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Nvidia has been playing a dangerous but profitable game since the Crypto boom. but now I think they probably have bitten more than they can chew. Apple alread
by dzonga 2mo ago
Nvidia has been playing a dangerous but profitable game since the Crypto boom.
but now I think they probably have bitten more than they can chew.
Apple already proved with their unified memory - that as long you have the capacity you can run capable models locally - thereby goes demand for inference if everyone is running some model locally.
For training - Chinese models have proved that you don't need the latest & greatest in Nvidia hardware. Same as TPUs.
only time will tell.
- pletnes 2mo agoNvidia sell iot boards with unified architecture. Would not be shocked if they launch pc/laptop/server boards at some point.
- synergy20 2mo agothat undercuts their core business, so it will be a defensive play at most to fend off mac and amd's local inference offerings
- bigyabai 2mo agoI don't know how people can say this with a straight face. Nvidia was selling desktop-grade ARM SOCs before Apple Silicon was ever announced, specifically for edge robotics, computer vision and ML. The absolute fastest desktop Mac GPUs cannot beat an Nvidia laptop GPU in prefill or inference speeds. Apple Silicon is a non-entity for professional datacenter deployment and arguably unusable for frontier models at agentic context sizes. AMD is Nvidia's primary worry, and they're not doing much better in terms of GPGPU SOC compute.
- officeplant 2mo ago>Nvidia was selling desktop-grade ARM SOCs before Apple Silicon was ever announced You can believe all you want that the dinky little jetson boards were desktop grade when historically the ARM SoC portion of a jetson board couldn't even keep up with broadcom/rockchip SoCs. It's taken until recently for the actual arm compute portion of Nvidia SoC's to be worth a damn at all, and they still fall far behind Apple let alone the rest of the pack like Qualcomm/Samsung.
- bigyabai 2mo agoI don't have to believe. I've run KDE and GNOME on the Tegra boards, you get full-fat CUDA support without sacrificing Vulkan drivers. It's incredible. You can believe all you want that good single-core performance will corner the edge compute market. It hasn't, Graviton has more buy-in than any Apple Silicon chip ever got.
- HDThoreaun 2mo agoEvery time nvidia takes its fab time and uses it to build anything other than datacenter chips it is losing money due to the massive markups the datacenter products have. Expanding their consumer offering means the datacenter backlog is going down which is very bad for their margins. Consumers will never pay 10-100x what it costs to fab something like datacenter users will.
- bigyabai 2mo agoIn many cases it isn't Nvidia paying for the fab time. For instance, the Nintendo Switch 2 is basically a pure-play design and support product for Nvidia, while Nintendo negotiates with Samsung for the actual SOC prices. Their IP philosophy is closer to AMD's than Apple's, Nvidia has long roped in 3rd party manufacturers to mark up, integrate and sell their hardware.
- wmf 2mo agoRTX Spark already launched.
- buildbot 2mo agoUnified memory DGX Spark and RTX Spark laptops are already a thing :)
- leoc 2mo agoRight, it's clear that nVidia is taking care and trying to position itself so that it can continue making sales if and when inference goes local. And it's in a much better intrinsic position to do that than the LLM SaaS vendors are: nVidia sells shovels to the army, but it also knows how to sell shovels to Walmart. Whether the financial relationships that Huang's got his company into will cause it problems if the market shifts is a different question, though.
- FuriouslyAdrift 2mo agoAs is AMD Strix Point
- ABS 2mo agoAFAIK NVIDIA unified memory is not as... "unified" as Apple's
- wslh 2mo agoYes. The more capable SoC PCs become, the weaker the "everything has to run in the datacenter" argument gets. As more powerful SoC PCs from multiple vendors appear over the next few years, that advantage may shrink for many workloads.
- ragall 2mo agoI'd be happy enough if Nvidia decided to launch an update to the now dated (2019) Shield streaming box, which is still the best on the market as to codec support and image quality.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2mo agoWhat's the danger? They slide back down to being just a gaming graphics card company with a $10 share price?
- georgemcbay 2mo ago> What's the danger? They slide back down to being just a gaming graphics card company with a $10 share price? Nvidia dropping from being a $5 trillion company to a $242 billion company would be 1929 levels of bad. Global economy end of days stuff, especially since Nvidia can't crash that hard without a lot of other stuff crashing with it.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Ekaros 2mo agoHow much in value could Nvidia safely drop and over what period of time for it be fine for greater economy? What level of correction would be manageable? And I am pretty sure that their value will drop in 5 to 10 years.
- grey-area 2mo agoJust for context, they make up 5% (yes 5%) of holdings in global index funds like VWRA. https://stockanalysis.com/quote/lon/VWRA/holdings/ https://stockanalysis.com/quote/lon/VWRA/holdings/ That is an astounding figure and means markets are highly imbalanced, unless you think Nvidia represents 5% of the global economy.
- twoodfin 2mo ago4.7% of the discounted future earnings pie of 3761 of the largest current publicly traded global companies. That’s still a lot, but “the global economy” over the horizon where those earnings are not discounted to 0 contains a lot more than what’s listed in VWRA today.
- 2mo ago
- hermitShell 2mo agoIt seems they had a head start but are now facing stiff competition on all fronts. Software moat, GPU's for gaming, and its distant cousin datacenter compute. They rightfully invested their insane profits into many ventures, and how many of those have turned around into profit? They are also a robotics AI company with Omniverse. They are also an AI company with Nemotron. They are also a bleeding edge network equipment company after the Mellanox aquisition. They stand to make a lot of money if they succeed in every venture. Good for Jensen taking risks and driving innovation, I hope they succeed in chewing even 50% of what they bit off.
- mrandish 2mo ago> They rightfully invested their insane profits into many ventures This is the inherent downside of such a rapid rise to being the world's most valuable company AND still being considered a growth stock. At their massive scale, the number of new adjacent businesses that have both sufficient size and potential growth is limited. > I hope they succeed in chewing even 50% of what they bit off. Anything approaching that is vanishingly unlikely. They're being forced to play the game more like a VC. The question is if a few unicorn winners can offset dozens of losers. The challenge is that, unlike a VC, their bets are much more correlated around AI.