Live data from Hacker News

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

cnbc.com

191–200 of 340 posts

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

#191
post #181
post #178

> “Nvidia … is becoming less of a mercenary chip provider and more of a platform provider, like Microsoft or Apple, on which other companies can build software. I can understand from a growth perspective why it’s more profitable for Nvidia if it can become more of a platform service for AI. However, that’s difficult to balance that and partnerships the company already has with AWS and Microsoft. I’d expect to see som…

My prediction is eventually there will be anti-trust ligitation, they will be required to open the CUDA standard, after which AMD will become a competitor. NVIDIA could voluntarily open the standard to avoid this ligitation if they wanted to, though, and IMO it would be the smart thing to do, but almost every corporation in history has chosen the ligitation instead.

The cuda api is essentially open... Hip is basically a copy.

CUDA is such a misnomer. Amd doesn't have tensorRT, cuDNN, cutlass, etc. Forcing Nvidia to make these work on AMD is like forcing Microsoft to make windows work on apple hardware... Not going to happen.

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

#192

"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).

In this case the interconnects are also doing compute.

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

#193
post #86
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As someone who has used Ubuntu in the past and has now moved onto greener pastures, I appreciate everything Canonical and Ubuntu have done for the Linux community but there are many better options today and Canonical is already far from the company it once used to be.

what would your top suggestions be for server or desktop, instead of ubuntu? Arch (too unstable for server?), Silverblue?

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

#194
post #181
post #178

> “Nvidia … is becoming less of a mercenary chip provider and more of a platform provider, like Microsoft or Apple, on which other companies can build software. I can understand from a growth perspective why it’s more profitable for Nvidia if it can become more of a platform service for AI. However, that’s difficult to balance that and partnerships the company already has with AWS and Microsoft. I’d expect to see som…

My prediction is eventually there will be anti-trust ligitation, they will be required to open the CUDA standard, after which AMD will become a competitor. NVIDIA could voluntarily open the standard to avoid this ligitation if they wanted to, though, and IMO it would be the smart thing to do, but almost every corporation in history has chosen the ligitation instead.

>My prediction is eventually there will be anti-trust ligitation, they will be required to open the CUDA standard, after which AMD will become a competitor.

If AMD isn't a competitor before government intervention, I don't the government forcing nvidia to open up CUDA changes much. CUDA's moat isn't due to some secret sauce - nvidia put in the developer hours; and if AMDs CUDA implementation is still broken, people will continue to buy nvidia.

There has been a lot of trying to get AMD to work - Hotz has been trying for a while now[1] and has been uncovering a ton of bugs in AMD drivers. To AMD's credit, they have been fixed, but it does give you a sense of how far behind they are in regards to their own software. Now imagine them trying to implement a competitor's spec?

[1] https://twitter.com/__tinygrad__/status/1765085827946942923

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

#195
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.

What happened to Red Hat? As far as I see they’re continuing to invest in linux. Im glad they are keeping CoreOs around as FCOS.

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

#196
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My prediction is eventually there will be anti-trust ligitation, they will be required to open the CUDA standard, after which AMD will become a competitor. NVIDIA could voluntarily open the standard to avoid this ligitation if they wanted to, though, and IMO it would be the smart thing to do, but almost every corporation in history has chosen the ligitation instead.

The cuda api is essentially open... Hip is basically a copy. CUDA is such a misnomer. Amd doesn't have tensorRT, cuDNN, cutlass, etc. Forcing Nvidia to make these work on AMD is like forcing Microsoft to make windows work on apple hardware... Not going to happen.

They did force Microsoft to make Office work on Mac though... (Office for Mac already existed but I think MS agreed to not cancel it.)

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

#197
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

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.10537.pdf Discussed in a previous post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37930663

Yes this is it!

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

#198
post #179
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>bit misleading. Only partially, because in LLMs FP4 isn't half as useful as FP8. So if you have gear that crushes at FP4 then that's what you use and you benefit from that increased speed (at minimal accuracy loss). Definitely some marketing creativity in there, but its not entirely wrong as a measure of real world usage

curiously, what real world usage actually uses FP4? AFICT, most of the LLMs still use BF16, and even the quantizations down to 4bits and 2bits end up back to 16bit or INT8 for actual computations.

Llama.cpp and many others support 4 bit weights and lower

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

#199
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My prediction is eventually there will be anti-trust ligitation, they will be required to open the CUDA standard, after which AMD will become a competitor. NVIDIA could voluntarily open the standard to avoid this ligitation if they wanted to, though, and IMO it would be the smart thing to do, but almost every corporation in history has chosen the ligitation instead.

> My prediction is eventually there will be anti-trust ligitation, they will be required to open the CUDA standard, after which AMD will become a competitor. If AMD isn't a competitor before government intervention, I don't the government forcing nvidia to open up CUDA changes much. CUDA's moat isn't due to some secret sauce - nvidia put in the developer hours; and if AMDs CUDA implementation is still broken, people…

I don't understand AMD in this. Isn't it insanity that they're not throwing all they've got at their software stack?

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

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a true believer that AI is not a craze, then the stock can only go up from here. If you think there is a chance that everyone gets bored of AI and moves on to some other fad that is not in Nvidia’s wheelhouse, then it’s probably down from here. I’m staying out of this bet: don’t have the stomach for it.

> If you think there is a chance that everyone gets bored of AI and moves on to some other fad that is not in Nvidia’s wheelhouse, then it’s probably down from here. You may wish to look at history to see how things can work out: Cisco had a P/E ratio of 148 in 1999: * https://www.dividendgrowthinvestor.com/2022/09/cisco-systems... The share price tanked, but that does not mean that people got bored of the Internet a…

Regarding bubbles:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

Post reply on HN