVdi80w https://youtu.be/V2q9hVdi80w We were doing cool things and on the cutting edge but ultimately couldn't make a business out of it and weren't talking to the right people.
rgmerk 3y ago
Not having done any GPU programming...is most of the code out there tied to the Nvidia architecture? I mean, if AMD or somebody else builds a better mousetrap, how much work would it be to switch?
- cowsandmilk 3y ago
  Most of the AI and ML related programming uses frameworks that abstract away what brand of GPU you are using. They could care less whether it is nvidia or AMD.
  - latchkey 3y ago
    This is true for making things just work, however to really squeeze performance out of a GPU, you need to go lower level and that is tied to the architecture.
    - virtue3 3y ago
      This has happened before and it will probably go the same way. Software and compilers will make up the difference, or hardware will become so cheap and ubiquitous it wont super matter. In 3-5 years what will a 10% performance difference matter to you? Then calculate how much that 10% performance difference is going to cost in real dollars to run on nvidia hw and then the fun math should start.
      - latchkey 3y ago
        Performance for GPUs isn't just speed, but also power efficiency. The complexity of GPUs doesn't lend itself to just being solved with better tooling. They are also not going to get cheaper... especially the high end ones with tons of HBM3 memory. Given that data centers only have so much power and AI really needs to be in the same data center as the data, if you can squeeze out a bit more power efficiency so you can fit more cards, you are getting gains there as well. When I was mining ethereum, the guy who wrote the mining software used an oscilloscope to squeeze an an extra 5-10% out of our cards and that was after having used them for years. That translated to saving about 1 MW of power across all of our data centers. Let me also remind you that GPUs are silicon snowflakes. No two perform exactly the same. They all require very specific individual tuning to get the best performance out of them. This tuning is not even at the software level, but actual changes to voltage/memory timings/clock speeds.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
I’m not sure I would bet an ads/spyware company with admittedly deep deep pockets would beat a specialized hyper focused company at its core business, especially as they have deeper pockets now with 30 years of experience in the sub sector. If Nvidia were wandering in the desert like Cisco I could believe it. But Nvidia isn’t, and I don’t believe Google, Amazon, or others will beat Nvidia at their own game. (Given my time in FAANG, I also speak from inside knowledge of how deeply f’ed these companies are - making your own arm chip or network adapter isn’t the same thing as taking on high end designers at their own game)
- tuyguntn 3y ago
  don't underestimate market forces. Same could have been told about Intel, but Apple anyway beat them in some ways and took away big market share
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Intel isn’t top of their game and haven’t been for many many years.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      Intel knows how to make software and libraries for their hardware, which is the thing people keep lamenting about AMD. Intel's current GPUs are mediocre but priced competitively for what they are, and Intel having more competitive hardware in the future is not implausible. Which could lead to Intel realizing the opportunity they have. Create decent libraries that work across every vendor's GPUs. In the short term this helps AMD at the expense of Nvidia, which in itself helps Intel by preventing Nvidia from maintaining a moat. In the medium term Intel then has people using Intel's libraries to write code that will work on their future GPUs and then their problem is limited to producing competitive hardware.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    AMD has taken more CPU market share from Intel than Apple. But the weird thing about the "Nvidia will remain undefeated forever" theory is that it seems to assume they have some kind of permanent advantage. Nvidia was well positioned to make an early investment in this because they had the right combination of existing technology and resources. Other companies would have had to invest more because they were starting from a different place (e.g. Microsoft), or didn't have the resources to invest at the time (AMD). But now the market is proven and there are more than half a dozen 800 pound gorillas who all want a piece of it. It's like betting that Tesla will retain their 2022 market share in electric car market even as the market grows and everyone else gets in. Maybe some of the others will stumble, but all of them? Apple, AMD, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook?
nalllar 3y ago
Their biggest competitor in the GPU space is AMD who have spent years chasing deadlock issues that won't stay fixed, playing whackamole, in between trying to do actual driver development. Following the amdgpu mailing list is not fun.
eru 3y ago
Feel free to short sell NVIDIA?
nicce 3y ago
> I'm personally not a fan of NVIDIA's drivers A bit funny thing is that they are essentially software company which focuses on software quality, if you look at the stats how many people are working with software over there. And still it is not good enough?
- stubish 3y ago
  I'd welcome a lot fewer software developers, so I get drivers rather than the bloated driver lifestyle synergy experience with cloud mess. So many companies spend so much money developing software that alienates and aggravates their customers. I blame HP, who by my recollection started it with printer drivers that required a custom installer and a CD.

teaearlgraycold 3y ago

Google is actually working on 1st party datacenter chips. Although I doubt those would be user-facing GPUs.

Laremere 3y ago
Google Pixels have a "neural core", and they have edge TPUs in addition to their data center TPUs. However Google hardware seems much less poised to take immediate advantage of the AI gold rush.
jeffbee 3y ago
The last decade of Google datacenter engineering can be viewed as an elaborate plan to avoid paying either Intel or Nvidia any more money than was really necessary.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  And, yet.
  - what_ever 3y ago
    Yet, what?
    - kccqzy 3y ago
      Yet, Google's customers still demand Google to pay Nvidia exorbitantly.
      - fnordpiglet 3y ago
        And intel.
      - teaearlgraycold 3y ago
        Google has plenty of first party servers.
ein0p 3y ago
Nobody other than Anthropic and a few other large cloud customers like that really cares what Google is working on. They bet the farm on a DL framework (Jax) with 2% market share. That’s a very deep hole to climb out of, particularly considering the popularity of PyTorch in generative AI space.

dave_sullivan 3y ago

> I'm personally not a fan of NVIDIA's drivers or the reliability of their hardware. As compared to AMD or Intel? I wish there was real competition to Nvidia but there isn't. I'm not a fan of their defacto monopoly but they do have the best product on the market and their competition has been asleep for 10 years. AMD and Intel barely knew what deep learning was 10 years ago (and certainly did not appreciate the opportunity) and Nvidia was already investing heavily.

pas 3y ago
> Nvidia was already investing heavily that sounds very interesting, can you link/share/describe some details on it? how much did they invest? how? into CUDA? what else?
- dave_sullivan 3y ago
  My statements based on high level meetings I had at the time with all 3 companies when I had started an early neural network PaaS company and was looking for them to invest. Nvidia knew what they were talking about and were already moving that direction, Intel heard about deep learning somewhere but didn't believe there was anything there, and AMD didn't know anything about anything.
  - wslh 3y ago
    Seems like a tale already told on "Only The Paranoid Survive" by Andrew Grove. Now Jensen should add some chapters. BTW I just discovered that their web page/brand is fully invested in AI, the title is: "World Leader in Artificial Intelligence Computing". I am curious about your PaaS because we were analyzing that business for fun first. A small thread here in HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39329764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39329764
    - dave_sullivan 3y ago
      > I am curious about your PaaS because we were analyzing that business for fun first. Here's an old tutorial video of the product: https://youtu.be/V2q9hVdi80w https://youtu.be/V2q9hVdi80w We were doing cool things and on the cutting edge but ultimately couldn't make a business out of it and weren't talking to the right people.

rgmerk 3y ago

Not having done any GPU programming...is most of the code out there tied to the Nvidia architecture? I mean, if AMD or somebody else builds a better mousetrap, how much work would it be to switch?

cowsandmilk 3y ago
Most of the AI and ML related programming uses frameworks that abstract away what brand of GPU you are using. They could care less whether it is nvidia or AMD.
- latchkey 3y ago
  This is true for making things just work, however to really squeeze performance out of a GPU, you need to go lower level and that is tied to the architecture.
  - virtue3 3y ago
    This has happened before and it will probably go the same way. Software and compilers will make up the difference, or hardware will become so cheap and ubiquitous it wont super matter. In 3-5 years what will a 10% performance difference matter to you? Then calculate how much that 10% performance difference is going to cost in real dollars to run on nvidia hw and then the fun math should start.
    - latchkey 3y ago
      Performance for GPUs isn't just speed, but also power efficiency. The complexity of GPUs doesn't lend itself to just being solved with better tooling. They are also not going to get cheaper... especially the high end ones with tons of HBM3 memory. Given that data centers only have so much power and AI really needs to be in the same data center as the data, if you can squeeze out a bit more power efficiency so you can fit more cards, you are getting gains there as well. When I was mining ethereum, the guy who wrote the mining software used an oscilloscope to squeeze an an extra 5-10% out of our cards and that was after having used them for years. That translated to saving about 1 MW of power across all of our data centers. Let me also remind you that GPUs are silicon snowflakes. No two perform exactly the same. They all require very specific individual tuning to get the best performance out of them. This tuning is not even at the software level, but actual changes to voltage/memory timings/clock speeds.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

I’m not sure I would bet an ads/spyware company with admittedly deep deep pockets would beat a specialized hyper focused company at its core business, especially as they have deeper pockets now with 30 years of experience in the sub sector. If Nvidia were wandering in the desert like Cisco I could believe it. But Nvidia isn’t, and I don’t believe Google, Amazon, or others will beat Nvidia at their own game. (Given my time in FAANG, I also speak from inside knowledge of how deeply f’ed these companies are - making your own arm chip or network adapter isn’t the same thing as taking on high end designers at their own game)

tuyguntn 3y ago
don't underestimate market forces. Same could have been told about Intel, but Apple anyway beat them in some ways and took away big market share
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Intel isn’t top of their game and haven’t been for many many years.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    Intel knows how to make software and libraries for their hardware, which is the thing people keep lamenting about AMD. Intel's current GPUs are mediocre but priced competitively for what they are, and Intel having more competitive hardware in the future is not implausible. Which could lead to Intel realizing the opportunity they have. Create decent libraries that work across every vendor's GPUs. In the short term this helps AMD at the expense of Nvidia, which in itself helps Intel by preventing Nvidia from maintaining a moat. In the medium term Intel then has people using Intel's libraries to write code that will work on their future GPUs and then their problem is limited to producing competitive hardware.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  AMD has taken more CPU market share from Intel than Apple. But the weird thing about the "Nvidia will remain undefeated forever" theory is that it seems to assume they have some kind of permanent advantage. Nvidia was well positioned to make an early investment in this because they had the right combination of existing technology and resources. Other companies would have had to invest more because they were starting from a different place (e.g. Microsoft), or didn't have the resources to invest at the time (AMD). But now the market is proven and there are more than half a dozen 800 pound gorillas who all want a piece of it. It's like betting that Tesla will retain their 2022 market share in electric car market even as the market grows and everyone else gets in. Maybe some of the others will stumble, but all of them? Apple, AMD, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook?

nalllar 3y ago

Their biggest competitor in the GPU space is AMD who have spent years chasing deadlock issues that won't stay fixed, playing whackamole, in between trying to do actual driver development. Following the amdgpu mailing list is not fun.

eru 3y ago

Feel free to short sell NVIDIA?

nicce 3y ago

> I'm personally not a fan of NVIDIA's drivers A bit funny thing is that they are essentially software company which focuses on software quality, if you look at the stats how many people are working with software over there. And still it is not good enough?

stubish 3y ago
I'd welcome a lot fewer software developers, so I get drivers rather than the bloated driver lifestyle synergy experience with cloud mess. So many companies spend so much money developing software that alienates and aggravates their customers. I blame HP, who by my recollection started it with printer drivers that required a custom installer and a CD.