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U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

nytimes.com

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Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#41

Post by Dalewyn »

trhway wrote: post #24
roenxi wrote: post #8

Nvidia solved a hard problem and their competitors all failed. I spent years with an AMD card growing progressively more annoyed at their self-inflicted apparent inability to multiply matrices on demand. Nvidia had nothing to do with their failure, unless they had some sort of high-level mole in AMD's driver teams. Hitting the only successful company in a difficult field with legal assaults is not the obvious path to…

>Nvidia had nothing to do with their failure, unless they had some sort of high-level mole in AMD's driver teams. I wonder why Jensen wouldn't help his cousin Lisa Su with a good advice :) In general it isn't surprising that hardware companies like Intel and AMD fall at software - just talk to any programmer at such a hardware shop. What striking is that Jensen is able to have such a prominent and huge software devel…

>it isn't surprising that hardware companies like Intel and AMD fall at software

A lot of what keeps Intel relevant is their prowess in both hardware and software, bringing properly refined products to market when it matters. Intel's failure against Nvidia had far more to do with their business strategy of CPU First missing the broadside of a barn; it's like bringing a knife to a gunfight, of course you're going to get your ass wrecked.

AMD fucking sucks at software though, no disagreement there.

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#42

Post by torginus »

roenxi wrote: post #8

Nvidia solved a hard problem and their competitors all failed. I spent years with an AMD card growing progressively more annoyed at their self-inflicted apparent inability to multiply matrices on demand. Nvidia had nothing to do with their failure, unless they had some sort of high-level mole in AMD's driver teams. Hitting the only successful company in a difficult field with legal assaults is not the obvious path to…

Honestly I don't get how the current situation could develop.

Video games have used compute shaders forever, and those work just fine on other cards.

I remember doing some quite involved stuff for my thesis using OpenCL a decade ago, and it worked just fine. Nowadays OpenCL is dead for some reason...

I just don't get what is there in CUDA that makes it so special. As far as I remember, a GPGPU API consists of a shader language, a way to copy stuff to and from the GPU, a way of scheduling and synchronizing work, atomics, groupshared variables, and some interop stuff.

Is the vendor lock-in due to CUDA libs? In that case, the problem is not CUDA, but the libraries themselves. Not sure about today, but performance-portability basically didn't exist back then. You needed to do specialize your code for the GPU arch at hand. It didn't even exist between different generations of cards by the same vendor. Even if you could run CUDA code on AMD, it would be slow, so you need to do a rewrite anyways.

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#43

Post by surfingdino »

Microsoft seems to have found themselves with more than they bargained for when they decided to go all in on AI. OTOH, Microsoft is quite familiar with antitrust inquiries, because they've been there before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#44

Post by surfingdino »

robotnikman wrote: post #36

Microsoft and OpenAI I might see something, but Nvidia? The only reason they are where they are right now was by investing a decade beforehand into CUDA

It's about using their status today and how, not where they were yesterday.

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#45

Post by shmerl »

jonathankoren wrote: post #30
shmerl wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it's used as a tool that makes it impossible or very costly to switch from what such tool is tied to. To give an example. If CUDA wouldn't have been tied to Nvidia hardware, developers could use CUDA on any competing hardware. Being tied limits the choice. That's the essence of lock-in damage. Development tools should be development tools, not ways to control the market. That's why there is value in something th…

But what prevents anyone from developing an OpenCUDA? It's been almost 25 years ago, but this was the crux of the Sun Microsystems v. Microsoft lawsuit. It's why OpenJDK exists. Even three years ago the Supreme Court ruled that you can't copyright an API. I mean, it feels breathtakingly obvious. Not only is there historical precedents for just doing this, there're legal precedents as well.

Cost. What prevents someone from making something new to fight against an incumbent? Cost of entry most of the time. That's the mentality in the lock-in. Make switching too expensive and difficult to even bother. Possible? Yes, but hard enough.

When someone manages to overcome the cost and commoditize what lock-in was walling - it improves things. Even better if someone manages to do it while breaking lock-in itself. Sort of like writing a wrapper to run CUDA on non Nvidia GPUs (what ZLUDA is doing).

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#46

Post by samplatt »

roenxi wrote: post #8

Nvidia solved a hard problem and their competitors all failed. I spent years with an AMD card growing progressively more annoyed at their self-inflicted apparent inability to multiply matrices on demand. Nvidia had nothing to do with their failure, unless they had some sort of high-level mole in AMD's driver teams. Hitting the only successful company in a difficult field with legal assaults is not the obvious path to…

>Nvidia had nothing to do with their failure, unless they had some sort of high-level mole in AMD's driver teams.

You're pretty close, but it's one level of abstraction away from the truth: NVidia spends absolutely earth-shakingly stonking amounts of money working directly with the devs of major studios, fixing issues with their drivers as they come, and in some cases paying studios to lock-in talking to them about the bugs they find.

It's why (and how) they release new driver patches for every AAA release, and part of the reason why it triggers a redownload of the shader cache on a whole slew of Steam games every major version release.

AMD and intel don't have a chance; NVidia is inside the design loop for game development far more thoroughly than other hardware vendors.

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#48

Post by hgomersall »

roenxi wrote: post #8

Nvidia solved a hard problem and their competitors all failed. I spent years with an AMD card growing progressively more annoyed at their self-inflicted apparent inability to multiply matrices on demand. Nvidia had nothing to do with their failure, unless they had some sort of high-level mole in AMD's driver teams. Hitting the only successful company in a difficult field with legal assaults is not the obvious path to…

Cory Doctorow argues well why it doesn't matter how you got into a monopoly position: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/18/market-discipline/#too-bi...

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#49

Post by fnordpiglet »

roenxi wrote: post #8

Nvidia solved a hard problem and their competitors all failed. I spent years with an AMD card growing progressively more annoyed at their self-inflicted apparent inability to multiply matrices on demand. Nvidia had nothing to do with their failure, unless they had some sort of high-level mole in AMD's driver teams. Hitting the only successful company in a difficult field with legal assaults is not the obvious path to…

Some companies such as standard oil had extraordinarily effective vertically integrated monopolies. The issues came into play when they used their market dominance to secure things like rebate structures with rail roads and made agreements to buy up transit capacity at very favorable rates that left competitors at a serious disadvantage.

A real question might be how Nvidia prioritizes capacity and delivery and pricing to OpenAI and Microsoft for their superior product that has no meaningful competitor. It’s not an issue that Nvidia, like standard oil, had a superior business and product. It’s an issue when their scale and the scale of their adjacent partners lead to agreements that strangle others that need access to the supply chain. For instance if Anthropic is at a disadvantage to open ai for Nvidia capacity due to agreements between them that are mutually beneficial to the exclusion of Anthropic, that’s anti competitive.

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#50

Post by uoaei »

roenxi wrote: post #8

Nvidia solved a hard problem and their competitors all failed. I spent years with an AMD card growing progressively more annoyed at their self-inflicted apparent inability to multiply matrices on demand. Nvidia had nothing to do with their failure, unless they had some sort of high-level mole in AMD's driver teams. Hitting the only successful company in a difficult field with legal assaults is not the obvious path to…

> there is no moat and they operate in a commodity space that will behave like a normal competitive market

Sure, until you consider the massive difference in accessible capital vs their rivals. Sure, VCs can fund startups, but Nvidia is publicly traded, which is just investment of a different form, and largely a form that you are barely accountable to. And that's on top of all the capital they directly control. That's an incredibly advantageous position to be in, and one that would be too tempting for most to resist exploiting.

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