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.
I 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.
AMD has figured it out and is in the process of catching up. It won't happen over night though.
Yeah we’ll have power positive fusion any day now.
Azure, Oracle, Meta, Tesla, Hot Aisle... all buying up MI300x.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/06/meta-and-microsoft-to-buy-am...
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-scores-two-big-wins-or...
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
You really should disclose that you’re a founder when you mention your company like that
It is in my profile. Pretty well disclosed imho.
Insufficient disclosure. You must be aware that of the companies you listed, one (yours) sticks out as being unknown.
Don't die on this hill, just do the decent thing and add a disclosure. This doesn't show you in a good light.
No hill to die on here. I did nothing wrong by mentioning my company. It is factual that I am buying these GPUs.
There is nothing in the guidelines or faq on this topic. So, it is best that we conclude that you are making up some fake rule that you expect people to abide by and then claiming a weird superiority complex about how I am looking bad according to your made up rules.
I do not need to tolerate that.
Classic HN… getting downvoted by the silent minority. Would love to see how you deal with bullies.
I did not intend to be confrontational and you are correct that talking up your company without declaring your affiliation is not against HN guidelines. I feel it is however a convention that is widely followed and for good reasons. Obviously your call at the end of the day.
TBF, they weren't "talking up" their company, they simply added the name to a list of companies doing something that's going against the grain.
To quote Bill Burr roasting Apple, there's a bit of "Einstein - Gandhi - Me" going on, but its way below the threshold for identifying themselves as a founder, IMO.
The guidelines state:
"Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity."
I was not "talking up" my company. I made a reference to it, by name, on a relevant thread. This is well within the guidelines.
Man you are wild.
Good way to ensure no one buys anything from your company.
You've fe'd up
It is a norm here and a common courtesy to let people know whenever one mentions their own company, product, or project. Otherwise, we don’t know that a comment might be self-marketing.
And yes, yours was an instance of self-marketing, even if unintentional, by name-dropping your company alongside power players like Meta and Tesla. You put yourself on people’s radar as a GPU-intensive company.
The guidelines state:
"Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity."
What I posted, just the name of my company, was entirely within the bounds of common courtesy.
Of course, I do want to put myself on people's radar... I am building a GPU-intensive company and I'm making a small relevant comment on a thread.
I looked it up. Over the years, there has been endless bike shed discussion on this topic, such as:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24353959
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36404027
I think that it is smart of the moderators here to simply sit on the sidelines and not try to control the discussion of this too much.
Aviato
I loved that show!
“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!
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.
Video proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmJF2U6aqQ8
Or maybe I know things you don't. =)
"You're only upset because they <used their market advantage to exploit consumers>"
You using your market advantage to exploit your employer or do you feel like you’re being paid a fair amount?
I have exploitable market advantage? Explain.
Do 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.
Nothing like what it would have been without a non-stop flood of H-1Bs
Then offshore offices would be more and larger. You can't really stop capital flight by banning migration. Corporations are more mobile than workers.
Nope. H-1Bs allow bringing in people from a dozen countries and having them together in an American office. Moving the company to a worse tax and legal environment with worse latency and worse food and weather and entertainment and prestige doesn't mean those workers will all leave their home countries and move there instead. Nor would the locals necessarily even allow that.
EDIT: bro, you're the one that said corporations are mobile, not me. secondly, all of my points still apply to a satellite office. where the headquarters is or where it's incorporated is irrelevant. thirdly, if they still do significant business in the US then the US maintains massive leverage over them anyway. so, try again.
Who said about moving the company? If you open another office offshore yoiu don't move the company. The HQ still stays in the US.
>EDIT: bro, you're the one that said corporations are mobile, not me
I say it and you misunderstand it. Mobile as they can open an office in any country, not move the HQ alltogethere.
Software developers create software development jobs. H1bs are a contributor to the fact that the US is the center for the software development industry. If companies weren't deciding to headquarter in the bay area to be at the center of things, there wouldn't be nearly as much upward pressure on US developer compensation.
I'm not sure you can trust the (would-be) exploiters opinion on whether the amount they are being paid is 'fair'?
They gained market advantage by creating something that delights consumers. I'd call that a net win.
The complaint is about losing those delights now that the market is secured by software lockin.
The bait and switch.
If 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.
I’m talking GPUs, not CPUs.
And he is saying AMD focusing on non-GPU markets and going from being a laughable underdog to a powerhouse hardly qualifies as "being asleep at the wheel".
Alright, fair point, but that is also why they missed out on the AI boom.
As if it was just there for the taking. AMD doesn't have the money to do what Nvidia does
Yes they do.
They were in the same ballpark until the past coupld of quarters. Nvidia laid the groundwork for this ages ago by developing drivers that play nice with NN.
AMD could easily have done the same at the time, and can do so now.
Even if it costs $1b-$10b to do it, AMD can afford it and it’s worth doing. They’ve got $55b in equity, and a huge $280b market cap to issue more stock into. [https:valustox.com/AMD]
I dunno, man.
They're releasing APUs with tensor cores right now.
They're finally getting their dogshit ROCm drivers fixed right now.
Yes, they're late. But they're definitely playing. This whole "asleep at the wheel" thing may have been true a year ago, but it's not true now.
[edit] Apologies, responded to the wrong comment, but I'll leave it here anyway.
Yeah 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.
Nope. Nintendo is sticking with Nvidia. I'll eat my hat if they don't.
It would be just a little surprising, since so far they have a pretty bad track record with 3rd parties.
Says 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.
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.
https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/10/13/apple-vs-nvidia-w...
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...
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. 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" was 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.
There is _one_ other GPU maker.
What the hell is intel doing? I have been holding their stock for a few years now. Where is the moon?
Hoping to build chips for others as they open their foundry business up
ASML 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-a...
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/intel-receives-it...
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/manufacturing/tsm...
Intel makes desktop cards too
and they have more memory bandwidth (per dollar) and more VRAM per dollar
the trajectory looks good if they can just resist giving up early without seeing instant success
"just resist giving up early without seeing instant success"
Sounds like I've been doing life wrong.
Intel, AMD, Apple?
Apple's not super relevant for a mass market OEM type of discussion.
They don't even take themselves seriously
I'd say they took themselves too seriously, and rested on their high margin laurels for too long
I 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.
To 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?
Society 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…)
So what changes to the law do you propose? None of the little annoyances that Nvidia is occasionally creating amount to anything that could have resulted in their current dominance in AI processing.
They made a good product. The competition is responding too slowly. And they got lucky with this crazy (in a good way) AI boom. I don't see how this could possibly be outlawed or why you would even want to. It will resolve itself on its own given enough time.
How about right-to-repair. How about forcing better access, documented, attributable firmware. Open Drivers for Linux.
The government as a big costumers could demand these things, even without having a low. The military should demand these things to be open for various reasons.
I think Nvida can still make plenty of money in such a world.
In cases where an interface has absurdly high value for society if its a standard, the government could also 'buy' that and open it up. Just like they do with other infrastructure.
One could make the argument that the x86 interface should be public domain as it amounts to infrastructure that most of society builds on. How such a thing would exactly work is of course up for some debate. But the concept of the government 'liberating' common interfaces makes sense from a society perspective.
>How about right-to-repair. How about forcing better access, documented, attributable firmware. Open Drivers for Linux.
How would that have stopped Nvidia from dominating the AI market?
>The government as a big costumers could demand these things, even without having a low. The military should demand these things to be open for various reasons.
I agree that governments should use APIs with multiple competing implementations (or one truly open source implementation) where possible. This could make a difference in some cases, but I doubt it would have had a big impact in this particular case as demand for GPGPU is overwhelmingly coming from the private sector.
>In cases where an interface has absurdly high value for society if its a standard, the government could also 'buy' that and open it up. Just like they do with other infrastructure.
Agreed, but is there a legal reason why AMD and others are not allowed to create a clean room implementation of CUDA? Haven't they done exactly that with ZLUDA (which they have now defunded)?
I thought not supporting CUDA was more like a failed strategic move by competitors to prevent CUDA from becoming an industry standard.
I think we agree on all the relevant principles. I just don't see how any of these principles make a big difference in this particular case.
Also, I don't see the Nvidia situation as particularly problematic. They are not too entrenched to unseat. Some of their biggest customers (themselves huge oligopolists) are shaping up to be their biggest competitors.
Most of AI processing will be inference, not training. Bringing the costs down is absolutely key for broad AI use. My bet is that the hardware margins will end up being slim.
Sounds 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.
I don’t see what being organic has to do with market failures (if in fact there were no shenanigans, which seems a stretch to posit at zero).
A market failure is a market failure.
There’s a big lobby on HN who want to defend or minimize or justify leaving market failures be, which is weird given they’re really bad for most people on HN, it’s a free country.
But let’s call it what it is.
I’m saying that we have “deregulated” big-cap tech to the point of not enforcing laws that we enforced even a decade ago. This is analogous to the last time a sector 100% captured the regulators which was high finance in the Greenspan era last time. Ended poorly.
The likely height of big-cap tech regulation was the regulated monopoly of ATT/Bell Labs/Western Digital all through the 20th century.
I prefer the outcomes in that era to the present status quo.
You can agree or disagree, and disagreeing is simple: “I prefer these outcomes because…”. I welcome such disagreement. And FWIW I’m not one of the many people who downvoted you: but they were justified in doing so because you moved a comparison of policies and their outcomes into a more abstract space of 1-bit generalizations, e.g. “talking points” vs “law/precedent”. I gave examples, it’s public record and trivially Googleable.
You didn’t fail to understand my point, you didn’t like it and took a cheap shot.
Market segmentation generally benefits consumers though. Enterprise is willing to pay much more than an average consumer, and they buy a lot more PCs/gpus/etc than the average consumer, so if you banned market segmentation tomorrow the response would be that gpus get a lot more expensive. You can see that happening when miners or enterprises buy up gaming gpus (which they are doing right now with 4090s for example). The clearing price wouldn't fall, it would rise.
The de-facto mechanism that's occurring with market segmentation is that consumers pay less than the clearing price and enterprises pay more. And consumers benefit from this subsidy.
If you banned it, you also wouldn't change the cost of developing new generations of products, so product development just would go slower, and the market would get even lumpier and less efficient (vendors squatting newer nodes would have an advantage, but it's inefficient to launch something immediately to compete with them, etc).
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?
Not 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.
People want Apple to change because they can't handle Apple making such amazing products? That's certainly a brand new take. Elaborate?
It'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.
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.
Big 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.
Unfortunately, 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.
Just 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
Is 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.
If 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.
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.
AMD being asleep at the wheel, or choked out by the Intel + Nvidia cartel?
Any 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.
The 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.
If you peel the layers back... isn't the real monopoly ASML?
I am always wondering why ASML hasn’t got any antitrust lawsuits for their monopoly.
INAL. 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.
Watch out, different jurisdictions have different 'anti-trust' laws. And, especially in common law jurisdictions, interpretations of a law can also change over time.
Who's this warning for? Do we have any budding monopolists in the HN crowd who need the warning?
Everyone's learning to talk like a GPT.
Eh, I was already uncool before GPT came around.
Then perhaps it's the other way around and you're the reason I'm sometimes warned by LLMs that I shouldn't kill processes.
Maybe for not lawyers like me who pretend to be expert in everything :|
Yes, sort-of.
But no worries: in a democracy we expect ordinary people to have some interest in the laws, after all, they are supposed to be electing people who decide on how laws should be changed (or not). So layman need to talk about laws, too.
I'm just always a bit cautious (or at least I should be). I know that eg in the US insider trading is about stealing secret from your employer; but in eg France insider trading is about having an unfair advantage over the public.
I can image that there are jurisdictions that treat monopolies by themselves as a problem. (Perhaps France, again?)
Btw, for the US herself have a look at https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-standard-oil-was-a-pr... to see how the prototypical case against Standard Oil wasn't really about monopoly abuse, either. At least no one really bothered proving that a monopoly was abused, they mostly just assumed it.
The warning is for armchair speculators like you and me. Specifically:
So this might be true about anti-trust in the US right now. But I'm not sure whether it's true about ant-trust law in eg France?
Also, in practice this was not true about anti-trust law in the US historically: Standard Oil was smashed into pieces without anyone proving in court that consumers had been harmed, or that the monopoly had been 'abused'.
See eg https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-standard-oil-was-a-pr... and https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Antitrust.html
Aloca :(
Because they're not a monopoly based on anticompetitive practices, they're a monopoly because what they do is so difficult and massively expensive that the monopoly is the only thing that makes it economically viable. The worldwide market for these machines is only perhaps a few dozen a year at most, it just can't support paying the R&D bills of multiple competitors.
ASML is also part-owned by their customers. Intel, Samsung and TSMC all invested in ASML to get EUV tech over the line - see aforementioned capital requirements.
Also, it's only really a monopoly at the top end, and only right now. It's not like ASML is the only company building litho machines. Canon and Nikon still sell a lot of machines, they just decided not invest to much into competing at the top end over the last 10 years.
This could, theoretically, change at any moment, and Canon is trying something with their new generation of nano-print tech.
Have they actually engaged in anticompetitive behavior or are they just the only player?
Well, that would be for a judge (or jury?) to decide, if someone sued.
the answer is it’s a state sanctioned monopoly which concentrates control of advanced technological processes in the hands of NATO.
ASML is a strategic asset.
They're not the only lithography machines, just the only EUV lithography machines. It's not a crime to have a better product.
The 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
Because the patents that they have for their deep EUV tooling are...licensed property of the US DoE. Someone doesn't want that disturbed.
I hope you are not being serious and it is missing /s somewhere.
I'm not sure if this is the motivation, but any sort of action against ASML would give Chinese fabs time to catch up.
It's not ASML's fault that 20 years ago when Martin van den Brink (CTO) went full steam to develop EUV everyone laughed at him saying EUV would be impossible to achieve. Their monopoly is well deserved. Other companies have a few years to catch up for full fault of their own.
I 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.
Then 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.
In a shrinking market, the midrange and low-end products will cease to be profitable. Hence, Nvidia's 60/70 offerings are lackluster because they don't make much money from them. They want you to buy the 80s and 90s cards.
Furthermore, node advancements have stopped scaling $/transistor. So the transistors aren't getting cheaper, just smaller.
Lastly, Nvidia wants to allocate every last wafer they pre-purchased from TSMC to their server GPUs.
[0]https://d15shllkswkct0.cloudfront.net/wp-content/blogs.dir/1...
But those are mostly AMD, and doesn't really have anything to do with what features someone puts on their discrete gaming cards, except insofar as it implies gamers don't need the cards some amateur ML hobbyist might buy.
That's assuming the products have high independent development costs, but that isn't really the case. The low end products are essentially the high end products with fewer cores which use correspondingly less silicon -- which have higher yields because you don't need such a large area of perfect silicon or can sell a defective die as a slower part by disabling the defective section, making them profitable with a smaller margin per unit die area.
Which implies that they can profitably continue producing almost-as-good GPUs on the older process node.
Which is why the proposal is for them to make as many GPUs as the gamers could want at Samsung.
Customers who want midrange or low end GPUs are price sensitive. Therefore, midrange and low end GPUs are a low margin business. Hence, there's little to no reason to provide a very compelling product in those categories.
While midrange GPUs are a cut from highend GPUs, they're still significantly more expensive to manufacture than say CPUs, at a transistor to transistor level. Look at an AMD 7950x transistor count, and then an RTX 4060 transistor count. The GPU has ~50% more transistors but sell at half the price. In addition, the GPU requires RAM, a board, circuitry, and a heatsink fan. The margins simply aren't there for lowend GPUs anymore.
Previously, Nvidia and AMD can make it up through volume. But again, the market has gotten much smaller going from 60 million discrete GPUs per year sold to 30 million. That's half!
Based on your logic, AMD should feast on midrange and low end discrete GPU market because Nvidia does not have value products there. But AMD isn't feasting. You know why? Because there's also no profit there for AMD either.
Once you stop thinking like an angry gamer, these decisions start to make a lot of sense.
Customers who want petroleum are price sensitive. Therefore, petroleum exporting is a low margin business. This is why the Saudis make the profit margins they do. Wait, something's not right here.
You're comparing the high end CPU to the mid-range GPU. The AMD 8500G has more transistors than the RTX 4060 and costs less.
The 8500G comes with a heatsink and fan. The 8GB of GDDR6 on the 4060 costs $27 but the 4060 costs $120 more. A printed circuit board doesn't cost $93.
That's not because people stopped buying them, it's because they shifted production capacity to servers.
But they do though. You can find lower end AMD GPUs from the last two years for $125 (e.g. RX 6400) whereas the cheapest RTX 3000 or 4000 series is around twice that.
And anyway who is talking about the bottom end? The question is why they don't produce more of e.g. the RTX 3070, which is on the old Samsung 8LPP process, has fewer transistors than the RTX 4060, is faster, and is still selling for a higher price.
The bottom line is, you keep wondering why no one is offering compelling value in the midrange area but there's a very obvious reason why: profit is not there.
[0]https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/
Selling 30M GPUs with a huge margin is more profitable than selling 60M GPUs with a modest margin, and they can point to Bitcoin or AI as an excuse.
But also, we're talking about them crippling the cards "for gamers" so there will be cards "for gamers" -- the premise of this has to be that they're supply constrained (artificially or otherwise) because otherwise they would just make more at the evidently profitable price gamers are already paying. It can't be a lack of demand because the purpose of removing the feature is to suppress demand (and shift it to more expensive cards).
So you're saying that if a high tech product only has a limited number of suppliers then they could charge high margins even if customers are price sensitive.
GPU manufacturing is automated. The CPU heatsink isn't attached because it mounts to the system board, not because attaching it would meaningfully affect the unit price.
Driver development isn't part of the unit cost, its contribution per unit goes down when you ship more units.
You can buy an entire GPU for the price difference between the 8500G and the RTX 4060.
That's only because you're limiting things to discrete GPUs and customers have increasingly been purchasing GPUs in other form factors (consoles, laptops, iGPUs) which have different attachment methods but are based on the same technology.
Steam is measuring installed base. That changes slowly, especially when prices are high.
They make a non-zero amount of profit, which is why they do it.
I think you answered your own question, really.
Although I would modify your statement slightly:
Original: Selling 30M GPUs with a huge margin is more profitable than selling 60M GPUs with a modest margin.
Modified: Nvidia and AMD must sell at a higher ASP because the market for discrete GPUs has shrunk from 60m to 30m/year.
That's your answer! It's what I've been arguing for since my very first post. It isn't Nvidia and AMD's choice to have the market shrink in terms of raw volume. It's because many midrange gamers have largely moved onto laptops, phones, and consoles for gaming since 2010. The remaining PC gamers are willing to pay more for discrete GPUs. Hence, both Nvidia and AMD don't bother making compelling midrange GPUs.
I remember midrange GPUs that have great value such as the AMD HD 4850. I don't think those days are ever coming back.
Is 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.
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.
I don’t know, in the world you want, gamers don’t have GPUs, and NVIDIA has less money. The only winners are people buying hardware for data centers.
They could leave the connector on the GPUs and then make more of them. Then everybody has more GPUs and everybody wins except Nvidia. Or to put it the other way, in the status quo everybody loses except Nvidia.
They used to do this with the Quattro workstation cards. What happened to those?
I am not sure where that idea came from. It is from Samsung 8nm Fab. It never had the capacity to play with in the first place. Especially when Samsung Foundry is upgrading to chase with leading node.
In general you want to upgrade your oldest fab to the newest node, or build a new one, instead of shutting down a recent one and taking it out of production even though there is still demand for that node.
There are still plenty of things being produced in fabs with older technology than that. Global Foundaries is the third largest in the world and they're offering 12nm or worse. People buy it because not everything needs a node which less than six months old and the price is right.
Yes. But that is specific to GF and TSMC when you have recurring customer on older node. Which is not true for Samsung Foundry.
Why is it different? Wouldn't Samsung prefer to build new fabs rather than retrofitting old ones given the demand, since they would then have more customers and make more money?
AMD is not too far behind. They can go wild in a few years.
In 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.
Didn't AMD just commit to a CUDA compatible api? Did I hallucinate that?
Different kinds of compatibility. HIP is source compatible and officially supported. Zluda is the newly released project for running CUDA-compiled binaries.
If you mean the one posted here earlier today, I believe that article was more like “we paid a contractor to implement this, and then decided not to use it, so per our terms it’s open source now.”
Well, you probably read a inaccurate headline about it. The project is called ZLUDA https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA and it had a recent public update because of the opposite - AMD decide not to continue sponsoring work on it:
It's worth noting that while ZLUDA is a very cool project, it's probably not so relevant for ML. Also from the README:
PyTorch has OOTB ROCm support btw and while there are some CUDA-only libraries I'd like (FA2 for RDNA, bitsandbytes, ctranslate2, FlashInfer among others), I think sponsoring direct porting/upstreaming compatibility of the libraries probably makes more sense. Also from the ZLUDA README:
AMD 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.
They did not add a compat layer, where did you get this?
The recent news was about AMD giving up on that path.
https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA
They still funded it and it was created.
There'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.
Oh please, AMD's offerings are worse than Nvidia's in every imaginable way except the open source nature of their Linux drivers. ROCm is shit. Nvidia actually supports CUDA on almost any Nvidia card. ROCm not so much.
Big 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
So 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?
let the startups do some work on their own for once lol
This 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.
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.
lol
I'd say it would be mutually beneficial if AI startups just skipped the part where they produce nothing of value despite having access to every resource, and skip ahead to the part where they go out of business.
Your AI startup has a 0.1% chance of becoming successful (going by SV definition of success, as yet another rent-seeking, privacy-abusing SaaS) while millions of gamers have a 99.9% chance of enriching their lives with entertainment. Statistically that's just the reality of this situation if you insist on being utilitarian.
We keep the GPUs, Nvidia keeps a diverse customer base, and you don't have to waste years of your life doing self-important busywork. Deal?
Won't somebody think of the crypto miners.
Yeah 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.
Nvidia purportedly enjoys a 1000% profit margin on H100’s.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-makes-1000-profit-o...
I think that is actually the markup number. Profit margin is capped at 100% since you can't profit by more than you sell something for.
Only by ignoring all upfront costs, as also mentioned in the article.
Marginal profits need to be high when upfront costs are huge.
But 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.
NN research and crypto assholes ruined the market for gaming graphics. I'm glad NVlink was taken out.
You can do this in software, effectively.
I 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.
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.
Design 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.
Nvidia’s value is completely out of line with their revenue and eventually that will catch up with them.
The last comment here made me laugh
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38144619