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Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

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141–150 of 444 posts

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the surface, it's not debatable. Enterprises are going full steam ahead on AI. Building out an ecosystem to challenge Nvidia seems like a decade long battle, if it's even possible.

What is full steam ahead for enterprises? It's not like they're throwing autoregressive LLMs into production any time soon. In any case Nvidia is expecting to ship ~550k H100s in 2023, hardly enough to satisfy every user. Tesla decided to in-house. TPUv4 and Gaudi2 exceeded A100 performance, they just never hit scale or the market and then Hopper added optimization for transformers rendering these chips relatively ob…

Large enterprises are already putting them into production. I have direct experience with it.

It's not unassailable. But it's going to take a lot to make any difference to Nvidia's volume or pricing, let alone a meaningful difference. They already face serious competitors in google and aws with TPU and inferentia, but those competitors are at a pretty big disadvantage for now (and others too). The cuda ecosystem is a big advantage. Nvidia has a lot of leverage with semi manufacturers because of volume. They spend way more on chip R&D than their competitors in the space. They have brand recognition. You can buy and own Nvidia chips v tpu and inferentia. It's... a tough road ahead for competitors.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For inference I agree! But training requires centralized gradient steps

If you're in a data center and running large training jobs then RDMA over Nvidia Mellanox Infiniband cards over high speed ethernet (like 100GB) are used to ship coefficients around without having that transfer bottleneck in the CPU.

100 gig, that's considered cute nowadays.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-ec2-p5-instances...

3.2 terabits.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#143
post #84

Nvidia's undervalued. Once enterprise adoption of AI picks up, demand for chips will increase 2-3 times further. I'm told Nvidia's building their own fab in Southeast Asia over the next few years. This will massively boost their output.

It remains debatable whether mass enterprise adoption of AI would happen first, or Nvidia's competitors coming up with equivalent chips would happen first.

There’s no competitor to Nvidia for the next 10 years.

They’ve got a monopoly. And with AI’s coming explosion, I’d wager 50/50 odds Jensen becomes the world’s first trillionaire.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#144

I miss the small graphics company that used to care about gamers :(

When was that? Surely it must have been at least a decade before the GTX 970 "4GB" but maybe after all the driver cheating in the late 90s and early 2000s. I no longer buy nvidia hardware but I do enjoy stock price getting higher. I just wish I had the sense to buy more, a lot more, stock when it was much cheaper. How does a chicken shit like me make big money :(

The 970 was amazing for gaming; the 3.5GB problem was just for CUDA.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#145
post #25

The good new is that Nvidia's high GPU prices motivate everyone (Intel, AMD, ARM, Google, etc.) to try and tackle the problem by making new chips, making more efficient use of current chips, etc. For all the distributed computing efforts that have existed (prime factorization, SETI@Home, Bitcoin, etc.), I'm surprised there isn't some way for gamers to rent out use of their GPU's when idle. It wouldn't be efficient, b…

The good new is that Nvidia's high GPU prices motivate everyone (Intel, AMD, ARM, Google, etc.) to try and tackle the problem by making new chips... Or their dominance leads to competition throwing in the towel and investing resources in a market with less stiff competition. I wouldn't be surprised to see AMD start to pair back ivnestment on high-end GPUs if things continue down this path. I would say Intel likely ke…

> I would say Intel likely keeps pushing, but I'm less convinced they can actually make much headway in the near future.

It seems that Intel is making great headway on their fabs and may somehow pull off 5 nodes in 4 years. Intel 3 is entering high volume production soon and according to Gelsinger 20A is 6 months ahead of schedule and planned for H2 2024.

If they do pull this off and regain leadership that would change outlook.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#146
post #4

Whelp, I guess those September NVDA call options I sold are going to get exercised. Who woulda guessed after the crypto fallout that "AI" would come along and bump the price back up. Record revenues, and a dividend of $0.04 on a $450 stock? That's not even worth the paperwork. For example, if you bought 100 shares, that's $45K. From that, around September $4 will show up in your account, which you have to pay taxes o…

I sold 600C for this Friday an hour or so before earnings. Free money with 168% IV.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#147
A tangent to this I've been thinking about quite a bit is how big a moat drivers are to the software/hardware ecosystem.

They're a major moat/hurdle (depending on your perspective) for operating systems, new hardware platforms, graphics cards, custom chips, and more.

It's interesting to think that we're not _that_ far from being able to generate decent drivers for things on the fly with the latest code gen advancements. Relevant to this, that could reduce the monopolies here, but perhaps as interesting is we can have more new complete OSes with more resources allocated to the user experience vs hardware compatibility.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#148

What's also pretty interesting that they actually didn't sell more chips this quarter - they ... just pretty much doubled the prices (hence the huge margin). This is what having a monopoly looks like ! This is also why companies that manufacture their cards didn't report any uptick in profits. I'm wondering how this play out in some months ? Do they have any pricing power with respect to NVidia ? Or NVidia could just…

Not that it's much better, but wouldn't it be a duopoly considering that AMD is also a big player? Hopefully Intel continues to improve it's GPU offerings

> wouldn't it be a duopoly considering that AMD is also a big player?

I don't think GPUs are commoditized. You can't swap a Nvida GPU with a AMD GPU, and get the same performance/results.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gamers like to ignore inflation and increasing fab costs and pretend cards should cost the same forever with double performance gains every 1.5 years.

For much of tech hardware world, declining costs and increasing performance have been the general trends for as long as most of us have been alive.

Off the top of my head the only thing I can think of that did that was TVs.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but the market is saying that a dominant GPU business is worth more than a trillion dollars. Just hard for me to believe that they can't get the business off the ground with that kind money on the table. Can't they just hire all of nvidia's developers and pay them 5x as much?

> Can't they just hire all of nvidia's developers and pay them 5x as much? Lol... Intel is famously stingy when it comes to salaries.

You have no idea. There are a lot of senior engineers at NVDA making 7 figures total comp annually. How many are there at Intel?
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