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TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

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Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#81

Post by Detrytus »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #48
wongarsu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be foolish. A large part of their moat is that lots of people already have Nvidia cards in their computers, making development really smooth and allowing hobbyists to easily get started and contribute to the ecosystem. If they were to give up their consumer gpu lead and let AMD overtake them that will lead to more AMD support in ML, enabling AMD to eventually compete in the server gpu space too.

That's not their moat at all. Most students don't have a capable gpu in their laptop. And these days everyone who is learning doesn't care about running on Nvidia, AMD, a cpu, etc. It's easy to move from one to the other (nominally). The moat is their high quality libraries for speeding up common operations on Nvidia gpus. AMD refuses to invest in ML and build the same libraries. Their stack is horribly buggy to the…

The students who are really interested in AI will buy desktop PC anyway. And the fact that they can use the same GPU for model training and for playing Diablo IV makes the whole investment easier to justify.

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#82

Post by wing-_-nuts »

Aerroon wrote: post #58
nomel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> allowing hobbyists to easily get started and contribute to the ecosystem I think many, maybe even most, would claim this is now best done on cloud services, like huggingface.co.

I think that's still a minority. Everyone has heard of cloud platforms giving people huge surprise bills and other such limitations. Another factor is availability and potential T&S concerns when you're doing something they don't want you to do. Stable Diffusion blew up when people are able to run it at home.

Nah, when you ask around on AI/ML subs, the default advice is to use google collab. Even shelling out for their premium offerings, you could pay for all the compute you would need through a PHD for the price of a 4090.

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#83

Post by wing-_-nuts »

Detrytus wrote: post #81
light_hue_1 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not their moat at all. Most students don't have a capable gpu in their laptop. And these days everyone who is learning doesn't care about running on Nvidia, AMD, a cpu, etc. It's easy to move from one to the other (nominally). The moat is their high quality libraries for speeding up common operations on Nvidia gpus. AMD refuses to invest in ML and build the same libraries. Their stack is horribly buggy to the…

The students who are really interested in AI will buy desktop PC anyway. And the fact that they can use the same GPU for model training and for playing Diablo IV makes the whole investment easier to justify.

I dunno man, stuff like google collab is ubiquitous for students these days. I asked about building a pc on the AI/ML subs on reddit and people basically and the default advice was that few did that these days, and they're right, compute prices have been really low until recently even if you decided to go with premium offerings.

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#84

Post by trashtester »

mschuster91 wrote: post #80
ARandomerDude wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or far-left ones, for that matter.

Far left ones don't go and shout "Ausländer raus" while marching in the thousands, which was a common occurrence during the high days of the weekly "Pegida" nazi marches in Dresden. Nor do they randomly beat up random people (not to mention protesters) that are just standing around [1]. [1] https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2018-10/recht...

While far left violence is currently a smaller problem in Germany than far right violence, it certainly exists.

This article [1] claims that there were 399 reported assaults associated with left-wing extremists, compared to 1013 associated with right-wing extremists.

Edit: and when it comes to property damage and arson, the far left is worse than the far right by about 3:1 [2]. This may be particularily relevant for companies who want to start new businesses.

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/left-wing-extremism-in-germany-how-muc...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/963069/right-wing-left-w...

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#85

Post by ethbr1 »

SilverBirch wrote: post #72
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increasing supply is not an issue if there is demand. As long as building more fabs brings more profit(even if at smaller margin), I can't see any reason why they won't be building it. It's economics 101. Also as moore's law is coming to end, the number of fabs has no way to go but up. Also I don't think manufacturing cost is the biggest of issue, because the margins are significantly higher than consumer GPUs which…

The problem is the bull whip effect. Yes there’s loads of demand now, but are we really saying that the AI boom is a permanent uptick in demand for silicon, or is it more likely that the hype dies down? By the time capacity comes online demand may well gave peaked and dropped. Suddenly these massive sunk cost fabs will be taking any business they can to amortise the costs.

It seems more likely that efficiency gains decrease aggregate compute requirements than people stop using AI tools altogether.

At minimum, LLMs work as a better human-software interface medium, which means they're going to be infused in almost everything non-technical consumer-facing.

Even absent any other breakthroughs, that seems like a huge consumer of AI hardware capacity.

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#86

Post by ethbr1 »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #83
Detrytus wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The students who are really interested in AI will buy desktop PC anyway. And the fact that they can use the same GPU for model training and for playing Diablo IV makes the whole investment easier to justify.

I dunno man, stuff like google collab is ubiquitous for students these days. I asked about building a pc on the AI/ML subs on reddit and people basically and the default advice was that few did that these days, and they're right, compute prices have been really low until recently even if you decided to go with premium offerings.

If you don't have a house with space that you expect to stay in for awhile, laptop+cloud is too compelling to make anything else worth it.

If you start having physical space guarantees, then the calculus changes...

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#87

Post by ethbr1 »

sangnoir wrote: post #75
siva7 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect nvidia to sell or close down their consumer division. Their whole business reality has changed in a few short months. Investors want undivided attention from the ceo to the new b2b cash cow.

This would be extremely foolish, considering the rate of ML research. There is no evidence that LLMs & supersized models are the end-state of ML research. In 3 years time, there might be completely new SoA technique that doesn't demand high memory bandwidth, which will completely flip the economics of pricey high-end cards. It's good they are selling shovels while there's a gold rush, but discarding the rest of your…

> ... but discarding the rest of your business to focus on a specific shovel that's currently popular may not end well.

I mean, we can just go ahead say "Intel" instead of beating around the bush.

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#88

Post by trashtester »

sangnoir wrote: post #75
siva7 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect nvidia to sell or close down their consumer division. Their whole business reality has changed in a few short months. Investors want undivided attention from the ceo to the new b2b cash cow.

This would be extremely foolish, considering the rate of ML research. There is no evidence that LLMs & supersized models are the end-state of ML research. In 3 years time, there might be completely new SoA technique that doesn't demand high memory bandwidth, which will completely flip the economics of pricey high-end cards. It's good they are selling shovels while there's a gold rush, but discarding the rest of your…

You may be right. However, Nvidia seems to develop their stack at a pace that it's difficult for the competition to keep up with.

They may end up in a position similar to US Steel or Standard Oil at the start of the 20th century if they continue to meet market demand as they do now, and AI is goes on to have the economic impact that steel and oil had in the last century.

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#89

Post by trashtester »

hef19898 wrote: post #62
pests wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends. Little boy would be easiest as the speherical detonation and materials science for the Fat Man implosion would still be difficult to design and machine. I also do not beleive the activator designs have ever been declassified.

Doesn't have to be an exact copy so, but yes design might be tricky. I assume solvable so, at least in a primitive and workable way. Machining, to be honest, beside size of the parts themselves, is something you can do in some reasonably well equipped maker space. And for size, CNC machines are readily available on the used market. And those are light years ahead of anything the Manhatten project had. Or Apollo for t…

From my undertanding, Fat Man requires a very precise design to focus the shock wave properly, or the bomb will never detonate properly.

This design is quite non-trivial even today. It took several of the brightest minds of all time to get it just right back then (like von Neumann).

Even with modern tools, you still need a team of quite capable engineers/scientists to pull something like that off, even if you do have the plutonium.

The little boy design is easier to engineer, but bomb grade uranium is even harder to produce than plutonium.

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#90

Post by Ekaros »

Miraste wrote: post #53
pandemicsyn wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is that the case? They sold a bunch early on but theres been lots of press about the lousy 40 series sales volume this year and their struggle to get people buy 4080/70's. In Feb they artifically constrained 4090 volume to try and push 4080s no one wanted. The 4070 was dead on arrival and had production cut by April. They've near stopped production now - theoretically because the AI stuff is so lucrative, but if they…

I blame it on Nvidia's product segmentation falling apart. Only a few years ago, the 1060, 1070, 1080, and Titan Xp had price differences that matched their performance differences. In their current lineup, buying anything that isn't a 4090 is getting ripped off. The 4060 and 4070 are basically e-waste. The 4090 had a 100% performance improvement in a lot of tasks over its predecessor, and the 4060 managed 10%. Somet…

Have to fill that line-up so they have something to sell to OEMs and retail customers have something to pick up.
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