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> “Nvidia … is becoming less of a mercenary chip provider and more of a platform provider, like Microsoft or Apple, on which other companies can build software.
by cebert 3y ago
> “Nvidia … is becoming less of a mercenary chip provider and more of a platform provider, like Microsoft or Apple, on which other companies can build software.
I can understand from a growth perspective why it’s more profitable for Nvidia if it can become more of a platform service for AI. However, that’s difficult to balance that and partnerships the company already has with AWS and Microsoft. I’d expect to see some acquisitions or competing custom solutions in the future. Fortunately for Nvidia, a lot of AI is still dependent on CUDA. I’m interested to see how this plays out.
- dheera 3y agoMy prediction is eventually there will be anti-trust ligitation, they will be required to open the CUDA standard, after which AMD will become a competitor. NVIDIA could voluntarily open the standard to avoid this ligitation if they wanted to, though, and IMO it would be the smart thing to do, but almost every corporation in history has chosen the ligitation instead.
- wmf 3y agoIt would be kind of genius for Nvidia to "open" the CUDA APIs (which have already been unofficially reverse engineered anyway) but not the code. Maybe they'd also officially support HIP and SYCL. Maybe they could open SXM after all competitors have already committed to OAM. They'd create the appearance of opening up while giving up very little.
- sitkack 3y agoBy "Opening Up" they cement their leadership position. AI frameworks are already targeting CL, SPIR-V, etc. The low level details will fade and so will Nvidias api dominance. The MI300 smokes the H100 yet here we are.
- incrudible 3y agoJust because they are a target doesn’t mean things just work. Historically, AMD hardware for GPGPU becomes obsolete well before the software landscape catches up. I am not going to risk my time and money finding out whether history repeats itself, just for a few potential FLOPS per dollar.
- sitkack 3y agoDon't disagree, but it is is nuts how AMD is leaving billions on the table by not finishing the project by writing the software.
- incrudible 3y agoEven if they finished it yesterday, it would take years to convince everyone that this time it will be worth investing in AMD, at which point the whole datacenter AI hype may already be over.
- sitkack 3y agoThe AI hype will not end. AMD just has to support transformers. OSS is already building it, at which point you can finetune an open weights model on an MI300. Nvidia is in the same place that Cisco and Sun were during the dot.com boom. People are just buying the mainstream think that works. It doesn't take years, it takes an accountant.
- anon291 3y agoThe cuda api is essentially open... Hip is basically a copy. CUDA is such a misnomer. Amd doesn't have tensorRT, cuDNN, cutlass, etc. Forcing Nvidia to make these work on AMD is like forcing Microsoft to make windows work on apple hardware... Not going to happen.
- wmf 3y agoThey did force Microsoft to make Office work on Mac though... (Office for Mac already existed but I think MS agreed to not cancel it.)
- pjmlp 3y agoIt was more like Microsoft had the anti-trust stuff going on, and Apple was on the verge of going bankrupt.
- alphabeta567 3y agoCUDA is not open. See what happened with ZLUDA.
- coryrc 3y agoI'm not sure your implication. My understanding of the project is AMD didn't want to invest in it anymore.
- sgift 3y agoIMHO there's reason to believe that was what was discussed here plays a role in that decision: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39592689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39592689 - namely NVidia trying to forbid such APIs.
- paulmd 3y agothat’s literally old news, it’s from ‘20 or ‘21 and just got noticed iirc
- nemothekid 3y ago>My prediction is eventually there will be anti-trust ligitation, they will be required to open the CUDA standard, after which AMD will become a competitor. If AMD isn't a competitor before government intervention, I don't the government forcing nvidia to open up CUDA changes much. CUDA's moat isn't due to some secret sauce - nvidia put in the developer hours; and if AMDs CUDA implementation is still broken, people will continue to buy nvidia. There has been a lot of trying to get AMD to work - Hotz has been trying for a while now[1] and has been uncovering a ton of bugs in AMD drivers. To AMD's credit, they have been fixed, but it does give you a sense of how far behind they are in regards to their own software. Now imagine them trying to implement a competitor's spec? [1] https://twitter.com/__tinygrad__/status/1765085827946942923 https://twitter.com/__tinygrad__/status/1765085827946942923
- AYBABTME 3y agoI don't understand AMD in this. Isn't it insanity that they're not throwing all they've got at their software stack?
- tempaccount420 3y agoHardware people don't get along very well with software people.
- elbear 3y agoWhy's that?
- imtringued 3y agoBecause they didn't go to uni when hardware-software-codesign was being taught.
- nebula8804 3y agoWhat unis would that include? Isn't ATI Canadian? Therefore i'd expect lots of UToronto and Waterloo people there. Aren't they some of the best in this field?
- wmf 3y agoI think they're planning for a world where half their customers (hyperscalers) just use GPUs and CUDA while the other half (the long tail) use more profitable, higher-level parts of the platform. They don't have the leverage to force customers one way or the other. It would be easier to just sell GPUs, but they know that sophisticated customers can switch to other chips while the platform provides lock-in for smaller customers.
- neverokay 3y agoDoesn’t matter how good your in-house tech team was, your company still outsourced it to cloud infra. That’s what Nvidia faces. Doesn’t matter how good the current in-house teams are using direct hardware, the trend in corporate is shift to a vendor (Google/AWS). Nvidia can watch this inevitable shift or get ready to offer itself as a platform too.
- joshellington 3y agoI get it, the service model always shines the brightest in the eye of the revenue calculator. But I have immediate skepticism they’ll be able to execute at a competitive level. Their core competency has always been manufacture and production, not service-based things. It’s a big rock to push up a tall hill.
- neverokay 3y agoHey, if it doesn’t work out they can always return back to what they are, a consumer first company but now with world class hardware/software. AI graphics service that renders games in the cloud (photorealistic), concluding its epic journey of being an amazing graphics card company. Kinda cool when you think about it.
- omnimus 3y agoThis doesnt seem to be true. They have been running Geforce Now for a long time and its one of the best gaming streaming services. It seems they are doing it in partnership with other regional companies but nobody says they cant use same partners. Running games with small latency seems more complicated than llms on cuda.
- selvan 3y agoMicrosoft and AWS would have a partnership with AMD/Intel for their GPUs, if those are capable and widely used as Nvidia's. Microsoft has partnetship with OpenAI and also with Mistral. Present convenience may not hold true in future. Nvidia knows that well.
- DanielHB 3y agoAWS is pushing ARM hard, yet people still buy x86/x64 compute en mass Even if AWS has its own hardware+software solution for neural networks it would still take years if not decades to tear off the CUDA platform