51–60 of 85 posts
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?
Or it would be nice if the regulatory body would fuck off
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.
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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?
The chip industry runs on relationships.
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.
Intel also charged a competitive price for CPUs, recent NVidia chips are charged at a premium rate not seen in semiconductor for decades. I'd venture the margin on an H100 @65k is probably ~98%. If the market for datacenter GPUs rises to ~30 million deployed GPUs and ~10 Million new chips per year... that would be 192 billion in profit/year. I'd be skeptical that NVidia can maintain that margin, or price point. Had t…
You are not far off.
Nvidia spends $3,320 to manufacture H100 unit, says Raymond James Financial, Inc. analysis.
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…
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>> 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…
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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.
This is why anyone making long-term investments in hardware-related software is wise to write it in a vendor-agnostic way -- even if the software continues to be good you may have other reasons to want to switch hardware in the next generation.
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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”)
Lina Khan and others are fighting good fight against misuse of monopoly powers, two sided markets, anticompetitive effects of platform-based business models and so on.
GPU market is not natural monopoly, nor is the market structured as monopoly. Nvidia just has a competitive advantage.
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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…
What’s to stop the government from taking your business from you for national security reasons?
I did personally sign some documentation (EAR) saying that I wouldn't export the equipment to a whole list of countries and I definitely won't do that. I also won't rent to anyone in those countries either, just to cover my bases. I have high ethics and have no desire to get in any sort of trouble.