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

The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

mohitdagarwal.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–128 of 128 posts

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#121

Post by vkaku »

01100011 wrote: post #27

Seems like another article based on the assumption that Nvidia just sits there doing nothing while everyone who has so far proven unable to compete suddenly figures it out and steals their lunch. At some point one of these Nvidia doomers will be right but there is a long line of them who failed miserably.

Actually, it doesn't. Everyone who saw the recent GTC knows about what they're planning to launch - what people do not get is that with the economic slowdown and price premium, everyone is looking to get more out of their current investments and the premium does not exist anymore.

Fair Disclosure: I am very neutral when it comes to FLOPS/W/$ and the generality of those FLOPS. Given inference and training, the advantage is slipping.

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#122

Post by ein0p »

crote wrote: post #31
ein0p wrote: post #10

How can it be "slipping" if they sell out of all their stuff years in advance? I still can't find any sanely priced 5090s. And before you point out that 5090s are not their main revenue driver, they're sold out of H100s and so on years in advance, too.

Same way they lost the crypo mining market. They are losing their biggest customers to custom in-house silicon, and smaller orders are going to compete with a market being flooded by superfluous hardware from companies which either went bust due the the AI bubble shrinking, or went bust because they weren't able to compete with the big fish.

I don't think they even wanted to be in the crypto mining market. They artificially hobbled their GPUs specifically so that they wouldn't perform well there.

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#123

Post by nsteel »

mushufasa wrote: post #69
voidspark wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everyone who has so far proven unable to compete The article explains that Nvidia's biggest customers (50% of datacenter revenue) are switching to their own hardware.

I'm skeptical of this. They have been doing this for a decade already. So far, those same companies have just become bigger and bigger customers of NVIDIA. NVIDIA is very strategic about building product to avoid commodification -- both by building out network effects where software is tied to their proprietary sdk libraries, and by always focusing on being at the cutting edge of product. Both these things can be tru…

I agree. In the exact same way that hyperscalers now build some of their own network stuff, they still buy an absolute boat load from traditional (specialist) vendors.

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#124

Post by malcolmgreaves »

int_19h wrote: post #104
adventured wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll do ~$110 billion in operating income over the next four quarters, with a mere 36,000 employees and no meaningful dividend or debt to maintain. I think they can trivially afford to keep trying if they see a market.

One interesting aspect of NVIDIA workforce that many people aren't aware of is that it's very good at retaining people. The annual turnover rate is something like 5%, and last time they had layoffs was in 2008. They are also maintaining full on remote work at the time most other big tech companies are forcing their peons into the offices. And that buys a lot of loyalty. Which translates to productivity.

It doesn’t translate to productivity. What it actually means is that it’s an ossified company where everyone is 10 years behind the curve in everything that is not designing hardware. Hardware is a slow business so this is ok. Software is fast moving. Nvidia has extreme difficulty making software that works due to its culture. (Remember installing drivers and how much of a mess that is? That’s their core software product! Docker images and using cloud machines where the drivers are already installed have made this simpler for AI applications.)

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#125

Post by 01100011 »

vkaku wrote: post #121
01100011 wrote: post #27

Seems like another article based on the assumption that Nvidia just sits there doing nothing while everyone who has so far proven unable to compete suddenly figures it out and steals their lunch. At some point one of these Nvidia doomers will be right but there is a long line of them who failed miserably.

Actually, it doesn't. Everyone who saw the recent GTC knows about what they're planning to launch - what people do not get is that with the economic slowdown and price premium, everyone is looking to get more out of their current investments and the premium does not exist anymore. Fair Disclosure: I am very neutral when it comes to FLOPS/W/$ and the generality of those FLOPS. Given inference and training, the advanta…

So you believe Nvidia announces everything they're currently working on at each GTC?

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#126

Post by chneu »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #52
chneu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data centers and enterprise will always dwarf consumer hardware. AI has nothing to do with it. You're silly if you think otherwise.

> Data centers and enterprise will always dwarf consumer hardware. Before the current AI hype, except for some rather specialized applications, people had rather little use for GPU acceleration (GPGPU) in data centers.

Again, you're focusing on AI and GPU. Datacenter contracts have always been the bulk of sales for companies like Nvidia.

One or two large datacenter contracts will make more money than all consumer hardware for companies like Nvidia. The margins are completely different.

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#127

Post by chneu »

ryao wrote: post #64
chneu wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gosh, I have a coworker who acts like gaming GPUs are the only hardware that matters. I've tried explaining that one or two AI data center clients for Nvidia dwarfs the entire gaming GPU market, but he just doesn't get it.

Around 15 years ago in college, I took the opposite position that datacenter workloads mattered more to Nvidia’s future than gaming and no one believed me. It is amazing how times have changed.

I used to work for Oracle in their datacenter hardware module.

The scale of the orders that datacenters put in is insane. It's literally 1000:1 vs consumer stuff.

While building a single server I could easily handle 2-3 million dollars worth of hardware. We'd roll out 50 of those in a week. That was just my shift and we had several.

Gamers and consumers simply dont understand the scale that datacenters work at.

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#128

Post by vkaku »

01100011 wrote: post #125
vkaku wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it doesn't. Everyone who saw the recent GTC knows about what they're planning to launch - what people do not get is that with the economic slowdown and price premium, everyone is looking to get more out of their current investments and the premium does not exist anymore. Fair Disclosure: I am very neutral when it comes to FLOPS/W/$ and the generality of those FLOPS. Given inference and training, the advanta…

So you believe Nvidia announces everything they're currently working on at each GTC?

That is what Jensen said NVIDIA is launching, not me. If that's not true what are they showing at GTC?
Post reply on HN