[HN Gopher] Nvidia in the Valley
___________________________________________________________________
Nvidia in the Valley
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 175 points
Date : 2022-09-26 14:09 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stratechery.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stratechery.com)
| digdugdirk wrote:
| This article lays out a solid overview as to how Nvidia got to
| where they are now. I'm curious (as someone without a deep
| knowledge of the technology or the industry) as to why AMD can't
| create a similar dedicated ray-tracing functionality in their
| chips? It seems to be where the industry is going, and the
| article later goes on to point out how Meta and Google are doing
| this themselves.
|
| Why has AMD ceded this market? Is it a patent issue? Capability
| issue? Something else?
| samstave wrote:
| amd seed was intel having to lit give them chip designs... in
| the 90s.
|
| google was secretly making their own motherboards in ~2004 that
| were multi proc
|
| "meta" (fucking idiot name) was building a crap ton of secret
| datacenter hardware and architecture in the 2010s...
|
| and they are part of the secret sauce...
|
| (source ;;worked for all in diff capacities)
| BudaDude wrote:
| I'm also curious why AMD hasn't implemented something like CUDA
| cores for ML. AMD cards are basically useless for doing any
| intensive ML task.
| smoldesu wrote:
| They did try. A few years ago AMD and Apple collaborated to
| make OpenCL, which was a pretty half-hearted attempt at
| building a platform-agnostic GPGPU library. Their heart was
| in the right place, but that was part of the problem.
| Nvidia's vertical control over their hardware and software
| stack gave them insane leveraging power for lots of dedicated
| use cases (video editing, gaming, 3D rendering, machine
| learning, etc.)
|
| In the end, even after years of development, OpenCL was just
| really slow. There wasn't a whole lot of adoption in the
| backend market, and Apple was getting ready to kick them to
| the curb anyways. It's a little bit of a shame that AMD got
| their teeth kicked in for playing Mr. Nice Guy, but they
| should have know that Nvidia and Apple race for pinks.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Intel and AMD never bothered to move OpenCL beyond bare
| bones C source, while NVidia not only moved CUDO into a
| polyglot ecosystem early on, they doubled down on IDE for
| GPGPU computing and first class libraries.
|
| Google never bothered with OpenCL on Android, pushing their
| C99 Renderscript dialect instead.
|
| Apple repented themselves of offering OpenGL to Khronos and
| the direction not going into the way they wanted to.
|
| Those that blame NVidia for their "practices" should rather
| look into how bad the competition has been from day one.
| paulmd wrote:
| OpenCL had a bit of a "second-mover curse" where instead of
| trying to solve one problem (GPGPU acceleration) it tried
| to solve _everything_ (a generalized framework for
| heterogeneous dispatch) and it just kinda sucks to actually
| use. It 's not that it's slower or faster, in principle it
| should be the same speed when dispatched to the hardware
| (+/- any C/C++ optimization gotchas of course), but it just
| requires an obscene amount of boilerplate to "draw the
| first triangle" (or, launch the first kernel), much like
| Vulkan, and their own solution is still a pretty clos
|
| HIP was supposed to rectify this, but now you're buying
| into _AMD 's_ custom language and its limitations... and
| there are limitations, things that CUDA can do that HIP
| can't (texture unit access was an early one - and texture
| units aren't just for texturing, they're for coalescing all
| kinds of 2d/3d/higher-dimensional memory access). And AMD
| has a history of abandoning these projects after a couple
| years and leaving them behind and unsupported... like their
| Thrust framework counterpart, Bolt, which hasn't been
| updated in 8 years now.
|
| https://github.com/HSA-Libraries/Bolt
|
| The old bit about "Vendor B" leaving behind a "trail of
| projects designed to pad resumes and show progress to
| middle managers" still reigns absolutely true with AMD. AMD
| has a big uphill climb _in general_ to shake this
| reputation about being completely unserious with their
| software... and I 'm not even talking about drivers here.
| This is _even more_ the widespread community perception
| with their GPGPU /ML efforts than with their drivers.
|
| http://richg42.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-
| driv...
|
| AMD doesn't have a library of warp-level/kernel-
| level/global "software primitives" like Cuda Unbound or
| Thrust either. So instead of writing your application, you
| are writing the primitives library, or writing your own
| poor implementation of them.
|
| https://github.com/NVIDIA/cub
|
| https://github.com/NVIDIA/thrust
|
| It's just a fractal problem of "the software doesn't exist
| and AMD would really rather you write it for them" all the
| way down and nobody wants to do that instead of doing their
| own work. AMD is the one who benefits from the rewrite, for
| everyone else it's a "best case scenario it works the same
| as what we've already got", so if AMD isn't gonna do it
| then pretty much nobody else is gonna leap on it. And then
| AMD has poor adoption and no software and the cycle
| continues.
|
| AMD really really just needs to get serious and hire a half
| dozen engineers to sit there and write this software, cause
| it's just not going to happen otherwise. It's a drop in the
| bucket vs the sales to be realized here even in the medium
| term, like one big ML sale would probably more than pay
| those salaries. They're not doing it because they're cheap
| or they're doing it because they're not really serious,
| take your pick, but, AMD is no longer _that_ broke, they
| can afford it and it makes financial sense.
|
| Again, not a "nice" thing to say but it's the cold truth
| here. I feel like I've made some variation on this post
| about every 6 months for like 5 years now but it's still
| relevant. If you as a vendor don't care about writing good
| code for key features/libraries for your product, nobody
| else is either, and you'll never get uptake. It's the same
| thing with AMD/ATI not embedding developers with studios to
| get those optimizations for their architectures. Console
| lock-in will only get you so far. If you don't care about
| the product as a vendor, nobody else will either.
|
| It's remarkable how much flak Jensen got for "NVIDIA is a
| software company now" back in 2009, and how people _still
| don 't get it_, AMD is _not_ a software company and that 's
| why they keep failing. Writing the framework that turns
| into StableDiffusion and sells a billion dollars of GPUs is
| the NVIDIA business model, AMD keeps trying to jump
| straight to the "sell a billion dollars of GPUs" part and
| keeps failing.
| paulmd wrote:
| AMD has "tensor cores" (called something different but
| they're very similar matrix accelerator units) in CDNA. RNDA3
| is supposed to have "something", it has the same instruction
| as CDNA, it's supposed to be less than a full unit but
| presumably there wouldn't be an instruction without some
| level of hardware acceleration either.
|
| The bigger problem is that AMD doesn't want to pay to keep up
| on the software side... at the end of the day when you're
| coming from behind you just have to pay someone to port key
| pieces of software to your platform. AMD has really coasted
| for a long time on letting the open-source community do their
| work for them, but that's not going to fly with things like
| PyTorch or other key pieces of software... if AMD wants the
| sales and the adoption of their hardware, it's just going to
| have to pay someone to write the software, so that people who
| want to do research and not PyTorch maintenance can justify
| buying the hardware.
|
| I am not particularly interested in the perceived historical
| justifications for the current situation, it doesn't matter
| to the businesses who might be AMD's customers. And actually
| in many ways they've gotten even shakier recently, what with
| dropping RDNA support from their NN/ML package. As a cold
| statement of reality, this is table stakes going forward and
| if AMD doesn't want to do it they won't get the sales.
|
| It's not even just PyTorch either, it's... everything. AMD is
| just coming from a million miles behind on the software, and
| "welp just write it yourself if you want to use our hardware"
| is not an attitude that is conductive to selling hardware.
| rektide wrote:
| Which libraries is AMD dropping RDNA support in?
|
| That seems very inadvised. Nvidia's libraries being usable
| by a broad range of developers on a wide range of hardware
| is critical to their wide adoption. AMD cannot expect to
| have real adoption if only their fancy enterprise grade
| unobtanium cards support ML systems. AMD needs a wide &
| engaged community trying to yse their stuff to figure out
| what software/drivers they simply have to build.
| paulmd wrote:
| Talking specifically about ROCm here, their ML package.
|
| God this is such a tough paragraph to write accurately.
| AMD themselves have conflicting information all over
| their docs and repos and half of it is not even marked as
| "outdated"...
|
| https://docs.amd.com/bundle/ROCm-Getting-Started-
| Guide-v5.2....
|
| The official supported platforms at this point are RDNA2
| (pro), GFX9 (pro), and CDNA. Consumer versions of these
| (RDNA2, Radeon VII, and Vega 56/64) _probably_ work,
| although Vega 56 /64 are an older version with much less
| hardware support as well. RDNA2 support is also "partial"
| and ymmv, things are often broken even on supported
| cards.
|
| If RDNA2 works, then RDNA1 _may_ work, but again, mega
| ymmv, things may not even be great with RDNA2 yet.
|
| The "hardware guide" link talks about supporting Vega 10
| (that's V56/64) and says GFX8 (Polaris) and GFX7 (Hawaii)
| are supported... but that doc is tagged 5.0 and 5.1 was
| the release that dropped the other stuff. So I'd _say_
| Vega 64 /56 chips are _probably_ broken at this point, on
| the current builds.
|
| Up until earlier this year though, it was unsupported on
| any consumer card except Radeon VII. They dropped
| Hawaii/Polaris/Vega support about 6 months before they
| started adding partial RDNA2 support back.
|
| And in contrast... NVIDIA's shit runs on _everything_ ,
| going back 10 years or more. At least to Kepler, if not
| Fermi or Tesla uarch (GTX 8800 series). It may not run
| _great_ , but CUDA is CUDA, feature support has been a
| _nearly_ forward ratchet, and they 've had PTX to provide
| a rosetta stone in between the various architectural
| changes.
|
| I mean... at the end of the day the hardware hasn't
| changed _that_ much, surely you can provide a shader
| fallback (which is required anyway since RDNA2 doesn 't
| have tensor acceleration). I don't get what the deal is
| tbh.
|
| https://www.techpowerup.com/288864/amd-rocm-4-5-drops-
| polari...
|
| https://www.phoronix.com/news/Radeon-ROCm-5.1
| rektide wrote:
| Yeah there was unbelievably terrible lag getting
| Polaris/RDNA2 generation going. It was jaw droppingly
| slow to happen! But it did finally happen.
|
| I was afraid all RDNA[n] were going fully unsupported,
| which felt like a sure invitation of death.
|
| Sounds like there's still a lot of uncertainty, but it
| also doesnt sound as bad as I'd first feared; it seems
| like RDNA2+ could probably hopefully possibly work decent
| well. As opposed to, you have to buy unobtanium hard to
| find stupidly expensive cards. Seems like it's still
| playing out, & we dont know what RDNA2+ is good for yet,
| but it doesnt sound like the walk towards certain death
| this originally sounded like.
|
| Thanks for the intense hard to develop reply. A lot of
| in-flight status updates to gather. Appreciated. Really
| should be better established, what AMD is shooting for &
| what we can expect.
| ActionHank wrote:
| AMD already has dedicated raytracing hardware on their GPUs,
| but are behind Nvidia.
|
| PC games that opted for Nvidia raytracing earlier on run poorly
| with an AMD GPU with raytracing turned on. Cyberpunk 2077 is an
| example of this, runs beautifully on Nvidia gpus with rt on,
| framerate falls through the floor on an AMD card.
|
| Raytracing on the "next gen" consoles PS5 and XBox Series X is
| done using AMD hardware and runs really well.
| Maciek416 wrote:
| IMO, a major ingredient of raytracing running well enough in a
| game that _also_ looks as good as any other current AAA title
| in raster-only mode has been DLSS. Raytracing is (or at least,
| at time of 2xxx series GPUs, was) still quite expensive to run
| at full res at resolutions (1440p, 4K) and framerates
| (60,120,144) that PC gamers demand. However, rendering
| raytraced games at a much lower resolution is just within reach
| for dedicated CUDA hardware. So DLSS makes up the difference
| with very sophisticated upscaling. Without DLSS, I think the
| raytracing in titles like Cyberpunk 2077 might not be
| performant enough.
|
| In light of this, you might go back and see that AI and RT for
| NVidia have gone hand in hand, because one enables the other to
| be performant enough for AAA titles. Opinions may vary greatly
| on this, but personally, I don't think AMD's FSR upscaler is
| capable of matching what DLSS can do in this regard. (Intel's
| upscaling does seem to be capable of doing it, but very high
| performance parts are still some ways away from release).
| ckozlowski wrote:
| I'm theorizing here, but I suspect it's because AMD feels like
| building out a dedicated or proprietary capability could really
| hurt them if it didn't take off. By that logic, NVidia's risk
| here could hurt them as well (and that they are taking a risk
| is the point the article it trying to make.)
|
| AMD has for a long time favored an inclusive, compatible
| approach. First (that I can recall) with x86-64, more recently
| with AdaptiveSync over G-Sync, and now with their Ray Tracing
| approach. Each time they chose a move efficient path that was
| open to the industry as a whole.
|
| This seems to have had some pros and cons. On the one hand,
| they've been able to keep up with the market with a solution
| that is the best value for them. They've never been a large
| company against the likes of Intel and NVidia, so I suspect
| there's less appetite for risk.
|
| On the other hand, by always going that route, they cede the
| leadership role to others, or if they do have leadership, it's
| not in a way they can really leverage. It becomes commoditized.
| Note how when the industry was moving to 64bit, AMD ended up
| setting the direction over IA-64 with their more inclusive
| approach. But it didn't turn into any significant leverage for
| them. They set a standard, but it was one that everyone else
| then adopted, including Intel.
|
| So I feel like while AMD's approach keeps them alive and always
| in the running, it's an approach that will never put them on
| top. Whether or not this is a bad thing really depends on what
| the goals of the company are, and if the the goal is to remain
| steadily in the race, then they're doing great.
|
| But arguably, NVidia pulls the industry in directions by way of
| its choices. They're risky and sometimes irritable. It's also
| put them in front.
|
| So in my opinion, AMD hasn't ceded the market, but they have
| ceded leadership in many instances by their safe approach. It's
| still profitable and safe for them. But they'll always remain
| second place as a result.
| viscanti wrote:
| The argument is made in the article. AMD is cutting all the
| things that are expensive but with limited markets (no
| special hardware on chip for raytracing or AI as well as
| using a slightly older fab). They'll focus on being much
| cheaper with nearly the same performance and less energy
| requirements than NV.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It makes sense -- as the underdog they need to erode
| entrenched advantages, starting up a standards-based
| compatible approach is a cheap way of doing so (on top of
| being totally laudable and good for the community).
|
| I wonder if we could ever see Radeon Rays on Intel's GPUs, or
| even their iGPUs. Raytracing in every low-resource-
| requirement MOBA, I say!
| gamdevthrowaway wrote:
| > as to why AMD can't create a similar dedicated ray-tracing
| functionality in their chips?
|
| They do and it works well.
|
| > out how Meta and Google are doing this themselves.
|
| Meta and Google develop products everywhere all the time.
|
| The author doesn't play or develop games, so it's okay that he
| doesn't really know anything or can meaningfully comment on it.
| He just took what Huang said and Ctrl+C Ctrl+V'd it.
|
| WHY DO PEOPLE CARE ABOUT RAYTRACING?
|
| Photoreal gets financing. For your game, for your crypto thing,
| whatever. Raytracing makes photoreal demos at pre-financing
| costs.
|
| Also essential reason why Unreal Engine is appealing. Unity is
| for people who make games, Unreal is for people who _finance_
| games.
|
| WHY DO PEOPLE CARE ABOUT AI-GENERATED CONTENT?
|
| The Darwinian force here is the same: people believe you can
| make a game (or whatever) out of DALL-E or whatever dogshite.
| They don't believe you when you say you would hire an artist in
| Indonesia for the same cost (or whatever). So you'll get
| financed by saying one and not the other.
|
| The reasons why don't really matter. It's idiosyncratic. You're
| going to spend the money however it is. Just like every
| startup.
|
| Also the AI generation thing attracts people who think they're
| the smartest, hottest shit on Earth. That attitude gets
| financing. Doesn't mean it reflects reality.
|
| DO THESE TECHNOLOGIES MATTER?
|
| I don't know. What does Ben Thompson know about making fun
| video games? It's so complicated. I doubt Big Corporate or VC
| capital is going to have financed the innovative video game
| that uses raytracing or AI generated content. It's going to be
| some indie game developer.
| TillE wrote:
| > I doubt Big Corporate or VC capital is going to have
| financed the innovative video game that uses raytracing
|
| Sorry, you _don 't_ believe that a AAA game developer is
| going to take full advantage of the latest high-end GPU
| capabilities? That's the one thing they _have_ reliably done
| for the past 25+ years.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| Uh, AAA game developers not using NVIDIA-developed tech?
| Yes. Tessellation was a huge fail that didn't deliver on
| performance. Geometry shaders were another huge fail. Mesh
| shaders are shaping up to be pretty unimpressive. Pretty
| much all of NVIDIA's middleware (Ansel, Flow, HairWorks,
| WaveWorks, VXGI) haven't really caught on fire; usually
| they're placed into the game through NVIDIA paying
| developers large sums of money, and usually ripped out upon
| the next game release.
|
| What instead happens is that game developers are developing
| large bunches of tech in-house that exploit new features
| like compute shaders, something NVIDIA has struggled to
| keep up with (lagging behind AMD in async compute,
| switching compute/graphics pipelines has a non-zero cost,
| lack of FB compression from compute write).
|
| I say all of this as a graphics developer working inside
| the games industry.
|
| Ben makes a bunch of historical errors, and some pretty
| critical technical errors, that I consider it to be almost
| a puff piece for NVIDIA and Jensen.
|
| (NVIDIA definitely did not invent shaders, programmability
| is a blurry line progressing from increasingly-flexible
| texture combiners, pioneered by ArtX/ATI, NVIDIA looooved
| fixed-function back then. And raytracing really does not
| function like however Ben thinks it does...)
| gamdevthrowaway wrote:
| > something NVIDIA has struggled to keep up with (lagging
| behind AMD in async compute, switching compute/graphics
| pipelines has a non-zero cost)
|
| Someone who knows what he is talking about.
|
| Like Ben Thompson could write an e-mail to any of the
| 10,000 people who know something about this and just ask,
| right?
| gamdevthrowaway wrote:
| The keyword there was innovative, I'm sorry. Like imagine
| Portal, an innovative rendering game - now, is there
| something innovative that is going to be done with a
| raytracing feature like accelerated screen space
| reflections? No, probably not, people could render mirrors
| for ages. It's going to be like, one guy who creates cool
| gameplay with the hardware raytracing APIs, just like it
| was a small team that created Portal.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| > _Also essential reason why Unreal Engine is appealing._
|
| Is that why unreal engine deprecated ray tracing?
|
| You're honestly quiet clueless considering your phrasing. I
| bet you haven't worked in a large studio working with unreal
| engine either.
| gamdevthrowaway wrote:
| > Is that why unreal engine deprecated ray tracing?
|
| Unreal Engine didn't deprecate ray tracing, they are using
| the same DirectX DXR APIs in a different place. But I think
| you already know that.
|
| > I bet you haven't worked in a large studio working with
| unreal engine either.
|
| Have you?
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| > _Unreal Engine didn 't deprecate ray tracing,_
|
| They literally did. They found that Lumen looked better
| and used less performance then hardware ray tracing. At
| least thats what they said in a developer interview a few
| month ago.
|
| > _Have you?_
|
| No, I haven't. My day job isn't even in the game
| industry. I've only dabbled a little after I bought my
| first VR headset.
|
| The either was because you were dissing the article
| author by saying they weren't a game dev, with the
| argument that UE is only used because it looks shiny to
| management, with is pure nonsense.
| cypress66 wrote:
| That's incorrect. Lumen supports both software and
| hardware raytracing.
|
| Software rt lumen is lower quality, often faster,
| supports any hardware and has some pretty big
| limitations.
|
| Hardware rt lumen is higher quality, often slower, needs
| hardware support and has a lot less limitations.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| I cannot find the interview I remembered so you're both
| almost certainly right wrt hardware ray tracing. I still
| think that their original premise about unreal engine is
| nonsense however.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| I am not worried about Nvidia.
|
| They will clearly suffer for a while, a bad year or maybe two,
| not enough to sink the company or to kill the golden goose.
|
| They are spreading themselves a bit thin with all their projects,
| but I can see them succeeding with enough of them to be in a
| better relative position 2-3 years from now.
|
| GPUs are becoming a general-purpose data-plane computing
| platform, this not simply related to gaming, crypto or AI
| training, but everything.
| paulpan wrote:
| Personally I'm very eager to see AMD's upcoming RX 7000-series
| from a pricing as well as performance standpoint compared to
| Nvidia's new 4000 series.
|
| As noted in the article, "Nvidia likely has a worse cost
| structure in traditional rasterization gaming performance for the
| first time in nearly a decade" due to the much lower die costs
| that AMD is targeting. I predict Nvidia's share price will
| continue its downward trajectory - both on the weakness of 4000
| series (given high price and surplus 3000 series inventory) and
| on AMD pricing pressure.
|
| What's more interesting is Nvidia's long term focus on ray
| tracing and continuing to dedicate more and more precious die
| space to it. AMD, on the other hand, seems to be more focused on
| the short term: rasterization performance. It's a bit reminiscent
| of Apple vs. Samsung, where AMD is Apple as it waits on
| technologies to become mainstream before full adoption and Nvidia
| is Samsung as it bets on new technologies (e.g. foldables).
| bullen wrote:
| How far off can you be: electricity is never going to become
| cheaper.
|
| Right now playing 5 hours of 1060 PC games costs $1 in EU.
|
| To even think of selling something that draws more than 30W is
| ridicoulus.
|
| The metaverse has to scale DOWN to 5W Raspberry 4.
|
| VR/120Hz/RTX are completely out of the question.
| vimota wrote:
| >Similarly, if AI applications become democratized and accessible
| to all enterprises, not just the hyperscalers, then it is Nvidia
| who will be positioned to pick up the entirety of the long tail.
|
| How does this square with Cloud providers themselves being
| hyperscalers ? What's to stop Google/AWS/Microsoft's hardware
| divisions from outpacing Nvidia since those businesses themselves
| may need the hardware and can then provide it to end users of
| their cloud platforms.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| With gfx slowly trending towards cloud and edge computing, I
| wonder how that benefits them, or not?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I've been hearing about this for a while but has any mainstream
| game actually demonstrated meaningful realtime graphics
| streaming? I suspect that kind of like NFTs or Metaverse, most
| developers see that it's a pretty bad idea in a practical
| sense, but talk about it because it's easy PR.
|
| People just barely tolerate games which require an internet
| connection to run for DRM, I can't imagine them appreciating
| the requirement for the connection to also be fast and stable
| enough for streaming, especially with handheld PCs starting to
| catch on. Especially since they'll also want to take down the
| expensive servers quickly after sales fall off, most likely
| making the games unplayable.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| There's several games released on Nintendo Switch that run
| only via cloud streaming. The Kingdom Hearts switch "ports"
| are all streamed.
|
| It's also the only way to play Fortnite on iOS after Apple
| removed Fortnite from the app store.
|
| https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/mobile
|
| > People just barely tolerate games which require an internet
| connection to run for DRM
|
| While some people are generally very loud about this on
| Reddit and gaming forums, the average person doesn't seem to
| care. Even people who complain loudly about it online will
| quietly buy it if it's the only choice. It reminds me of that
| old screenshot of a Steam group dedicated to "Boycotting
| Modern Warfare 2" in 2009. The day after release? Most of the
| group was playing it.
|
| https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--
| W8ZYHe9...
| izacus wrote:
| There's a difference between being angry at DRM in general
| and not being able to play a game because your cheapskate
| ISP gave you a shitty overbooked connection.
|
| Stadia hit that issue quite a bit. And I haven't really
| seen cloud titles on Switch (a famously offline console
| bought by people who really want to play away from stable
| networks) have significant sales success.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I played with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 gamepass
| streaming. It was fine, games like that don't require
| fractions of a second response time, it looked like I was
| watching an interactive high compressed youtube video of the
| game set to medium, but the whole time I was going "Why don't
| I just play the prettier version on my PC?"
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Not sure about this trend.
|
| The idea of a dumb terminal had been around forever, and so
| far, it has been cyclically going up and down.
|
| In my opinion, we'll always have both.
| Melatonic wrote:
| This guy really loves his leather jackets eh?
| russli1993 wrote:
| if chiplet is the silver bullet to die costs, I don't get why
| Nvidia won't go for it. After all, Nvidia has smart ppl too.
| There must be some design tradeoffs that made Nvidia engineers to
| believe their approach is still the best in terms of perf and
| area. For 4090 and 4080 price, I think Nvidia strategy is: they
| are higher tier, with 3000s as the lower tier more affordable
| option. They feel they can succeed with this strategy in the
| current market (1 year or so) given the competitive landscape.
| Then they can use 4090 and 4080s to drive up the ASP and margins.
| Their biggest motivation is sustain the stock price.
| zackmorris wrote:
| I hadn't heard the term chiplet before, thank you! When I got
| out of school in the late 90s, system-on-chip (SoC) was a pipe
| dream. It has issues because memory might have different
| requirements than CPU, so it's hard to put all of the
| components on a single die.
|
| I always thought the situation was frankly pretty silly,
| because I didn't want one big die anyway. I wanted a scaleable
| grid of chips like the 3D processor from the Terminator 2
| movie.
|
| It took over 20 years, but maybe we'll have a chance to get
| something like that with an open source RISC-V. Maybe an array
| of matchhead-size CPUs at 1 GHz costing $1 each that could be
| scaled to hundreds or thousands of cores with content-
| addressable memory for automatic caching and data locality.
| Then it could be treated as a single processor with access to a
| one large shared memory space and we could drop the (contrived)
| distinction between CPU/GPU/TPU/etc and get back to simple
| desktop computing rather than dealing with the friction of
| vertex buffers.
|
| My guess is that Nvidia doesn't want any of that to happen, so
| works to maintain its dominance in single-die solutions.
| paulmd wrote:
| "match-head sized chiplets" sort of falls into the chiplet
| mythos I think. Chiplets aren't magic, they actually
| _increase_ power usage vs an equivalent monolithic chip, data
| movement is expensive and the more data you move the more
| expensive it is. People just think chiplets are efficient
| because AMD made a huge node leap (GF 12nm to TSMC 7nm is
| like, more than a full node, probably at least 1.5 if not 2)
| at the same time, but chiplets have their own costs.
|
| The smaller you split the chiplets, the more data is moving
| around. And the more power you'll burn. It's not desirable to
| go _super_ small, you want some reasonably-sized chiplet to
| minimize data movement.
|
| Even if you keep the chiplets "medium-sized" and just use a
| lot of them... there is still some new asymptotic efficiency
| limit where data movement power starts to overwhelm your
| savings from clocking the chips lower/etc. And there's
| copper-copper bonding to try and fix that, but that makes
| thermal density even worse (and boy is Zen4 hot already...
| 95C under _any_ load). Like everything else, it 's just
| kicking the can down the road, it doesn't solve all the
| problems forever.
| paulmd wrote:
| Even AMD is only splitting off IO dies this generation. That's
| an advantage for sure, because you can push 20% or so of your
| die off to separate chiplets, which means you can go 25% larger
| than you otherwise could with a purely monolithic design.
|
| (and in particular you can also push them off to N6 or some
| other super-cheap node and save your super-expensive N5
| allocation for the GCD... at the cost of some power for
| infinity fabric to send a TB/s of data around between chiplets)
|
| But so far nobody seems to have progressed on splitting the GCD
| itself... which has always been the actual goal here. Multiple
| chiplets computing together like one, transparently without
| software needing to be catered to like SLI.
|
| AMD's general approach seems to be "big cache-coherent
| interconnect between GCD chiplets", which is generally
| unsurprising on multiple levels (it's how infinity fabric
| already works in their CPUs, and it's how SMP generally works
| in general today almost everywhere) but there still seems to be
| some barrier to making it work with _graphics_. There are of
| course a lot of gotchas - like temporal data or needing access
| to other parts of the frame that may be in another GPU - but
| cache-coherent interconnects generally solve this.
|
| But yeah, NVIDIA isn't avoiding some silver bullet here,
| they've actually been on the forefront of this with NVSwitch
| since Pascal, that was the first serious "multi-GPU that acts
| like one" attempt. I don't know why they're not doing it, or at
| least the "split the IO dies off" thing.
|
| edit: thinking about this a bit more, one reason they may not
| be doing the MCD/io die idea is because they're doing L2
| instead of L3. L3 can be pushed off to a separate die... L2 is
| really part of the SM, it's a lot "closer". Again, they may
| have engineering reasons to favor L2 over L3, or it may be a
| patent thing.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| It isn't the case that NVIDIA won't go for a chiplet design,
| they're working on it but it isn't ready yet. Current
| expectations for NVIDIA's chiplets to be ready seem to be for
| either a refresh of the 50xx series or the 60xx series.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > I don't think we could have seen it. I don't think I would've
| done anything different,
|
| This is a CEO admitting they essentially learned nothing, will
| not admit they made a wrong choice in light of data, and
| typically means they will do it again.
|
| They could have seen the writing on the wall about how people
| were angry about crypto emissions and that proof of stake was
| being bandied about as a solution (and that Cardano already had
| it, so it's not just a theory).
| johnla wrote:
| I read that more as CYA than anything.
| treis wrote:
| Lots of people talking about the economics but my take away from
| the article was that we're on the cusp of something really cool.
| The combination of ray tracing, physics via ray tracing, and GPT
| like content generation are all the ingredients needed to make
| huge immersive worlds. Imagine GTA with every house, office, and
| sky scraper full of unique realistic looking people doing
| realistic things in a fully destructible environment.
| wslh wrote:
| Offtopic: Stratechery has a podcast at [1] including the
| translated interview with Nvidia CEO [2]. The weird thing from
| the marketing/conversion perspective is that the interview
| translation says "To listen to this interview as a podcast, click
| the link at the top of this email to add Stratechery to your
| podcast player." instead of having a direct link in the web page.
|
| [1] https://open.spotify.com/show/1jRACH7L8EQCYKc5uW7aPk
|
| [2] https://stratechery.com/2022/an-interview-with-nvidia-ceo-
| je...
| draw_down wrote:
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| NV saw the profits it made from the shortages of the last mining
| boom, and determined that it was better to make a much higher
| profit even at the cost of shipping fewer units. They went full
| bore on the 'costs and tdp don't matter'. They saw that people
| were willing to pay any price for cards that were 5% faster at a
| higher power draw.
|
| Only, the mining boom is over, there are a _mountain_ of 3000
| series cards floating around out there, and NV is sweating. The
| flood of used mining cards is going to make this the first good
| time to buy a GPU in _years_ and no amount of shenanigans with
| 4000 series cards is going to change that math.
| johnla wrote:
| Where's the best place to pick up these cheap cards? eBay?
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| ebay, fb marketplace, r/hardwareswap
| izacus wrote:
| This sounds like a win for nVidia in any case, since it'll
| entrench their RTX, CUDA, NVENC and DLSS moats, making them
| ubiquitous targets for games and driving purchasing decisions
| in the future.
|
| But they'll need to wade out a generation for that - which
| probably isn't the first time.
| adolph wrote:
| 40 years from now someone will make good use of those in a
| documentary . . .
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_Al_Capone's_Vau...
| monkmartinez wrote:
| The article kind of led with Crypto, but could have easily
| started and ended with Crypto. Full Stop.
|
| Overlay Ethereum-USD and Nvidia charts for the past 5 years and
| what does that tell you? My take is both Nvidia's stock price and
| Ethereum-USD price were products of helicopter money. Sure some
| gamers bought cards, but not on the scale to which miners
| acquired them.
|
| Analysis of mining hash rate post-merge bears this out[0]. With
| some estimates being $5 to $20 Billion(USD) in newer GPU's that
| are no longer "profitable."[1] The 'chip' shortage meant Nvidia
| could not satisfy demand for their products. I posit no amount of
| chips would have satisfied demand. They, along with many other
| companies, made record profits during the pandemic. There was
| just soooo much 'extra' money flowing around with stimulus,
| overly generous unemployment, PPP, and more.
|
| I can't tell you how many people were YOLO'ing every cent of
| their stimulus into Crypto and WSB stonks. It was an enormous
| cohort of people based on the explosion of Robinhood and Coinbase
| use mentioned in WSB subreddit. Mooning and Diamond hands FTW,
| eh?
|
| Mining crypto with gainz from a roulette spin with Robinhood
| options? Yeah, while we are at it, lets buy 4 mining rigs because
| mining Ethereum is very, very profitable during this time. The
| thinking that one can literally turn electricity to heat while
| making money (even while one sleeps no less) and trade options
| while one is awake. It may look crazy right now, but the
| subreddits were non-stop talk like this.
|
| There are mining rigs all over my Facebook marketplace and local
| craigslist now. Crypto winter is here (for who knows how long)
| and Nvidia is not going to make those types of returns for the
| extreme foreseeable future. Reality check 101.
|
| [0]https://twitter.com/WuBlockchain/status/1552837630278385664
| [1]https://www.theblock.co/post/168380/whats-left-for-
| ethereum-...
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| After crypto it will be ML and general cloud computing.
| monkmartinez wrote:
| How many people do you think are 'into' ML enough to spend
| $1k+ on a SOTA gpu and associated hardware? I am slowly
| getting there having moved from Colab to my own set up...
|
| However... Ethereum enabled/lured many everyday joes into
| buying 4+ $1k cards due to the incentive structure of; 'buy
| mining rig then buy a lambo.' Setting up a GPT-NeoX is orders
| of magnitude more difficult than pointing GPU compute at
| Nicehash. I really have a hard time thinking ML will have any
| meaningful uptake in that regard because the incentive
| structure isn't the same and its much, much harder.
|
| Big cloud seems to be going there own way in regards to
| compute. GPU's are great for ML, but that doesn't mean they
| will always hold the crown. TPU's, NVMe storage, and chiplets
| may find a better path with newer software.
|
| I just don't see how Nvidia really thrives without
| drastically reducing price (less margin). I don't think they
| are dead, but they are in big trouble as are many companies.
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| New Macbook Pros and workstations are now coming with
| powerful GPU's for ML work.
|
| StableDiffusion alone was trained on 256 x Nvidia A100
| GPUs.
| monkmartinez wrote:
| Correct, MBP's can run stable diffusion and other ML
| workloads on non-nvidia hardware. I clearly see this
| becoming a trend. GPT-J, Neo and NeoX run really well on
| Colab TPU's, again these are not made by Nvidia.
|
| Training is dominated by Nvidia, I will not question that
| as most papers I have seen say something similar. I will
| say that I do not believe training will always be
| dominated by Nvidia's datacenter options. Two things that
| will hasten the withdraw from Nvidia; Cuda and hardware
| advances around the motherboard (ASICs, RAM proximity,
| PCIe lanes, data transfer planes, etc).
|
| Think about this... what if a company released an ML
| training/Inference ASIC that used regular DDR4/NVMe,
| performed like 4 x A100's and cost $8000? Would you be
| interested? I would! I don't think this is too far off,
| there has to be someone working on this outside of
| Google, Apple and Meta.
| [deleted]
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| We've had several generations of ASICs already, if TPUs
| etc aren't much superior to GPUs why would future ASICs
| be any better.
| justapassenger wrote:
| > Overlay Ethereum-USD and Nvidia charts for the past 5 years
| and what does that tell you? My take is both Nvidia's stock
| price and Ethereum-USD price were products of helicopter money.
| Sure some gamers bought cards, but not on the scale to which
| miners acquired them.
|
| While I do get your point, and largely agree, I don't think
| that stock price is a good comparison. You can overlay also
| Meta or Amazon stock, and get same conclusions. Last few years
| were across the board tech bubble.
| monkmartinez wrote:
| Agreed, it has been very bubbly across the board. However, I
| think Nvidia (AMD as well) and Ethereum are especially
| correlated as first and second order effects seem
| proportional to incentive feedback into their respective
| ecosystems. Ethereum has been hounded by the 'wastefulness'
| of mining, which is to say 'proof of stake' wasn't born in a
| vacuum. Likewise, Nvidia GPU's were being bought at many
| multiples of msrp in BULK! Call it a perfect storm, call it
| what you want... but Nvidia has a tough road ahead.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Is there any kind of precedent where bad news for the
| semiconductor manufacturers means good news for specific
| downstream industries? Examples? I.e. the oversupply of chip X
| allowed industry Y to buy more chips resulting in innovation Z...
| spicyusername wrote:
| The last paragraph really sums it up In other
| words, Nvidia has earned the right to be hated by taking the
| exact sort of risks in the past it is embarking on now. Suppose,
| for example, the expectation for all games in the future is not
| just ray tracing but full-on simulation of all particles:
| Nvidia's investment in hardware will mean it dominates the era
| just as it did the rasterized one. Similarly, if AI applications
| become democratized and accessible to all enterprises, not just
| the hyperscalers, then it is Nvidia who will be positioned to
| pick up the entirety of the long tail. And, if we get to a world
| of metaverses, then Nvidia's head start on not just
| infrastructure but on the essential library of objects necessary
| to make that world real (objects that will be lit by ray-tracing
| in AI-generated spaces, of course), will make it the most
| essential infrastructure in the space. These bets
| may not all pay off; I do, though, appreciate the audacity of the
| vision, and won't begrudge the future margins that may result in
| the Celestial City if Nvidia makes it through the valley.
| TechnicolorByte wrote:
| It's a very good summary. Nvidia to me gets a lot of flak
| (sometimes rightfully so) in large part to being the big risk-
| taker in the GPU/graphics/AI space that pushes forward industry
| trends. AMD, meanwhile, is largely a follower in the
| GPU/graphics space with few contributions to rendering
| research. Even worse, they even use their marketing to angle
| themselves as consumer-friendly when I reality they're just
| playing catch-up. For instance, they started off badmouthing
| ray-tracing as not being ready back when Turing launched (when
| is any new paradigm ever "ready" when it requires developers to
| adapt?) before adopting it with much worse performance the
| following generation.
| ThomPete wrote:
| There is going to be no end to demand in the future for Nvidia
| unless it's going to another chip producer or another technology
| (like quantum chips)
|
| It's really that simple IMO.
|
| AI have just started becoming mainstream and it will most
| certainly play a big part in whatever gets us out of our current
| situatins.
|
| Disclaimer: I invested very early in nvdia stocks and is long on
| them.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Once I got my hands on stable diffusion, I bought a 3090 because
| I was afraid that they would go up in price, but my power supply
| wasn't big enough and I returned it for a 2060. But now I see
| that 3090s are dropping like 40% in price since then. This
| article does a great job explaining these dynamics.
|
| Metaverse and crypto will be a bust, but democratized AI is going
| to explode, the big risk for NVDA is that models and tools get
| small and efficient enough that they don't need $1,000+ hardware.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| $1,000 is a very reasonable enterprise price point. After all,
| datatcenter CPUs are much more expensive.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Democratic means fit on an iPhone if not on $50 throw-away
| hardware.
| bongobingo1 wrote:
| I think democratizing AI means more than "a very reasonable
| enterprise price point" of $1000.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It doesn't, you can run this on $150 GTX 1060s if you're
| willing to wait a few moments. The interesting angle here
| is that there is a consumer segment of hardware (gaming
| GPUs) that can be used to drive cool artistic experiments.
| I think for most people, even non-gamers, getting dedicated
| acceleration hardware is not any more expensive than an
| entry-level analog synthesizer.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| With only 4GB, I'm RAM limited for a lot of models. I'm
| thinking of buying a dedicated GPU just for ML stuff.
| Dennip wrote:
| Won't enterprise always go for the quadro cards which are
| more like $4000+
| jeffparsons wrote:
| > the big risk for NVDA is that models and tools get small and
| efficient enough that they don't need $1,000+ hardware.
|
| You will always be able to do more and better with the premium
| hardware. Maybe for video games the marginal differences aren't
| enough to sway most consumers towards the high end cards, but I
| expect there will be a lot of people willing to pay top dollar
| to be able to run the best version of X AI tool.
| bitL wrote:
| The new 40x0 series has no NVlink even on their pro cards,
| which is a major letdown and step back for AI folks.
| solardev wrote:
| With games, the best card might make sense cuz it could be
| the difference between 60+ fps and 40.
|
| For workloads though, does it really matter if it completes
| in 20 seconds instead of 15?
|
| Unless there's some feature difference in the higher end
| cards (like AI-specific subchips), not just more of the same
| & faster, then a lower card of the same generation shouldn't
| impact your ability to run something or not.
|
| Maybe RAM size...
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| How many times do you have to complete that 20/15 second
| task in a year? Multiply that by 5 seconds to get the
| "wasted time". Factor in the employees salary by that
| wasted time, how much are you paying them to wait on that
| slower hardware? Is it more money than the price difference
| between the better GPU and the cheaper GPU?
|
| Or maybe it's an automated thing that runs constantly? The
| difference between 20 and 15 seconds is 480 additional
| iterations per 8-hours. How much is that worth to you?
|
| There's also the unmeasurable benefits. What if you're
| losing potential good employees applying because word on
| the net is your company uses last-gen hardware for
| everything, and your competitors use the newest.
| [deleted]
| Blammar wrote:
| RAM size is the issue. I can't run stable diffusion at 1k x
| 1k on my 2080ti because I run out of vram.
| [deleted]
| mw888 wrote:
| Democratized AI will not explode, it will thrive as centralized
| services until the day real time AI is expected by consumers.
| ronsor wrote:
| I actually don't think Metaverse will be a bust, but I think
| the current corporate implementation of it will be. Companies
| are trying to cash in too early and it's not really working out
| for them, particularly Zuckerberg's Meta.
| metadat wrote:
| What other implementation will come to fruition? AFAICT the
| Metaverse is a shoddy VR clone of Second Life.
|
| The Metaverse is already a bust, essentially a stillborn
| fetus. The market doesn't actually want it.
| mlsu wrote:
| Zuck's Metaverse (tm) is very forward looking in some ways,
| and very backward looking in others.
|
| Although his particular vision is very weird and ugly, Zuck
| is on the right track: in the future, people will spend
| real time (not async time, a-la tiktok/instagram) with each
| other in virtual spaces. Facebook is already a text-based
| version of the metaverse, and it minted a pretty penny.
|
| The metaverse, as Zuck imagines it, is already here though:
| video games. People who are hardcore about video games wake
| up, go to work, get home, and then plug in. Their friends
| and social circle exists on the internet, in the game. This
| is the metaverse. Video-game communities; Fortnight [1] ,
| WoW, League, CS-Go, etc; these are the most complete so far
| existing metaverse(s). One exists for every major flavor of
| gameplay we can think of. Look on steam for people who have
| 10,000 hours in a game. These people live as Zuck wants us
| all to: in the metaverse.
|
| Zuck's vision is to expand these virtual communities beyond
| the hardcore gamer group. You go to work (in a metaverse)
| then you come home and spend time with your friends (in a
| different metaverse), then you play a game (in yet another
| metaverse), then you sleep and do it all again the next
| day. It's actually a very forward-looking vision, and one
| that probably will come to pass over the next few decades.
| A metric for this is "time spent in front of a screen." It
| inexorably climbs year after year, generation after
| generation.
|
| But the key thing is that the experience has to be good.
| The metaverse of Fortnight or CS-GO is worth spending time
| in because those games are _fun_ and engaging in their own
| right; for some, more fun and engaging than reality itself.
| These games print money, because a small group of people
| legitimately spend every leisure moment in them. Zuck 's
| vision is to expand this beyond the market for hardcore
| gamers and into work, socialization -- life itself.
|
| I suspect that the market doesn't quite fully understand
| this part of Zuck's metaverse dreams. In part because of
| Meta's spectacular failure at making the metaverse look fun
| and compelling.
|
| Personally, my money's on Epic to actually bring the
| Metaverse to fruition. They already own a Metaverse,
| Fortnight, and they also own Unreal, which will probably be
| the software foundation upon which the normie metaverse
| gets built.
|
| [1] https://medium.com/@ow/the-metaverse-is-already-here-
| its-cal...
| quantumwannabe wrote:
| A spiritual successor to Second Life with modern graphics
| and VR support would likely be very successful. Dumbed-down
| versions like Fortnite Creative and Roblox have been very
| popular. Zuckerberg won't be the one to build a successful
| metaverse game though, not because Meta doesn't employ
| skilled game developers, but because culturally the
| leadership is completely out of touch. Second Life thrived
| because of its uncontrolled player creation environment,
| which Meta would never allow. It let you 3D model and
| script _anything_ you could think of using in-game (and
| external) tools and had a free market economy where the
| developer only took a cut when converting to /from real
| world currency. The whole debacle with the "virtual
| 'groping'" and the personal space bubble has demonstrated
| that even if Facebook's Metaverse did have good creative
| tools, all it would take is a single article written by a
| journalist with an axe to grind for them to cripple it.
| They've already removed legs from avatars in Horizon Worlds
| for "safety", which is ridiculous.
| not2b wrote:
| The market doesn't want Zuckerberg's version. Maybe some
| day someone will get it right in a way that's good enough
| to be interesting.
| metadat wrote:
| Yes, maybe someday, somewhere else.
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| >Metaverse and crypto will be a bust
|
| I love when HN netizens just throw stuff like this out without
| further explanation. It's as if they're monks reciting the
| dogma. Sigh.
| flumpcakes wrote:
| It is probably the default safe position. I think there would
| be a larger need in explaining how they won't be a "bust"
| compared to saying that they will. The internet needed
| explaining to many people to see it's real advantages before
| it took off.
| yuan43 wrote:
| > I [nvidia CEO] don't think we could have seen it [massive
| effect of Ethereum merge on bottom line]. I don't think I
| would've done anything different, but what I did learn from
| previous examples is that when it finally happens to you, just
| take the hard medicine and get it behind you...We've had two bad
| quarters and two bad quarters in the context of a company, it's
| frustrating for all the investors, it's difficult on all the
| employees.
|
| This is not confidence inspiring. It was obvious that the Etherum
| merge would affect the bottom line in a big way. Why this
| professed ignorance? Does it have to do with the fact that to
| admit that it was visible a mile away would have been to admit
| the deep reliance the company had come to have on the short-term
| Ethereum mining boom?
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Many folks _in_ crypto expected those Ethereum-mining GPU farms
| to just switch to some other GPU-minable cryptocurrencies. It
| wasn 't a certainty all those farms would just close up and
| dump their GPUs on the market en masse. But Fed interest rate
| policy hitting at the same time, driving down the crypto market
| across the board (and all other risk assets), may have
| unexpectedly changed the ROI calculation there and resulted in
| the dump.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Many poorly educated folk maybe. All other chains were
| already less profitable and had a small fraction of
| Ethereum's hashrate. Even 5% of ETH's hashrate moving to them
| is plenty to make them unprofitable for most. This was never
| a likely outcome.
| paulmd wrote:
| > Many folks in crypto expected those Ethereum-mining GPU
| farms to just switch to some other GPU-minable
| cryptocurrencies.
|
| This was a pretty common take but if you did the math
| Ethereum had about 90% of the GPU-mining market (by hashrate)
| so it was obvious the profitability was going to tank on
| those other currencies as soon as Ethereum switched.
|
| In the long run yes, there will probably be another big spike
| in another cryptocurrency that starts another GPU boom. But
| it's not magic where one instantly springs up to absorb all
| the ethereum hardware at equivalent profitability.
|
| A GPU crash was inevitable regardless of the interest rate
| drop hitting at the same time.
| swalsh wrote:
| I hoped there would be a rise in proof of work like chains,
| where in the work was something useful like training an AI or
| brute forcing a hard but useful problem. Like a SETI@Home,
| but paying crypto for successful solutions as opposed to
| relying on altruism.
| asciimike wrote:
| There are a few of these type of things, e.g. RNDR token
| (https://rendertoken.com) and rent a flop
| (https://rentaflop.com) in rendering, and golem
| (https://www.golem.network) and sonm (https://sonm.com/) in
| the "general purpose computing on the blockchain"
| omegalulw wrote:
| It's hard to pull this off, if not impossible. A key
| attribute of proof of work systems is that the difficulty
| should be dynamically adjustable and that everyone has
| perfect consensus on what "work" is. Doing meaningful work,
| while admirable, puts the owners of those projects in
| control of defining "work" and adjusting difficulty, i.e.,
| people in the loop. That's not trustworthy from a currency
| POV, no matter who the people are.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| It was sudden and couldn't have been predicted. Ethereum ended
| PoW just this month but the GPU crash was 7 months ago. In
| reality the PoW transition had nothing to do with the GPU
| crash, it was the end of WFH and the crypto decline caused by
| the russian invasion that resulted in the GPU crash.
| [deleted]
| varelse wrote:
| opportune wrote:
| I think Huang does not want to draw investors' attention to
| crypto because he doesn't want people to equate Nvidia's
| performance as a company with crypto performance. He doesn't
| want Nvidia to just be a crypto company.
|
| At the same time, he also definitely wants to cash in on any
| future crypto booms, because they are lucrative.
|
| It is best for him to take a position that mostly ignores
| crypto. I think he legitimately doesn't want crypto to be the
| future of Nvidia and doesn't want to build for that use case,
| nor does he want to be financially reliant on it, but there is
| also no point in him talking shit or spreading doom about
| crypto when he can just shut up and still sell gpus.
| swalsh wrote:
| Nvidia doesn't have a role in any future crypto boom, unless
| it's being used for analytics or AI. All modern chains use
| PoS.
| kranke155 wrote:
| They do now but they didn't just a few days ago.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| As the article says, the timing on the Ethereum dropping proof-
| of-work was shorter than Nvidia's production pipeline.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I think we forget that Silicon manufacturing is planned a lot
| farther out than Silicon shopping.
|
| They were likely trying to make TSMC purchase orders in the
| start of the pandemic, before a crypto boom. They also tried to
| handicap their GPUs wrt crypto. They likely didn't expect the
| absolute shit show of a chip shortage (because who predicted or
| understood the pandemic early).
|
| The rest of the market was desperate, and they probably
| expected it to be more robust than it ended up being. The merge
| would have been so far away at the time that they wouldn't
| predict if it would happen at all nevermind when.
| sophrocyne wrote:
| Couple of comments to this point suggest that it couldn't have
| been predicted since the official timing of the merge was only
| announced in 2022, and silicon supply chain requires planning
| in advance of that.
|
| But that point is ignorant of this truth - Proof-of-stake has
| been on the roadmap since ~2017 if not earlier.~ Edit: 2016 -
| Thanks friend! :)
|
| I think the reality is that the impact of Ethereum on Nvidia's
| business was not fully appreciated, and that 'veil of
| ignorance' may well have been intentional. They never truly
| served the crypto market directly (e.g., there wasn't really a
| "miner" line of cards), and as a result didn't do the due
| diligence to understand how those customers played into their
| business performance and strategy. Or they did, and just really
| underestimated the Ethereum devs on ever making the merge
| happen. But I lean towards the first.
|
| Either way, I think that with crypto in the rearview, I'm
| actually more confident in their leadership team. They seem
| better suited to gaming and AI.
| throw101010 wrote:
| > They never truly served the crypto market directly (e.g.,
| there wasn't really a "miner" line of cards)
|
| There were deliberate, and miserably failed, attempts to make
| lines of cards that could not be used for mining, while in
| parallel keeping their non-limited lines in production,
| making them the defacto miners' lines.
|
| So yes they did know about it and tried to address it by
| catering to both markets, but were unable to do it correctly.
| izacus wrote:
| What would "correct" approach look like?
| sophrocyne wrote:
| ASICs probably.
|
| The point you responded to is also fair; the fact they
| tried to lock miners out was a de facto acknowledgment
| that crypto had an impact on their sales, and is more
| critical evidence they handled it poorly.
| [deleted]
| doikor wrote:
| Nvidia did (does?) have a miner line of cards (CMP HX).
| Though they were mainly their server cards that failed QA but
| could still work as a miner.
|
| https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/
|
| These also had models that you can't find anywhere on Nvidia
| website like HX170 that is basically a A100 with less memory
|
| A lot of miners preferred consumer cards though as those can
| be sold to gamers once the bust comes again (and with crypto
| it always will every few years)
| sophrocyne wrote:
| Completely unaware of this line. Thanks for sharing.
|
| Frankly, doesn't paint a better picture for an Nvidia...
| paulmd wrote:
| > But that point is ignorant of this truth - Proof-of-stake
| has been on the roadmap since 2017 if not earlier.
|
| it's been on the roadmap since 2016. That's actually still a
| problem though, a perpetually-rolling-deadline is effectively
| worse than not having a deadline at all.
|
| Was NVIDIA just supposed to cut production for the last 6
| years in anticipation of something that was continuously
| pushed back 6 months every 6 months? That's not a reasonable
| expectation.
| sophrocyne wrote:
| As an observer, I never got the sense that there were
| strong commitments being made on timelines until A) beacon
| chain was live (running in parallel), and B) testnets
| started getting merged successfully.
|
| The moment of Genesis for the beacon-chain started a clock
| that Nvidia should have been paying attention to, and I
| think would have given them plenty of time to foresee the
| present situation.
| [deleted]
| jonas21 wrote:
| Regardless of whether they foresaw it or not, what should
| they have done differently?
| cma wrote:
| Probably not much, but different investor guidance.
| sophrocyne wrote:
| Great question, and perhaps at the point where decisions
| were being made, it'd be hard to argue a different path
| internally (hindsight being 20/20).
|
| However, it seems clear that the business built both
| insane prices and the crypto lockup of devices (whether
| explicitly, or implicitly) into their forecasts for the
| business. They didn't have a good pulse on the actual
| demand/usage of their product, and when that usage
| pattern would shift.
|
| The path they're taking right now, specifically regarding
| pricing towards & serving higher-end enthusiasts with
| newer products, makes sense while the used inventory gets
| cycled around the lower end of the market.
|
| From a product perspective, I don't have any useful
| opinions to share because I'm not in hardware, and I
| don't have the information set they're operating from
| internally. But, they should have hoovered up as much
| cheap capital as they could while their stock price was
| high and the going was good to make the next period of
| heavy investments (to be fair, shares outstanding did
| grow, just not by a ton, %-wise, and they have a fair bit
| of cash on the balance sheet)
|
| https://www.wsj.com/market-
| data/quotes/NVDA/financials/quart... is painful to see,
| and I don't foresee it getting better in the next year.
| paulmd wrote:
| people absolutely SCREAMED a year ago when there was a
| rumor going around that NVIDIA was pulling back on new
| chip starts, it was going all around that it was a plan
| to "spike prices during the holidays".
|
| In the end 2021Q4 shipments were actually up according to
| JPR, of course. But people were _mad_ , and I still see
| that MLID article brought up as proof that NVIDIA was
| deliberately trying to "worsen the shortage" and "spike
| prices during the holidays".
|
| https://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-allegedly-halting-
| RTX-3...
|
| https://www.jonpeddie.com/press-releases/q421-sees-a-
| nominal...
|
| Now, what MLID may not really know, is that wafer starts
| typically take about 6 months, so if he's hearing about
| reduced starts in October, it's probably more like NVIDIA
| is pulling back on expected Q1/Q2 production... which
| indeed did come down a bit.
|
| But as to the public reaction... people were fucking
| _mad_ about _any sign_ of pulling back on production.
| People are just unreasonably mad about anything involving
| NVIDIA in general, _every single little news item_ is
| instantly spun into its worst possible case and
| contextualized as a moustache-twirling plan to screw
| everyone over.
|
| Like, would it have really been a bad thing to pull back
| on chip starts a year ago? That actually looks pretty
| sensible to me, and gamers will generally also suffer
| from the delay of next-gen products while the stockpile
| burns through anyway.
|
| It's _nowhere near_ the "sure miners may be annoying,
| but deal with it for 6 months and then we all get cheap
| GPUs and everyone holds hands and sings" that LTT and
| some other techtubers presented it as. Like, yeah, if you
| want a cheap 30-series card at the end of its
| generation/lifecycle great, but, you'll be waiting for
| 4050/4060/4070 for a while. Even AMD pushed back their
| midrange chips and is launching high-end-only to allow
| the miner inventory to sell through.
|
| And people hate that now that they've realized the
| consequence, but they were cheering a year ago and
| demanding the removal of the miner lock / etc. More cards
| for the miners! Wait, no, not like that!
|
| It's just so tiresome on _any_ article involving NVIDIA,
| even here you 've got the "haha linus said FUCK NVIDIA,
| that makes me Laugh Out Loud right guys!?" and the same
| tired "turn everything into a conspiracy" bullshit,
| _constantly_.
| smoldesu wrote:
| And that's just the _hardware_ drama. The software hate
| against Nvidia is partially unwarranted too - Nvidia 's
| Wayland issues mostly boil down to GNOME's refusal to
| embrace EGLStreams, which got whipped up into a narrative
| that Nvidia was actively working to sabotage the Linux
| community. The reality is that desktop Linux isn't a
| market (I say this as an Nvidia/Linux user), and they
| have no obligation to cater to the <.5% of the desktop
| community begging for changes. Honestly, they'd get more
| respect for adding a kernel-mode driver to modern MacOS.
|
| In the end, Nvidia is still a business. Putting any money
| towards supporting desktop Linux isn't going to have an
| adverse effect on their overall sales. We're just lucky
| that they patch in DLSS/ray tracing support to Linux
| games and software like Blender.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I think it's more like there are so many games at play as CEO
| in that position that anything but vague denial would be far
| more trouble than it's worth. Anything you say is going to
| attract a lot of criticism so the only thing you can say is the
| least damaging one.
|
| In other words, most public statements are mostly nonsense
| engineered for response and have only a casual association with
| the truth.
| modeless wrote:
| They have consistently underestimated the effects of crypto,
| it's been screwing up their demand forecasts for a long time. I
| think what happened was they had all these efforts to prevent
| miners from buying cards so gamers could buy them instead, and
| they thought they were successful. So they attributed strong
| demand to gaming, but they were actually failing and miners
| were still buying all the cards. I don't know why they thought
| they were successful...
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Calling it a "valley" almost seems silly. They're returning to
| _normal_ after a boom perpetuated on smoke.
|
| Nvidia will be fine. Investors don't like to see it because they
| somehow couldn't comprehend that the growth they saw was
| completely artificial (how is beyond me), but the company will be
| fine.
|
| Their latest decision with the 4000 series was smart though. They
| realized suckers will pay insane amounts for the cards, even
| disregarding prior crypto. So, make 4000 series insanely
| expensive. That will drive sales of 3000 series to empty the
| over-supply and make their relatively lower prices look like a
| steal.
|
| In the end, they get people to way over-pay on both the 3000 and
| 4000 series. Double dipping!
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Same thing happened during the last crypto boom. It was
| impossible to find 1000 series cards, and Nvidia saw how much
| people were willing to pay, so they priced the 2000 series
| high, just as (former) crypto miners were selling 1000 series
| cards.
| bitL wrote:
| Whether it is smart or not remains to be seen. AMD might step
| up and obliterate 40x0 in price/performance.
| capableweb wrote:
| In the price-sensitive consumer space, price/performance
| matters a lot. But all the other places,
| libraries/SDKs/interoperability matters as much or more. Most
| of all the Stable Diffusion stuff that is appearing is
| heavily powered by nvidia cores, with AMD support being
| spotty at best. Same goes for many other areas in AI/ML.
| izacus wrote:
| That's about as likely as Matrox suddenly being resurrected
| as the leader in professional graphics. These are huge
| complex chips.
| ckastner wrote:
| What makes you think AMD's chips are that much less
| complex? They hold up well in benchmarks.
|
| And add price to the comparison (since we are commenting on
| price/performance), and AMD already comes out ahead of
| Nvidia. Here's an article [1] that basically reproduces
| AMD's on PR on this, but other sites corroborate this.
|
| [1] https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-claims-to-offer-better-
| perfo...
| omegalulw wrote:
| > They realized suckers will pay insane amounts for the cards,
| even disregarding prior crypto.
|
| Press X to doubt. People are PISSED, and the 30 series is
| already excellent value. 4090 will sell but I have my doubts on
| the 4080 (esp 12 GB).
| izacus wrote:
| I'm willing to bet a case of lager that 40xx will sell out
| like hot cakes when gamer teenage angst passes.
|
| Gamer community is known for teenage rage outbursts which are
| of dubious practicality or reason.
| filoleg wrote:
| Yeah, I remember a similar fit thrown around the 20xx
| series release not that long ago. I had a 1080Ti at the
| time, so i didn't care to upgrade. Comes around the release
| time of 30xx, suddenly almost everyone i knew and everyone
| on reddit was upgrading from their 20xx series cards.
| fragmede wrote:
| Belittling the community, calling them teenagers, and
| telling them to "get over it" doesn't actually materialize
| $1,600 to be able to buy the card though. Especially right
| in the middle of a period of inflation and economic
| downturn. And then there's the competition Nvidia is in
| with themselves given then glut of used 3090 cards on the
| market, and the 3090 was only selling priced so high
| because of crypto mining in the first place, and that's
| gone now.
|
| Who knows, maybe you're right or maybe Nvidia's in for a
| valley, or Nvidia will end up dropping their prices.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| People say they're pissed, but open their wallets all the
| same. I wouldn't correlate internet outrage to anything real.
| Same as every time people say they're going to boycott
| anything online.
| izacus wrote:
| I wonder if "the investors" are mostly just AI trading
| algorithms with impulse control and intelligence of a 6 year
| old.
|
| Nothing else explains the short sightedness of modern markets.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I think the investors are just hopping stocks. Nvidia was
| generating extreme profits, now that that's over they'll jump
| to another hypey thing. Energy perhaps. They don't care about
| the companies they back. Just about money.
|
| It's causing good companies with a long-term vision to suffer
| (note I'm not considering Nvidia one of these) and promoting
| the hollow-shell money grabbers and pyramid schemes.
|
| I don't know how it can be solved though.. We've made this
| situation ourselves by speeding business up to "the speed of
| light". Perhaps a bigger role for governments in investment
| but I know that's cursing in the American church of the free
| market :)
|
| But in the long term we really have to find some stability
| back in the system IMO.
| lmm wrote:
| IMO the instability was always "really" there, but reduced
| information flow hid those fluctuations. Maybe we just need
| to get used to the instability - business is risky and will
| have ups and downs, responding quickly ultimately makes the
| system more efficient in the long run.
| ckastner wrote:
| > _Investors don 't like to see it because they somehow
| couldn't comprehend that the growth they saw was completely
| artificial (how is beyond me)_
|
| This was absolutely fascinating to watch over the past 18
| months.
|
| Anyone looking for GPUs starting from February 2021 new exactly
| what was going on. Cards were being gobbled up by miners. They
| never made it to any shelf for a consumer to buy; webshops were
| botted, very few humans had a chance to buy.
|
| Regular consumers only got them on eBay or similar. And it was
| blindingly obvious that consumers weren't paying four figures
| markup for certain cards. When ETH skyrocketed to almost $5000,
| a friend of mine was reselling 3060 Tis he bought for EUR419
| from Nvidia's webshop, using a bot he wrote, and resold them
| for EUR1250. His regular buyer took all cards he could get his
| hands on (dozens per month), and resold them to central
| European countries (popular among miners) for even more markup.
|
| Again, this was blindingly obvious. Availability of cards
| followed the ETH price; when ETH dipped in summer 2021, cards
| became available again. When ETH went up towards the end of the
| year, my friend was selling used 3080s for EUR1800 again. Then
| ETH started to crash again, and suddenly Nvidia was facing a
| massive oversupply.
|
| The fact that Nvidia to this day refuse to acknowledge the role
| that miners played in artificially inflating growth is weasily,
| to say the least.
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| The pricing of their cards are probably fine once you consider
| how stupid expensive fab costs are going to be, but their PR
| both communicating that and their weirdass 4080 naming nonsense
| is still hot garbage.
|
| I do agree though that their long-term fundamentals are fine.
| They're still reactive enough to be competitive with AMD
| (another company with strong fundamentals), avoided amateur
| mistakes like going full cryptobro, and they just generally
| positioned themselves well in the global market.
| flumpcakes wrote:
| Fab expenses haven't raised that much, meanwhile the margin
| for AIB has gone from 30% to 5%. Nvidia is making huge
| margins on their chips, probably the most of any company
| selling to consumers.
| Jsharm wrote:
| Is a GPU previously used for mining worth anything in the second
| hand market? I was under the impression it thoroughly knackered
| them out.
| causi wrote:
| There are a number of seriously conflicting stories. Some of
| them say "the cards were individually tuned and undervolted to
| run at maximum efficiency to make the most money so they'll be
| fine" and some say "these cards were overclocked and left to
| run in a boiling hot shipping container then they washed them
| off with a water hose".
| neogodless wrote:
| Results may vary.
|
| But I used my Radeon RX 6700 XT for mining nearly 24/7 for
| about 10 months (between purchase and when it paid itself off),
| while using it for gaming in between (I'd obviously stop
| mining). It ran around 65degC during that time. Very low core
| clocks, but memory was run at close to the maximum recommended
| speed by AMD's Adrenalin software. At least so far no signs of
| any problems.
| bentcorner wrote:
| LTT goes over it pretty well (IMO):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKqVvXTanzI
|
| tldr: Cards (like any piece of other electronics) do have a
| lifespan, but mining doesn't affect that. Cards that are kept
| clean and in better working conditions will run faster.
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