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

extremetech.com

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

#41

Post by AnthonyMouse »

wongarsu wrote: post #14
mjevans wrote: 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…

16 years ago AMD was on the verge of bankruptcy and was already smaller than Nvidia despite being a company that makes GPUs and CPUs and, at the time, had their own fabs. They had no money to invest in anything, and that didn't really change until Ryzen. You may be able to identify its release date from this graph:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMD/amd/market-cap

Now they have to take the money and use it to fix their software. It's pretty obvious why they didn't do that in 2008.

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

#42

Post by latchkey »

renewiltord wrote: post #32
latchkey wrote: post #24

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.

I would start to look into using ROCm/HIP to port the code. Some of it can be done automatically and some will need customizations [0]. Then, you rent time on my systems and see what the performance is. If it is good, you rent more, for longer to bring the pricing down. Effectively, we are taking the capex/opex risk off your shoulders. The key point here is that we have actual availability and we aren't just reselling someone else's hardware.

Dual 9754's are indeed quite nice. ;-)

[0] https://github.com/ROCm/HIPIFY

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

#43

Post by samspenc »

leblancfg wrote: post #38
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #27

As for their market share, it’s only down from here.

As for just the market however, sure is looking like it's going up from here.

Yeah, NVidia could lose market share (likely slowly), but the data center GPU TAM is growing significantly, so it's likely lifting all boats, but NVidia faster than its competitors.

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

#44

Post by elefanten »

nabla9 wrote: post #6
mjevans wrote: 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?

Monopolies are not illegal per se. Misusing monopoly power is illegal. Nvidia has monopoly in the market, but unless they use their position illeagally, that's OK. GPU market is competitive and Nvidia has put in the work others like AMD or Intel never bothered to do.

While this has mostly held, there’s a big push to redefine anti-trust. That’s what the MSFT-Activision case was actually about beneath the surface narrative. The challenger jurisprudence lost, but it got pretty close and has lots of political support.

(see: Lina Khan’s management of the FTC, or “New Brandeis movement”)

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

#45

Post by cesarb »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #29
incrudible wrote: post #15

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.

> Reputation is basically meaningless here. If they fix the software, people will figure that out in short order.

What matters is not just "the software is working", but also "the software will keep working" (for both new releases and new hardware). Reputation is meaningful for that.

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

#46

Post by KennyBlanken »

latchkey wrote: post #24

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…

"needs work" is an understatement. ROCM only just came out for windows(!) and so far everyone in the LLM and SD scene says that ROCM on linux is a pain in the ass to get working, requires a lot of hackery and override environment variables, is buggy, and also only supports a small handful of cards - whereas CUDA runs on nearly everything NVIDIA makes, from laptop GPUs to datacenter compute cards. And there's very little support on the third party software side at the moment.

That "no consumer hardware support" sounds stupid, but people getting into ML/AI, grad students, etc want to be able to mess around and develop/prototype on local hardware they already own.

You cannot do that with ROCM, because they only support a very, very small number of consumer-level cards - and very oddly, it's a mix of the very high end and low end, nothing in the middle.

AMD is also massively behind hardware-wise with only the current 7xxx series cards that just came out having AI-specific hardware, whereas NVIDIA has had tensor cores for three generations of their cards.

But of course AMD can't do anything right, so they nerfed the GPU's graphics processing cores when they added the AI stuff, making the cards a worse deal from a pure gaming standpoint. The 7000 series cars are basically a tiny bump at best, and in many games worse, than the 6000 series equivalents. Their only advantage is better hardware video encoding support and somewhat better power consumption.

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

#47

Post by nabla9 »

bonton89 wrote: post #36
nabla9 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Intel vs. AMD was abut CPU's not GPUS. Intel still has > 70% market share in server CPUs where it once had almost 99% market share.

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

#48

Post by elorant »

latchkey wrote: post #37
sandworm101 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 leas…

Was it difficult though because you lack the credentials of an established large corporation, or because there is very low stock at this point?

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

#49

Post by thomastjeffery »

nabla9 wrote: post #6
mjevans wrote: 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?

Monopolies are not illegal per se. Misusing monopoly power is illegal. Nvidia has monopoly in the market, but unless they use their position illeagally, that's OK. GPU market is competitive and Nvidia has put in the work others like AMD or Intel never bothered to do.

Legal? Sure.

OK? I sincerely disagree.

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

#50

Post by latchkey »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #46
latchkey wrote: post #24

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…

"needs work" is an understatement. ROCM only just came out for windows(!) and so far everyone in the LLM and SD scene says that ROCM on linux is a pain in the ass to get working, requires a lot of hackery and override environment variables, is buggy, and also only supports a small handful of cards - whereas CUDA runs on nearly everything NVIDIA makes, from laptop GPUs to datacenter compute cards. And there's very lit…

All of what you're saying is true and I can't argue that.

The only difference is that previously you couldn't even rent time on these super high end AIA's. They were reserved for supercomputers only. Even the MI250x sku is government/research only and even I am unable to buy that over the MI250.

So, we need to work on building that developer flywheel. My view is that if you can rent some time on one of these systems, that is a good first step. Nowhere else can you load a model into 192gb of RAM on a top end system.

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