Furiosa: 3.5x efficiency over H100s • Hacker News Board

Re: Furiosa: 3.5x efficiency over H100s

#161

Post by Forgeties79 » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 8:17 PM UTC

sothatsit wrote: post #151

Forgeties79 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Consensus seems to be that the labs are profitable on inference. They are only losing money on training and free users. That sounds like “we’re profitable if you ignore our biggest expenses.” If they could be profitable now, we’d see at least a few companies just be profitable and stop the heavy expenses. My guess is it’s simply not the case or everyone’s trapped in a cycle where they are all required to keep spendi…

This is just not true. Plenty of companies will remain unprofitable for as long as they can in the name of growth, market share, and beating their competition. At some point it will level out, but while they can still raise cheap capital and spend it to grow, they will. OpenAI could put in ads tomorrow and make tons of money overnight. The only reason they don't is competition. But when they start to find it harder t…

I understand how this has worked historically but when have we seen this amount of money invested so rapidly into a new area? Crypto, social media, none of it comes close. I just don’t think those rules apply anymore. As I mentioned in a previous comment this is literally altering the economies of cities and states in the US, all driven by tech company speculation. This could be my own ignorance, but it seems to me that we have never seen anything like this, and I really can’t find a single sector that has ever seen this kind of investment before. I guess maybe railroads across the US in the 19th century? I’d have to actually look at what those numbers looked like and it’s pretty hard to call that comparing apple to apples.

Re: Furiosa: 3.5x efficiency over H100s

#162

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 3:07 PM UTC

sothatsit wrote: post #151

Forgeties79 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Consensus seems to be that the labs are profitable on inference. They are only losing money on training and free users. That sounds like “we’re profitable if you ignore our biggest expenses.” If they could be profitable now, we’d see at least a few companies just be profitable and stop the heavy expenses. My guess is it’s simply not the case or everyone’s trapped in a cycle where they are all required to keep spendi…

This is just not true. Plenty of companies will remain unprofitable for as long as they can in the name of growth, market share, and beating their competition. At some point it will level out, but while they can still raise cheap capital and spend it to grow, they will. OpenAI could put in ads tomorrow and make tons of money overnight. The only reason they don't is competition. But when they start to find it harder t…

[deleted]

Re: Furiosa: 3.5x efficiency over H100s

#163

Post by _zoltan_ » Mon, Jan 19, 2026, 12:50 PM UTC

minimaltom wrote: post #156

_zoltan_ wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8xGPUs per box. this has been the data center standard for the last 8ish years. furthermore usually NVLink connected within the box (SXM instead of PCIe cards, although the physical data link is still PCIe.) this is important because the daughter board provides PCIe switches which usually connect NVMe drives, NICs and GPUs together such that within that subcomplex there isn't any PCIe oversubscription. since last yea…

Fascinating! So each GPU is partnered with disk and NICs such that theres no oversubscription for bandwidth within its 'slice'? (idk what the word is) And each of these 8 slices wire up to NVLink back to the host? Feels like theres some amount of (software) orchestration for making data sit on the right drives or traverse the right NICs, guess I never really thought about the complexity of this kind of scale. I googl…

usually it's 2-2-2 (2 GPUs, 2 NICs and 2 NVMe drivers on a PCIe complex). no NVLink here, this is just PCIe - under this PCIe switch chip there is full bandwidth, above it's usually limited BW. so for example going GPU-to-GPU over PCIe will walk

GPU -> PCIe switch -> PCIe switch (most likely the CPU, with limited bw) -> PCIe switch -> GPU

NVLink comes into the picture as a separate, 2nd link between the GPUs: if you need to do GPU-to-GPU, you can use NVLink.

you never needed to DIY your stuff, at least not for the last 10 years: most hardware vendors (Supermicro, Dell, ...) will sell you a complete system with 8 GPUs.

what's nice on GH200/GBx00/VR systems, is that you can use chip-to-chip NVLink between the CPU and GPU, so the CPU can access GPU memory coherently and vica versa.

Re: Furiosa: 3.5x efficiency over H100s

#164

Post by rajhlinux » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 11:12 AM UTC

They just declined Meta's $800 million offer. What are they smoking? I just saw the specs and nothing is special about the Furiosa RNGD Gen 2 card compared to the RTX 5090. Sure, it has more SRAM, but that is not a deal breaker. The same goes for power consumption, data centers have incentives for power.

If each Furiosa RNGD Gen 2 card costs $10k while an RTX 5090 costs $2k, and the RTX 5090 has better performance for LLMs, you have to be mad stupid, have a personal grudge against Nvidia, or just want to burn cash for no good reason to rack up your data centers with Furiosa.

The value of their company is going to diminish and their next offer won't go over $1.5 billion. It will actually be less than $800 million since every year Nvidia, Intel, and other AI hardware startups introduce a better and faster card.

If Furiosa cards magically became cheaper than Nvidia's similar hardware, Furiosa might be worth a quarter billion dollars. I highly doubt this would ever happen because making AI compute with cutting edge lithography is hella expensive and involves heavy politics.

Re: Furiosa: 3.5x efficiency over H100s

#165

Post by rajhlinux » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 11:14 AM UTC

roughly wrote: post #7

I am of the opinion that Nvidia's hit the wall with their current architecture in the same way that Intel has historically with its various architectures - their current generation's power and cooling requirements are requiring the construction of entirely new datacenters with different architectures, which is going to blow out the economics on inference (GPU + datacenter + power plant + nuclear fusion research divis…

Have you seen the specs? Consumer RTX 5090 is faster and cheaper than the Furiosa RNGD Gen 2. You gotta be mad stupid to buy something that performs worse and it is 5 times more expensive.