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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announces new AI chips: ‘We need bigger GPUs’

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Re: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announces new AI chips: ‘We need bigger GPUs’

#121
post #64

What is FP4, 4 bit floating point? If so, the comparison graph [0] with 30x above Hopper was a bit misleading. [0] https://youtu.be/Y2F8yisiS6E?t=4698

How can 4 bits possibly be enough? Are intermediate calculations done at a higher width and then converted down back to FP4?

Re: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announces new AI chips: ‘We need bigger GPUs’

#122

Double digit peta flop mass produced. "The computing power needed to replicate the human brain’s relevant activities has been estimated by various authors, with answers ranging from 10^12 to 10^28 FLOPS." Petaflop is 10^15 Crazy times.

I’ll be happy with this if we use it to design viable fusion power plants. And I’ll be severely disappointed if it’s mostly used for ad targeting.

> I’ll be severely disappointed if it’s mostly used for ad targeting

Obligatory Rick and Morty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xerLPWdyX-M

Re: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announces new AI chips: ‘We need bigger GPUs’

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, stock price is not a good short term indicator about Nvidia developments, nor any company for that matter. Nvidia is doing a very good job. That being said, their stock is absolutely and hilariously overvalued.

NVDA's forward PE is ~37, about what it has been for the past ~5 years I've been tracking that. So it's not overpriced based on that metric. If you're convinced the stock is that overvalued, go short some or, if you like to live dangerously, buy some long-term put options (don't be an idiot and buy short-term options.) I have no idea if NVDA is like Cisco Systems in 2000, or if it's something unique. What I am aware…

That's exactly what I'm saying below - PE is still very high, hence projecting the past growth into the future. But the scale changed a bit. A 37 PE ratio is extremely high by historical standards - this was reserved for very promising, small startups. Not for 2T companies. I know this got distorted in the past 15 years by abnormally low interest rates, but sooner or later it will come back to something that makes sense.

Buying long-term put options on Nvidia now is extremely expensive - the stock was so volatile that the price you pay for those options almost annihilate any gains you could expect, even if the stock losses 50% in 12 months.

You got me curious about those 5-7 trillions. Where these numbers come from ?

Re: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announces new AI chips: ‘We need bigger GPUs’

#124

They acquired Bright Cluster Manager a few years ago, who would be next on their list to acquire? It seems like they want to provide customers with the whole stack.

Canonical is a ripe target. Canonical has been trying to grow Ubuntu and other tools in the enterprise world for the last few years without significant success, and much of the Nvidia devkit stuff is built around Ubuntu.

Canonical’s culture [1] is the antithesis of what nvidia wants.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1bec2zk/lit...

Re: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announces new AI chips: ‘We need bigger GPUs’

#125
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No moat. Yes, CUDA, but CUDA is maaaaaybe a few tens of billion USD deep and a few (more) years wide. When the rest of the industry saw compute as a vanity market, that was sufficient. Now, it's a matter of time before margins go to, uhhh, less than 90%. Does that make shorting a good idea? I wouldn't count on it. The market can always remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

And MS and everyone else have plenty of interest in helping AMD commodify CUDA compatibility.

It's so weird it's taking them so long, because as far as anyone can tell AMD is mostly competent enough to make GPUs within some percentage points of Nvidia, the "breadth of complexity" in what these things do at the end of the day is ... rather underwhelming, the software stack may appear to be changing all the time but is also distinctly JavaScript-frotend-esque... is there an insider that knows what the holdup is? Is AMD just averse to making a ton of money?

At this point AMD investors should be rebelling, it's pissing money out there but they are not getting wet, and management might have doubled the stock price but that's little consolation if "order of magnitude" is what could have been.

Re: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announces new AI chips: ‘We need bigger GPUs’

#126

"Platform company" means multi-chip in this case? Seems logical since it's becoming impractical to cram so many transistors on a single die.

I don't really understand the bird's-eye view of the product line, but judging by some of the raw physical numbers and configurations Jensen was bragging about, it means that they want to basically play the mainframe game of locking high-end applications into proprietary middleware running on proprietary chassis with proprietary cluster interconnect (hello, Mellanox acquisiton).

The lock-in is more of a bonus for them. The underlying problem is that it's impossible to build a chip big enough, or even a collection of chiplets big enough. Training LLMs requires more silicon than can fit on one PCB, so they need an interconnect that is as fast as possible. With interconnect bandwidth as a critical bottleneck, they're not going to wait around for the industry to standardize on a suitable interconnect when they can build what they need to be ready to ship alongside the chips they need to connect.

Re: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announces new AI chips: ‘We need bigger GPUs’

#127
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30x is the type of number that when you see it in a generational improvement, you should ignore it as marketing fluff.

From how I understood it, it means they optimised the entire stack from CUDA to the networking interconnects specifically for data centers, meaning you get 30x more inference per dollar for a datacenter. This is probably not fluff, but it's only relevant for a very very specific use-case, ie enterprises with the money to buy a stack to serve thousands of users with LLMs. It doesn't matter for anyone who's not microso…

It's a weird graph... It's specifically tokens per GPU but the x-axis is "interactivity per second", so the y-axis is including Blackwell being twice the size and also the increase from fp8 -> fp4, note it will needs to be counted multiple time as half as much data is needed to be going through the networks as well.

Re: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announces new AI chips: ‘We need bigger GPUs’

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canonical is a ripe target. Canonical has been trying to grow Ubuntu and other tools in the enterprise world for the last few years without significant success, and much of the Nvidia devkit stuff is built around Ubuntu.

Canonical’s culture [1] is the antithesis of what nvidia wants. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1bec2zk/lit...

That's not culture, that's Shuttleworth.

Re: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announces new AI chips: ‘We need bigger GPUs’

#129
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canonical is a ripe target. Canonical has been trying to grow Ubuntu and other tools in the enterprise world for the last few years without significant success, and much of the Nvidia devkit stuff is built around Ubuntu.

Please do not give them this idea. Ubuntu is actually a pretty great daily driver desktop Linux, and I'd hate for that to lose priority and disappear. I'm not a fan of what happened to the Red Hat ecosystem for exactly the same reasons.

the desktop Linux ecosystem can survive w/o Ubuntu. Silverblue / Universal Blue for instance is quite compelling.

Re: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announces new AI chips: ‘We need bigger GPUs’

#130
post #121
post #64

What is FP4, 4 bit floating point? If so, the comparison graph [0] with 30x above Hopper was a bit misleading. [0] https://youtu.be/Y2F8yisiS6E?t=4698

How can 4 bits possibly be enough? Are intermediate calculations done at a higher width and then converted down back to FP4?

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