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Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

extremetech.com

31–40 of 85 posts

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#31
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if AMD got their act together a couple of years ago and wrote good software and drivers, you mean? This lead won't last forever. Everyone in the industry has a vested interest in this collapsing, and there are ongoing assaults from all angles. George Hotz' new company is working to undo this, and there are lots of others. All potential AMD acquisition targets, too. There are lots of little OpenCL-lik…

It will take a minimum of 5-10 years to see a meaningful change, if it's not already too late. Absolutely nothing will change about the context in two years, other than Nvidia will be far stronger at that point with $50+ billion per year in operating income (formally joining the hyper profitable US tech giants). It's going to be extraordinarily expensive to build in the GPU data center space at scale. Nvidia will hav…

> It will take a minimum of 5-10 years to see a meaningful change, if it's not already too late.

It isn't too late and I'm betting it will be closer to 5 than 10.

> It's going to be extraordinarily expensive to build in the GPU data center space at scale.

It already is expensive. But it isn't just NVIDIA doing it. CoreWeave is the largest and certainly backed by NVIDIA, but they are a separate business. AMD doesn't have to do it on their own either.

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#32

On Dec 6th, AMD released the MI300x. This is effectively their entry into the AIA (ai accelerator is the new GPU) market. The previous generation (MI250) cards were good, but this new release leapfrogs everything. These cards offer 192gb of ram and pretty great performance. 8 cards in a chassis. Great for training and inference. Sure, we all know that the AMD software needs work, but I think the long bet here is on L…

Exciting news. How's software story on this? Currently we are on CUDA, etc. We have nice big AMD Epycs (1GB of cache!) but use Nvidia for GPU. Mi300x at $40k would be tempting, but hard to justify with porting effort required.

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#33

On Dec 6th, AMD released the MI300x. This is effectively their entry into the AIA (ai accelerator is the new GPU) market. The previous generation (MI250) cards were good, but this new release leapfrogs everything. These cards offer 192gb of ram and pretty great performance. 8 cards in a chassis. Great for training and inference. Sure, we all know that the AMD software needs work, but I think the long bet here is on L…

>> We are interested in feedback on what people want and can be agile enough to customize our purchases for your needs.

I would like you to not by pallets of these chips so that I and others may be able to get our hands on a couple for our own personal projects.

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#34
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if AMD got their act together a couple of years ago and wrote good software and drivers, you mean? This lead won't last forever. Everyone in the industry has a vested interest in this collapsing, and there are ongoing assaults from all angles. George Hotz' new company is working to undo this, and there are lots of others. All potential AMD acquisition targets, too. There are lots of little OpenCL-lik…

It will take a minimum of 5-10 years to see a meaningful change, if it's not already too late. Absolutely nothing will change about the context in two years, other than Nvidia will be far stronger at that point with $50+ billion per year in operating income (formally joining the hyper profitable US tech giants). It's going to be extraordinarily expensive to build in the GPU data center space at scale. Nvidia will hav…

There is a lot of space for competing on price though. AMD or even Intel could release a datacenter GPU that's 3x slower than the H100 while using 2x more power and still sell it with a very decent margin. Of course that will likely mean that Nvidia will just cut prices to stay competitive and maintain 90%+ market share but their obscene margins will have to come down.

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel never had a software moat. AMD has a terrible reputation for software that will be hard to shake.

Reputation is basically meaningless here. If they fix the software, people will figure that out in short order. They just have to actually do it.

They are not fixing the software though, and they never do. You have this problem with every new generation, it launches broken and never gets fixed by the time it is obsolete. If you told me they fixed it, I would not even believe you.

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#36
post #23

IIRC, Intel peaked at 98% of the Data Center CPU Market. AMD released an arguably superior CPU almost 7 years ago, but Intel still has 70%. You might be able to argue that MI300 is competitive, but it is certainly hard to argue it's superior, so we're not yet at the GPU equivalent of the 2017 release of EPYC.

Industry estimate is that Nvidia market share declines 75% in 2027-2028. If the AI hype is real, then Nvidia revenue is $300 billion in 5 years. Assuming P/E 25 would mean $7.5 trillion valuation. That sounds insane. If hype is 1/3 true, Nvidia grows 17% per year and is valued $2.5 trillion in five years. ps. Intel vs. AMD is not completely symmetric competition because AMD is fabless and Intel is not. While AMD gets…

Until Intel actually releases a discrete GPU on an Intel process instead of the same TSMC everyone else is using their fab advantage remains a theoretical one in this space. It is to bad they didn't have even a power sucking discrete GPU available built on one of their older processes during the previous GPU shortage since they'd at least have a strong install base right now by simple virtue of being able to put out a large supply.

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#37

On Dec 6th, AMD released the MI300x. This is effectively their entry into the AIA (ai accelerator is the new GPU) market. The previous generation (MI250) cards were good, but this new release leapfrogs everything. These cards offer 192gb of ram and pretty great performance. 8 cards in a chassis. Great for training and inference. Sure, we all know that the AMD software needs work, but I think the long bet here is on L…

>> We are interested in feedback on what people want and can be agile enough to customize our purchases for your needs. I would like you to not by pallets of these chips so that I and others may be able to get our hands on a couple for our own personal projects.

It was very difficult for me to get access to these chips and I'm building a whole business around it. It won't be possible for individuals for a long long time, if ever. Maybe in a few years on the secondary market.

Case in point... try searching ebay for the previous generation... MI250.

If you want access to these chips, you're going to have to rent them. Given that nobody is really renting them currently, at least I'm working to get you access to them at all.

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#39
post #3

It would be nice if... Maybe some regulatory body could declare this an obvious 'monopoly' and at least force the 'language spoken' to be free for anyone to implement without patent worries?

OpenCL is only about a year younger than Cuda. Nobody stopped AMD from investing into it. But where Nvidia spent the last 16 years continuously investing into providing the best performance and development experience, AMD rarely invested into either. Instead they focused on video games, with some projects that helped them profit from the crypto hype but lacked the necessary commitment to achieve much of anything beyo…

I think this is the right answer, NVidia struck a gold mine with CUDA. It's powerful enough not only for games, graphics and creatives; but could somehow also be easily retrofitted to work in other scenarios such as data center and AI / ML (language and image processing). AMD and Intel's software solutions seem to be pretty lacking and it looks harder to get a full end-to-end AI/ML stack working efficiently on those.

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#40
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who needs GPGPU anyway, right? The world's largest computer, Frontier at oak ridge national laboratory, runs AMD GPUs. AMD is undisputably the #2 in the GPU space. https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2023/11/

That is great, did someone ask the programmers about it though? Or did someone else see the higher FLOPs per dollar and bought in? If your job is literally programming a supercomputer and you can get AMD to fix stuff for you, maybe it aint so bad. That is not where most software comes from though.

It creates demand for the software to be fixed though, helping with the chicken/egg
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