111–120 of 282 posts
> Microsoft said it does not plan to sell the chips Add it to the list of things you can't buy at any price, and can only rent. That list is getting pretty long, especially if you count "any electronic device you can't fully control or modify".
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> The masses will be left with the NVidia monopoly, while large companies will be able to free themselves from that. My bet: if it really becomes clear what capabilities an AI accelerator chip needs and lots of people want to run (or even train) AIs on their own computers, AI accelerators will appear at the market. This is how capitalism typically works. My further bet: these AI accelerators will initially come from…
The capital costs are enormous, not even counting the CUDA moat. It takes years to start producing a big AI processor. Yet many startups and existing designers anticipated this demand correctly, years in advance, and they are all still kinda struggling. Nvidia is massively supply constrained. AI customers would be buying up MI250s, CS-2s, IPUs, Tenstorrent accelerators, Gaudi 2s and so on en masse if they wanted to..…
As I already hinted in my post: I see a huge problem in the fact that in my opinion it still is not completely clear to this day which capabilities an AI accelerator really needs - too much is in my opinion still in a state of flux.
Is this done as a bridge until/if Nvidia is able to deliver their processors fast enough?
I would think that competitors to Nvidea would have serious competitors on the market already if competing can be done by Microsoft for whom producing hardware is not their main business focus.
I wish I could work in some team designing these chips. Maia is probably my dream product to work on. Super new, super cool and one of it’s kind.
> I wish I could work in some team designing these chips. Maia is probably my dream product to work on. Super new, super cool and one of it’s kind. You likely became bewitched by their glamorous marketing side. I'd bet that the real work that the team does is very similar to the work that basically every ASIC design team does.
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If they “can’t make the chips fast enough” being TSMC’s second highest volume customer behind Apple and probably second in priority, what chance does Microsoft have getting enough of TSMCs capacity?
They're more constrained by advanced packaging (CoWoS) capacity rather than the manufacturing of the silicon.
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I genuinely don't see how x86 architecture will continue to survive the next 10 years. It will of course take longer to change home desktop users to new architectures; they will be the last segment to switch, but it seems all but inevitable. BTW, I'm not even speaking to whether x86 can compete at the same power per watt... I think it just won't make sense financially to be out of sync with the industry.
Even if it should be possible to design Arm CPUs competitive with the x86 CPUs, there are a lot of application domains for which no vendor of Arm CPUs has ever attempted to make competitive Arm CPUs. For example, for scientific computation and computer-aided design, Fujitsu is the only company that has designed Arm CPUs that can compete with the x86 CPUs, but they do not sell their CPUs on the free market. For a huge…
I agree that Qualcomm/Mediatek/Rockchip/Nvidia pricing is really terrible but I guess prices don't matter when there's almost no demand anyway.
I am a little confused on all this. I thought conventional wisdom was that creating "super good/ top performant " computer processors was hard, and unless you could produce them at scale prohibitable expensive. Is this done as a bridge until/if Nvidia is able to deliver their processors fast enough? I would think that competitors to Nvidea would have serious competitors on the market already if competing can be done…
Every day we get closer and closer to the hypothetical "five computers". [0] Software was first, and now every one of them have hardware too. Amazon Apple Goole Microsoft [0] - https://engines.egr.uh.edu/episode/1059
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The capital costs are enormous, not even counting the CUDA moat. It takes years to start producing a big AI processor. Yet many startups and existing designers anticipated this demand correctly, years in advance, and they are all still kinda struggling. Nvidia is massively supply constrained. AI customers would be buying up MI250s, CS-2s, IPUs, Tenstorrent accelerators, Gaudi 2s and so on en masse if they wanted to..…
Is there not a distributed computing potential here like there was for crypto mining? Some sort of seti@home/boinc like setup where home users can donate or sell compute time?
Theres also some kind of actual AI crypto project that I wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole.
But ultimately, even if true distribution like Petals figures out the inefficiency (and thats hard), it had the same issue as non Nvidia hardware: its not turnkey.