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Somehow I wish it weren't true because I hate monopolies in any markets. Nvidia has been enjoying their absurd premium on consumer and production GPUs and inten
by behnamoh 3y ago
Somehow I wish it weren't true because I hate monopolies in any markets. Nvidia has been enjoying their absurd premium on consumer and production GPUs and intentionally removed the NVLink capability in the GeForce 4090 series (3090 had them) to avoid cannibalizing their A100 and H100 business. With NVLink, people could chain multiple GPUs and increase the overall VRAM without much reduction in bandwidth. But without it, if you chain two 4090s, your effective bandwidth gets shrunk, so higher VRAM but much slower for LLM inference.
I'm with Linus Torvalds on this—f*** NVidia.
- FredPret 3y agoI understand the sentiment. But the only reason you're mad at Nvidia is because they made something desirable (a GPU that does NN training) but didn't do it in the way you prefer (NVLink, Linux compatibility etc). It's not their fault AMD and others have been asleep at the wheel and handed them the whole market for free. Any company with a monopoly on the hot new thing would try to capitalize on it. When the other GPU makers eventually catch a wakeup, the situation will finally improve.
- llm_trw 3y agoThere is _one_ other GPU maker.
- philistine 3y agoIntel, AMD, Apple?
- oblio 3y agoApple's not super relevant for a mass market OEM type of discussion.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- __float 3y agoIntel makes desktop cards too
- akmittal 3y agoThey don't even take themselves seriously
- throwoutway 3y agoI'd say they took themselves too seriously, and rested on their high margin laurels for too long
- ergocoder 3y agoWhat the hell is intel doing? I have been holding their stock for a few years now. Where is the moon?
- newsclues 3y agoHoping to build chips for others as they open their foundry business up
- nealabq 3y agoASML recently delivered their first high-NA lithography system to Intel. While TSMC is being more cautious, hesitating to commit to this very expensive machine. Intel's making a big bet, and it may (or may not) pay off. We'll probably know by the end of 2025. Intel may end up back on top. https://www.asml.com/en/news/press-releases/2022/intel-and-asml-strengthen-their-collaboration-to-drive-high-na-into-manufacturing-in-2025 https://www.asml.com/en/news/press-releases/2022/intel-and-a... https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/intel-receives-its-high-na-euv-scanner-from-asml/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/intel-receives-it... https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/manufacturing/tsmc-to-adopt-high-na-euv-tools-in-2030-or-later-report https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/manufacturing/tsm...
- latchkey 3y agoAMD has figured it out and is in the process of catching up. It won't happen over night though.
- throwup238 3y agoYeah we’ll have power positive fusion any day now.
- latchkey 3y agoAzure, Oracle, Meta, Tesla, Hot Aisle... all buying up MI300x. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/06/meta-and-microsoft-to-buy-amds-new-ai-chip-as-alternative-to-nvidia.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/06/meta-and-microsoft-to-buy-am... https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-scores-two-big-wins-oracle-opts-for-mi300x-ibm-asks-for-fpgas https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-scores-two-big-wins-or... https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/elon-musk-implies-that-teslas-procuring-amds-instinct-mi300-for-ai https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
- throwup238 3y ago“Meta and Microsoft say…” “Oracle is set to use…” “Elon Musk implies…” Not one of them have actually bought anything. AMD is just muddying the waters by grouping HPC sales with AI. It’s nonsense. Edit: I see you’ve got a startup on MI300x hardware. Now it makes sense, I guess - you need to believe. Good luck!
- mlyle 3y ago> Not one of them have actually bought anything. AMD isn't shipping in large volume yet, but MI300x instances can be spun up in preview on Azure today with availability ramping up. Microsoft has absolutely bought a lot of MI300x.
- latchkey 3y agoVideo proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmJF2U6aqQ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmJF2U6aqQ8
- jayd16 3y ago"You're only upset because they <used their market advantage to exploit consumers>"
- selectodude 3y agoYou using your market advantage to exploit your employer or do you feel like you’re being paid a fair amount?
- eru 3y agoI'm not sure you can trust the (would-be) exploiters opinion on whether the amount they are being paid is 'fair'?
- jayd16 3y agoI have exploitable market advantage? Explain.
- selectodude 3y agoDo you work in tech in the United States? Congratulations, you’re one of the wealthiest people on the planet. That’s one hell of a market advantage.
- iraqmtpizza 3y agoNothing like what it would have been without a non-stop flood of H-1Bs
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoThen offshore offices would be more and larger. You can't really stop capital flight by banning migration. Corporations are more mobile than workers.
- iraqmtpizza 3y ago
- quickslowdown 3y agoAMD being asleep at the wheel, or choked out by the Intel + Nvidia cartel?
- ij09j901023123 3y agoThe only people that buy AMD GPUs are gamers; AMD have long since stopped targeting the enterprise side of their GPU market. NVIDIA makes the majority of their profits by selling A1000+ cards to businesses that require the power for computation (video rendering, LLM processing, etc). AMD neglected and disregarded productivity, and now they are paying the consequences.
- thfuran 3y ago>Any company with a monopoly on the hot new thing would try to capitalize on it. So what? "Any company with a monopoly" would also pay children in company scrip to work 20 hours a day in unsafe factories unless compelled to do otherwise.
- jakogut 3y agoUnfortunately, I think developers handed them the market too, it wasn't just the competition not being up to snuff. Developers valued their own development experience, features, and performance over value, efficiency, portability, openness, or freedom. The result is anyone depending on CUDA became vendor locked to Nvidia. Similar as the story with Direct3D, though thankfully there are workable solutions for D3D now implemented on top of Vulkan. Nvidia's CUDA moat may be less fordable.
- bmicraft 3y agoJust today something very interesting came out: ZLUDA It's a reimplementation of cuda on top of rocm, and it's a drop in replacement you can use with already compiled binaries. It's even faster than native rocm/hip in blender
- sjwhevvvvvsj 3y agoIf AMDs version of “asleep at the wheel” is them eating Intels lunch for the last few years, I’d hate to see them awake. Intel is weak, and it’s much smarter to put resources into squeezing Intel while they are on the ropes than shift too much focus to ML.
- namlem 3y agoYeah exactly. AMD has other markets to compete in. Their desktop, laptop, and handheld offerings are incredible right now. I assume they are also going to replace Nvidia for the Switch 2.
- philistine 3y agoNope. Nintendo is sticking with Nvidia. I'll eat my hat if they don't.
- whaleofatw2022 3y agoIt would be just a little surprising, since so far they have a pretty bad track record with 3rd parties.
- paulmd 3y agoSays who, Charlie demerjian and circa-2010 AMD fanboys echoing him? Things like Bumpgate as a major social media mindshare thing largely stem from him and his coverage. And he leaves off the part where AMD gpus were failing too (because of the same RoHS-compliant solder) and where apple kinda wanted to part ways anyway because they saw the “platform” nvidia was building and didn’t want any part of it on macOS… game knows game. https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/10/13/apple-vs-nvidia-what-happened.html https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/10/13/apple-vs-nvidia-w... That’s the problem is like the evga thing there is a distinctly contemporary take and that’s shaped by people like Charlie, and then there’s the take with the benefit of a couple years of hindsight and maybe it wasn’t exactly the way the bunnyman said it was. Maybe apple didn’t want CUDA usurping them, and maybe apple wanted to leave the way clear for the pivot to apple silicon and metal and the platform Apple wanted to build there. The problem is the AMD fanboys are just as noxious today and - just like the evga thing - it’s gonna take years before people are willing to re-evaluate things fairly. https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/xgn7do/we_need_more_context_on_evga_and_its_ceo/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/xgn7do/we_need_more... https://youtu.be/vyQxNN9EF3w?t=5044 https://youtu.be/vyQxNN9EF3w?t=5044 There’s a little backstory like this behind almost all of the AMD fanboy “lore” around nvidia. Crysis 2 was never a thing either - the whole point of wireframe mode is seeing the full geometry at maximum LOD, with no culling, for example, and it does not happen during actual gameplay. nvidia never “sold directly to miners”, tech media didn't actually read the RBS article they were citing and it doesn't say what they say it says. NVIDIA "recently said they're completely an AI company now" stories a few months ago was a quote from 2015. Etc. There's just a group of people who just get off on hating and they don't mind making shit up if that's what it takes. It's essentially impossible to unwind the popular opinion of NVIDIA from this ridiculous amount of past-hate... yeah, after 30 years of blood libel from ATI fanatics they probably do have an overall negative public opinion! People know the stories are true, because NVIDIA is bad, because there's all these stories, so they must be true.
- refurb 3y ago> But the only reason you're mad at Nvidia is because they made something desirable This is true. It's like blaming the company for being successful. "Stop making products that are so much better than any other product". I'm not sure we want that?
- matwood 3y agoNot dissimilar from the conversations around Apple. They have made products so much better than any of the competitors people want to force them to change.
- dns_snek 3y agoPeople want Apple to change because they can't handle Apple making such amazing products? That's certainly a brand new take. Elaborate?
- matwood 3y agoIt's pretty straight forward. Android provides all the openness people claim to want. Different device makers, different roms, different stores, side loading, etc... But people don't want to use Android or its hardware. People want to use iPhones and iOS and force Apple to add side loading, stores, etc... If Android were superior, no one would care what Apple did. Everyone would simply use Android.
- jakogut 3y agoAndroid's market share inside the United States is 42%. Globally, Android's market share is 70%. I don't think it's accurate to generalize that "people" don't want to use Android. Both platforms seem to have their pros and cons, like any comparable competing products. I think the conversation around side loading and store royalties on iOS has more to do with who owns the hardware, and what the user is permitted to do by the manufacturer.
- benreesman 3y agoI don’t have hard evidence of this, which makes it a thought experiment and not an assertion. Big-cap tech is utterly notorious for some of the worst anti-trust violations and other cartel-style behavior of any sector. This goes back as least as far as “Wintel” in the 90s and probably further that I didn’t watch up close. Suffice it to say that the Justice Department is extremely disincentivized to go after domestic economic Cinderella stories in a globally competitive world and has had to bring lawsuit after lawsuit on everything from bundling to threatening OEMs to flagrant wage fixing in print (I do have second-hand that the mass layoffs are coordinated aka Don’t Poach 2.0). Crippling “gaming” (high margin but not famine-price gouging margin) cards, controlling supply tightly enough to prevent the market clearing at MSRP routinely, stepping at least up to and likely over the line on the GPLv2: these things or things like them have been ruled illegal before (though it’s hard to imagine that happening again). It’s possible that tech is just a natural monopoly and we had it right with Ma Bell: innovation was high, customer prices were stable and within the means of most everyone, and investors got a solid low-beta return. It’s easy to view the past with rose-colored glasses and the Bell Era wasn’t perfect, but IMHO this status quo is worse.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoTo be honest this just sounds like a bunch of talking points stuck together, can you write a credible argument based on known case-law/precedent/etc... if you have a legal angle to critique?
- mtsr 3y agoSociety isn’t shaped just by current laws, but also by where we want things to go. If the current situations is undesirable, changing laws and regulations is the way to change it. (Of course actually enforcing current laws and regulations can also go a long way in many cases…)
- killingtime74 3y agoSounds like it's just undesirable to you. (I don't own any Nvidia stock). Their growth to their current position in the market was organic. You don't just break down big companies for no reason other than them being big. If we did, there's a long line of companies ahead of Nvidia to be broken up first.
- SmokeyHamster 3y agoIs that even logistically possible for rivals at this point? You think AMD doesn't want to carve out a chunk of that pie? What Nvidia is doing is hard and the engineers with the skill to design those chips are few far between. I'm sure Nvidia's already hired most of the best in the business. Anyone who wants to unseat Nvidia will need very talented people, who aren't cheap, and that means massive investment capital which largely doesn't exist.
- ActorNightly 3y agoIf you look at graphics performance, AMD already is pretty much on par with Nvidia. All of the math with graphics and ML is largely the same. The thing that is missing is AMD focusing their software engineers that develop the drivers, and making them put work into RoCM to make it usable across all cards, all driver versions, like with NVIDIA.
- SmokeyHamster 3y agoThat's true. AMD does make some attractive Radeon cards. However, the real killer feature now is CUDA. Everyone's coding for CUDA, which AMD's hardware doesn't support, so even if they have a GPU that's on par with Nvidia, most libraries still can't make full use of it.
- qwertox 3y ago> have been asleep I still don't see the required effort put into place by Intel together with AMD in order to create an attractive alternative to CUDA. Right now they're only only getting looks because their devices are cheaper for the hardware you get and for big projects because they're available, so you're required to have in-house experts who know how these platforms work in order to get stuff done that you know would definitely work on Nvidia. The games Nvidia is playing with the consumer market is really annoying, but we have to thank Intel and AMD that Nvidia is in a position to do this. Microsoft is probably also at fault. We're at a point where Apple only has to say "Oh, one more thing, you can now put Nvidia GPUs in your Mac Pro" for Intel and AMD to notice in what position they've put themselves into.
- lumost 3y agoBig companies are weird. There are probably 10 teams each at intel, arm, and amd claiming that they can beat the h100 or build a better compute runtime. Half those teams are full of crap, a quarter will take the funds and try to do something like CUDA (but better) cough ROCm. Then another eighth to a quarter will simply not have the political clout to get the whole thing done. Add to this that we just funded 10 teams to get 1-2 functional teams… and you see why chasing after an incumbent is hard. Even when you have near infinite money to do so.
- iraqmtpizza 3y agoAny evidence that the much less well-funded AMD has been "asleep at the wheel" w.r.t. the GPU market? Without going practically all-in on Zen, they'd be bankrupt.
- system2 3y agoAMD is not too far behind. They can go wild in a few years.
- behnamoh 3y agoIn the LLM world, each month is a year and each week is a month. AMD hasn't done anything substantive in the past two years since GPT-3/GPT-3.5. Almost every research paper implements their algorithm in CUDA. AMD can't beat software with good hardware.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- brucethemoose2 3y agoThere's more ROCm compatibility than you'd think. I'm at a startup, and we'd love to be using MI300Xs. Out stack works with it, they are amazing, our wallet is open... But we can't! We simply can't find any. It seems they are unobtanium for megacaps only.
- dartos 3y agoAMD has rocm and added a CUDA compat layer to it. Nvidia is in the limelight, but their product (GPU compute) is a commodity. Once someone else has it cheaper, then it’s a race to the bottom.
- lukeschlather 3y agoI don't think Nvidia is worried about cannibalizing their A100 and H100 business, I think they're trying to keep the cards something resembling affordable for gamers.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoThen why wouldn't they just make more of them? The excuse is supposed to be fab capacity, but the 3070 has better performance than the 4060 etc. and is built on the older process which should no longer be in short supply.
- autoexec 3y agoIs it an issue of supply? I figure they think non-gamers will be willing and able to pay far more for their hardware than most gamers could ever afford. If they sold comparable products to gamers at a low price the non-gamers would just end up buying them up and even if there was enough supply to satisfy the needs of everyone Nvidia would still be out a fortune. It'd be better for them to sell low priced gaming cards that would perform poorly for non-gaming purposes and sell extremely high priced specialty cards to the people who want to use them for AI or crypto or whatever other non-gaming uses they come up with. That'd at least keep the price of video cards low for gamers, avoid supply issues, and allow nvidia to extract massive amounts of profit from companies with no interest in video games. The only downside would be that it makes it harder for anyone who doesn't have deep pockets to get into the AI game.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago> If they sold comparable products to gamers at a low price the non-gamers would just end up buying them up and even if there was enough supply to satisfy the needs of everyone Nvidia would still be out a fortune. That's the point. They're not trying to do gamers a favor, if it was that they'd just make more cards. What they're trying to do is market segmentation, which customers despise and resent.
- 3y ago
- MuffinFlavored 3y ago> Somehow I wish it weren't true because I hate monopolies in any markets. If you peel the layers back... isn't the real monopoly ASML?
- wbsun 3y agoI am always wondering why ASML hasn’t got any antitrust lawsuits for their monopoly.
- docandrew 3y agoHave they actually engaged in anticompetitive behavior or are they just the only player?
- eru 3y agoWell, that would be for a judge (or jury?) to decide, if someone sued.
- mikewarot 3y agoThe relevant EU Law[1] seems to be "Any abuse by one or more undertakings of a dominant position within the common market or in a substantial part of it shall be prohibited as incompatible with the common market insofar as it may affect trade between Member States." So, as long as it treats fabs in Europe fairly, it can do whatever it wants in the rest of the world. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_competition_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_competition_law
- blackoil 3y agoINAL. Antitrust is not against monopoly, but monopoly "abuse". MS is free to make an OS which everyone wants and free to be a monopoly. When they tried to leverage it to gain market share in the distinct market of browser and media players it became a problem. So till ASML starts abusing the position they should be good legally.
- 3y ago
- pavelstoev 3y agoYou can do this in software, effectively.
- acchow 3y agoBig tech and AI startups would buy all the 4090's in existence if they had NVLink. You would not be able to find one for gaming without a multiple x markup
- eastbound 3y agoSo we’re deeply hampering our AI startups, limiting their growth and possibilities by jacking up the prices x10, to reserve some silicium only for gamers which could perfectly be used for AI? Maybe gamers can wait and the next technological leap should have priority?
- wastewastewaste 3y agolet the startups do some work on their own for once lol
- oblio 3y agoThis is a ridiculous argument. People need entertainment, too, we're not machines. If the current ML craze is really that impactful, it will happen regardless. If it can't break through it's because most of it is just a bunch of hot air.
- guappa 3y ago> the next technological leap should have priority? lol
- imhoguy 3y ago> jacking up the prices x10 AI is goldrush and Nvidia is selling golden shovels. They try to play it longterm though. Goldrush ends at some point, if they upset "gardeners" gamers, these may be jumping onto AMD or even Intel shovels already. That was already the case during Bitcoin goldrush. But I wouldn't be also surprised this is a plan agreed at closed door meetings between big corporations. They may want to just kill any independent AI advantage, and force everyone to their cloud walled gardens. Future will tell.
- FloorEgg 3y agoYeah I guess to hell with all those people who are building the next generations of games and gaming platforms, and the millions of people who are looking forward to them. Let's sacrifice all their purpose and enjoyment so your AI startup can get cheaper hardware and push out some AI product no one wants, just so it can go out of business anyway when the VC money runs out.
- up2isomorphism 3y agoBut all Linux’s arch enemies are becoming more and more lucrative: Microsoft, apple, Nvidia. Actually less evil one s like Sun died. In fact these companies are so dominating now largely thanks to Linux and open source software.
- mr_toad 3y agoNvidia purportedly enjoys a 1000% profit margin on H100’s. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-makes-1000-profit-on-h100-gpus-report https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-makes-1000-profit-o...
- ksec 3y ago>Nvidia has been enjoying their absurd premium on consumer This has been running wild on the Internet. If anything Nvidia has arguably earned less premium in the consumer market with most of the initial R&D cost being amortised with their AI / datacenter chips.
- kimixa 3y agoDesign and development-limited tech loves economies of scale. Stuff like software is functionally free per-unit past the development, hardware still scales very well as per-unit costs are a smaller proportion of the end unit cost (and much of their advantages is also in software, like CUDA and DLSS etc.). The steam survey suggests that Nvidia have over 90% of the GPU market, so for every design they sell somewhere near 10x the number of units, so if they sell at the same margins they get 10x the development resources per unit. That's a lot of slack to lose to business inefficiencies, or competing with more specialized but smaller market devices. Assuming they don't just purchase such possible competitors when they pop up. It may be that a monopoly is the "natural" end state of such tech markets. I think it's self-evident this isn't a good end state for consumers.
- leetcrew 3y agoI don't love nvidia, but this is not the example I would choose to show why. cutting edge hardware exists at prices that are affordable for hobbyists largely because a few key features for commercial use cases can be "artificially" turned off. it sucks that you don't get to pay consumer prices for your highly lucrative application anymore, but the alternative looks a lot more like "tensor prices for geforce skus" than "geforce prices for tensor skus". we are already seeing this play out with crypto mining to an extent. I'd hate to see what would happen to the consumer market if AWS could just buy a bunch of RTX parts to rent out.
- pdntspa 3y agoNN research and crypto assholes ruined the market for gaming graphics. I'm glad NVlink was taken out.
- foobiekr 3y agoNvidia’s value is completely out of line with their revenue and eventually that will catch up with them.
- 6510 3y agoThe last comment here made me laugh https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38144619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38144619
- fennecbutt 3y agoIdk man, we'd need to know all of their numbers before we know whether they're assholes or not. I mean I'm sure they're overcharging for gpus in general, but the enterprise/consumer split is always tough, technically enterprise customers are subsidising the dev and research of new tech that eventually becomes consumer gpus. Either its 20k/1k for top end of each or its idk, 7k for everyone? They could definitely drop prices all around though and still have a buffer for r&d left over.