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Nvidia's moat is real but not big enough that one can't surpass it with a lot of engineering. It's not the only company making AI accelerators, and this has bee

by est31 2y ago

Nvidia's moat is real but not big enough that one can't surpass it with a lot of engineering. It's not the only company making AI accelerators, and this has been the case for many years already. The first TPU was introduced in 2015. Nvidia has just managed to get a leader position in the race.

AlotOfReading 2y ago
Saying it's "just" a lot of engineering effort to catch up isn't wrong, but it understates the reality. There are very few organizations on earth that have the technical and financial resources to meaningfully compete with even small parts of Nvidia's portfolio. Nvidia's products benefit from that breadth of strengths and the volumes they ship. They don't just make accelerators, they'll sell you the hardware too (unlike TPUs). They don't just sell you the hardware, the software ecosystem will work too (unlike AMD or Intel). That hardware won't just do a lot of computations, it'll also have a lot of off-chip memory bandwidth (vs Cerebras or others). Need to embed those capabilities in a device that can't fit a wafer cabinet or a server rack's worth of compute, Nvidia will sell you similar hardware that uses a similar stack, certified for your industry (e.g. automotive). Take any of that away and you're left with a significantly weaker offering. Also they benefit from the priority of paying fabs a lot of money and placing a lot of orders. If anything, Nvidia is less dominant than they should be because they've managed to ensure absolutely no one wants to buy from them when there are viable alternatives.
- kortilla 2y ago
  People said the same about Cisco, Intel, IBM etc. It will only be a matter of time for companies to eat into the high margin stuff for specific use-cases and grow from there.
  - skeptrune 2y ago
    There's something weird about the market right now in that all the AI budgets being used to by GPUs are loss-leading. Orgs are treating the spend as a waste anyways, so I suspect they aren't going to be looking to cut costs. Make Cerebras a hard sell imo.
talldayo 2y ago
> Nvidia's moat is real but not big enough that one can't surpass it with a lot of engineering. Yes, but you also need a lot of capital if you want node parity with them. Nvidia (supposedly) spent an estimated $9 billion dollars getting onto TSMC's 4nm node. https://www.techspot.com/news/93490-nvidia-reportedly-spent-10-billion-chunk-tsmc-5nm.html https://www.techspot.com/news/93490-nvidia-reportedly-spent-...

by est31 2y ago

AlotOfReading 2y ago

Saying it's "just" a lot of engineering effort to catch up isn't wrong, but it understates the reality. There are very few organizations on earth that have the technical and financial resources to meaningfully compete with even small parts of Nvidia's portfolio. Nvidia's products benefit from that breadth of strengths and the volumes they ship. They don't just make accelerators, they'll sell you the hardware too (unlike TPUs). They don't just sell you the hardware, the software ecosystem will work too (unlike AMD or Intel). That hardware won't just do a lot of computations, it'll also have a lot of off-chip memory bandwidth (vs Cerebras or others). Need to embed those capabilities in a device that can't fit a wafer cabinet or a server rack's worth of compute, Nvidia will sell you similar hardware that uses a similar stack, certified for your industry (e.g. automotive). Take any of that away and you're left with a significantly weaker offering. Also they benefit from the priority of paying fabs a lot of money and placing a lot of orders. If anything, Nvidia is less dominant than they should be because they've managed to ensure absolutely no one wants to buy from them when there are viable alternatives.

kortilla 2y ago
People said the same about Cisco, Intel, IBM etc. It will only be a matter of time for companies to eat into the high margin stuff for specific use-cases and grow from there.
- skeptrune 2y ago
  There's something weird about the market right now in that all the AI budgets being used to by GPUs are loss-leading. Orgs are treating the spend as a waste anyways, so I suspect they aren't going to be looking to cut costs. Make Cerebras a hard sell imo.

talldayo 2y ago

> Nvidia's moat is real but not big enough that one can't surpass it with a lot of engineering. Yes, but you also need a lot of capital if you want node parity with them. Nvidia (supposedly) spent an estimated $9 billion dollars getting onto TSMC's 4nm node. https://www.techspot.com/news/93490-nvidia-reportedly-spent-10-billion-chunk-tsmc-5nm.html https://www.techspot.com/news/93490-nvidia-reportedly-spent-...