Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 379 posts

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#201

Post by gitgud »

rgmerk wrote: post #14
beebmam wrote: post #3

It seems deeply overvalued to me, as it's pretty likely that NVIDIA's competitors will have parallel computation hardware that competes well enough. I'm personally not a fan of NVIDIA's drivers or the reliability of their hardware.

Not having done any GPU programming...is most of the code out there tied to the Nvidia architecture? I mean, if AMD or somebody else builds a better mousetrap, how much work would it be to switch?

A lot of projects have trouble moving off of Nvidia's proprietary CUDA platform. An example is this [1] ML repo, the issue has been open for years...

[1] https://github.com/alicevision/AliceVision/issues/439

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#202

Post by dehrmann »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #159
ein0p wrote: post #91

As much as I’d like to say it’s overpriced, its only potential competitor, AMD, is even more overpriced with an eye watering P/E of 324 as of right now, three times that of NVIDIA. Such numbers are stark raving insanity for hardware companies. For comparison, Apple, fully in possession of the world’s most valuable brand, and a gigantic money printer powered by a loyal, billion+ user strong customer base, and a deep p…

Intel is jsut as much a competitor to Nvdia as AMD. I suspect they will work together on creating a CUDA alternative which is the biggest problem both of them face. If they can figure it out I dont see how nvdia isnt fucked as the money is in the big cloud purchasers who have every incentive to switch as soon as a legitimate alternative presents itself. Even if amd/intel dont beat Nvdia coming close with a product th…

> CUDA alternative

The should name it OpenCL.

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#203

Post by bmicraft »

jakogut wrote: post #164
FredPret wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the sentiment. But the only reason you're mad at Nvidia is because they made something desirable (a GPU that does NN training) but didn't do it in the way you prefer (NVLink, Linux compatibility etc). It's not their fault AMD and others have been asleep at the wheel and handed them the whole market for free. Any company with a monopoly on the hot new thing would try to capitalize on it. When the other GP…

Unfortunately, I think developers handed them the market too, it wasn't just the competition not being up to snuff. Developers valued their own development experience, features, and performance over value, efficiency, portability, openness, or freedom. The result is anyone depending on CUDA became vendor locked to Nvidia. Similar as the story with Direct3D, though thankfully there are workable solutions for D3D now i…

Just today something very interesting came out: ZLUDA

It's a reimplementation of cuda on top of rocm, and it's a drop in replacement you can use with already compiled binaries. It's even faster than native rocm/hip in blender

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#204

Post by TillE »

dave_sullivan wrote: post #6
beebmam wrote: post #3

It seems deeply overvalued to me, as it's pretty likely that NVIDIA's competitors will have parallel computation hardware that competes well enough. I'm personally not a fan of NVIDIA's drivers or the reliability of their hardware.

> I'm personally not a fan of NVIDIA's drivers or the reliability of their hardware. As compared to AMD or Intel? I wish there was real competition to Nvidia but there isn't. I'm not a fan of their defacto monopoly but they do have the best product on the market and their competition has been asleep for 10 years. AMD and Intel barely knew what deep learning was 10 years ago (and certainly did not appreciate the oppor…

Ten years ago, Intel was the leader in chip fabrication technology. Things can change fast.

Intel has already been making good low-end GPUs (with lousy but rapidly-improving drivers). If they're smart, they'll keep at it.

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#205

Post by rezonant »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #167
rezonant wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there's not really a trillion dollars on the line. This is a valuation, not revenue. All this says is that AI and LLMs are extremely over hyped, and the market believes Nvidia's tech is the only viable supplier of the platform LLMs run on. These are things we already knew, so it's not surprising the market is quadrupling what it thinks Nvidia is worth.

Yes there is a trillion dollars on the line here. Market cap is what matters to investors end of the day, everything else is just influencing it. Yes the market is saying Nvdia is the only supplier for AI and LLM hype, but its also saying they will continue to be the only supplier long term and that seems deeply flawed to me.

While there's certainly a feedback cycle involved, market cap is decided by investors in the large. The stock price is just reflecting buys and sells of those investors. People believe AI has a lot of money and hype in it, and Nvidia supplies necessary equipment for AI, so they buy Nvidia. As a result the stock price goes up, and the market capitalization goes up accordingly.

As a thought experiment, imagine buying 50% of a company on the open market and then seeing the price go up accordingly as the market does, then saying it must be even more valuable than I thought! And buying the other half of the company at the higher price. You caused that "value" by buying.

No one investor has a trillion dollar opportunity, and no competitor does either. Making an assumption that a competitor will come along and zero out Nvidia because they have a better AI chip is not rational. For one the value of Nvidia isn't solely based on this, and by the time you've made your AI chip the market is going to have changed.

Considering how insanely inflated the public's expectations of what LLMs can do, despite the fact that they are only a mirage of intelligence, it would probably be foolhardy to build a new AI chip to replace them.

I suppose for AMD they could see their stock increased by such a margin if they could just produce a chip that convinced the market, but were they not already trying to do that?

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#206

Post by lumost »

qwertox wrote: post #194
FredPret wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the sentiment. But the only reason you're mad at Nvidia is because they made something desirable (a GPU that does NN training) but didn't do it in the way you prefer (NVLink, Linux compatibility etc). It's not their fault AMD and others have been asleep at the wheel and handed them the whole market for free. Any company with a monopoly on the hot new thing would try to capitalize on it. When the other GP…

> have been asleep I still don't see the required effort put into place by Intel together with AMD in order to create an attractive alternative to CUDA. Right now they're only only getting looks because their devices are cheaper for the hardware you get and for big projects because they're available, so you're required to have in-house experts who know how these platforms work in order to get stuff done that you know…

Big companies are weird. There are probably 10 teams each at intel, arm, and amd claiming that they can beat the h100 or build a better compute runtime.

Half those teams are full of crap, a quarter will take the funds and try to do something like CUDA (but better) cough ROCm. Then another eighth to a quarter will simply not have the political clout to get the whole thing done.

Add to this that we just funded 10 teams to get 1-2 functional teams… and you see why chasing after an incumbent is hard. Even when you have near infinite money to do so.

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#207

Post by ksec »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #75
lukeschlather wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Nvidia is worried about cannibalizing their A100 and H100 business, I think they're trying to keep the cards something resembling affordable for gamers.

Then why wouldn't they just make more of them? The excuse is supposed to be fab capacity, but the 3070 has better performance than the 4060 etc. and is built on the older process which should no longer be in short supply.

>and is built on the older process which should no longer be in short supply.

I am not sure where that idea came from. It is from Samsung 8nm Fab. It never had the capacity to play with in the first place. Especially when Samsung Foundry is upgrading to chase with leading node.

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#208

Post by eru »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #157
eru wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like betting that Tesla will retain their 2022 market share in electric car market even as the market grows and everyone else gets in. Yes. Especially once you take the Chinese electric car companies into account, that are already outselling Tesla.

And even a Tesla optimist would presumably admit that maintaining a third of the EV market would be a huge win for Tesla, as the EV market becomes "the car market" going forward. Maybe that won't happen, but it's at least within the realm of possibility -- maybe some of the existing carmakers stick the transition and some of them fail, but Tesla remains the biggest one, that's not impossible. But maintaining the 80%…

Agreed.

Btw, I was talking about global electric car production. I don't know whether Tesla ever did 80% of global electric car sales?

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#209

Post by ksec »

wbsun wrote: post #70
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Somehow I wish it weren't true because I hate monopolies in any markets. If you peel the layers back... isn't the real monopoly ASML?

I am always wondering why ASML hasn’t got any antitrust lawsuits for their monopoly.

I hope you are not being serious and it is missing /s somewhere.

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#210

Post by renewiltord »

wbsun wrote: post #70
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Somehow I wish it weren't true because I hate monopolies in any markets. If you peel the layers back... isn't the real monopoly ASML?

I am always wondering why ASML hasn’t got any antitrust lawsuits for their monopoly.

They're not the only lithography machines, just the only EUV lithography machines. It's not a crime to have a better product.
Post reply on HN