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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#181

Post by lostmsu »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #60
lostmsu wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you get this from? AFAIK GPT-3 (for example) was trained on a GPU cluster, not TPUs.

Experience, for one. TPUs are dominating MLPerf benchmarks. That kind of performance can't be dismissed so easily. GPT-2 was trained on TPUs. (There are explicit references to TPUs in the source code: https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/0574c5708b094bfa0b0f6df... ) GPT-3 was trained on a GPU cluster probably because of Microsoft's billion-dollar Azure cloud credit investment, not because it was the best choice.

I checked MLPerf website, and it looks like A100 is outperforming TPUv3, and is also more capable (there does not seem to be a working implementation of RL for Go on TPU).

To be fair, TPUv4 is not out yet, and it might catch up using the latest processes (7nm TSMC or 8nm Samsung).

https://mlperf.org/training-results-0-7

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#182

Post by RantyDave »

paulmd wrote: post #126
banjo_milkman wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is driven by partly embedded applications and more directly by the datacenter. Nvidia already own the parallel compute/ML part of the datacenter and the Mellanox acquisition had brought the ability to compete in the networking part of the datacenter - but they were missing CPU IP, for tasks that aren't well matched to the GPU. This plugs that hole. They are in control of a complete data-center solution n…

There's a huge number of synergies that this deal provides. (a) NVIDIA becomes a full-fledged full-stack house, they have both CPU and GPU now. They can now compete with AMD and Intel on equal terms. That has huge implications in the datacenter. (b) GeForce becomes the reference implementation of the GPU, ARM processors now directly fund NVIDIA's desktop/datacenter R&D in the same way consoles and Samsung SOCs fund R…

Quite. Nvidia will be able to make a single chip CPU, GPU and Infiniband. Plus they'll score some people that know about cache coherency from Arm. We can see the future datacentre starting to form...

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#183

Post by twblalock »

gautamcgoel wrote: post #20

This is awful . Out of all the big tech companies, Nvidia is probably least friendly to open source and cross-platform comparability. It seems to me that their goal is to monopolize AI hardware over the next 20 years, the same way Intel effectively monopolized cloud hardware over the last 20. Expect to see less choice in the chip market and more and more propietary software frameworks like CUDA. A sad day for CS and…

On the other hand, if Nvidia wants ARM to succeed (and why else would they acquire it?), they can be a source of more competition in the CPU market.

I don't really see how this deal makes the CPU market worse -- wasn't the ARM market for mobile devices basically dominated by Qualcomm for years? Plus, the other existing ARM licensees don't seem to be impacted. On the other hand, I do see a lot of potential if Nvidia is serious about innovating in the CPU space.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#184

Post by teruakohatu »

dannyw wrote: post #162
teruakohatu wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tech may have advanced due to the insatiable hunger of machine learning, but the weak competition has meant pricing has not decreased as much as it should have or could have, only enough to move more GPUs. (nvidia biggest competitor are the GPUs they manufactured two years earlier).

Really? You get 2x perf per dollar with Ampere. That’s not good enough on the pricing front?

Yes really. Performance that is cleverly hampered by RAM (and driver licensing) on the low end from an ML perspective. The only reason they can do this is because of lack of competition. The performance of 3000 series cards could be dramatically improved for large models at a modest increase in price if RAM was doubled.

It really is possible to be critical of a monopoly without disparaging the product itself. It is when a true competitor arises that we see the monopolist's true capabilities (see Intel and AMD).

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#185

Post by Conan_Kudo »

gautamcgoel wrote: post #172
tony wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprisingly - they have a working driver for FreeBSD. Never had an issue with it - and the performance is fantastic. As far back as early 2000's I remember installing proprietary nvidia drivers on Linux and playing UT2004. Maybe Nintendo/Sony uses Nvidia cards on their developer machines? I imagine FreeBSD drivers aren't simply altruism on their part. On the other hand, stagnation on other fronts: - Nouveau (tried r…

Is the FreeBDD driver open source? Also, somehow I was under the impression they stopped maintaining the FreeBSD driver. Is that correct?

They did. The proprietary NVIDIA driver is required on FreeBSD as well. The FreeBSD community just doesn't care about this.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#186

Post by paulmd »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #148
ianai wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I wonder the same thing about the sentiment against nvidia. It’s be helpful if there were some wiki about things they’ve killed or instances they’ve acted against foss systems.

Linus famously gave them the middle-finger.

"linus went on a hyperbolic rant" isn't sufficient evidence for anything.

linus is a hyperbolic jerk (as he admitted himself for a few months before resuming his hyperbolic ways) who is increasingly out of touch with anything outside the direct sphere of his projects. Like his misguided and completely unnecessary rants about ZFS or AVX.

if there are technical merits to discuss you can post those instead of just appealing to linus' hyperbole.

(I won't even say "appeal to authority" because that's not what you're appealing to. You're literally appealing to his middle finger.)

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#187

Post by burnte »

adventured wrote: post #155
burnte wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly sleeping, they have a fraction of the revenue and profit of NVidia and Intel. Revenue was half of Nvidia, profit was 5% of NVidia. Intel is even bigger. They only have so much in the way of R&D money.

> Revenue was half of Nvidia, profit was 5% of NVidia. For operating income it's 25%, for net income it's 18%; not 5%. Last four quarters operating income for AMD: $884 million Last four quarters operating income for Nvidia: $3.5 billion This speaks to the dramatic improvement in AMD's operating condition over the last several years. For contrast, in fiscal 2016 AMD's operating income was negative $382 million. Op in…

I was using 2019 numbers rather than last 4 quarters. I also talked about revenue and profit, not operating anything.

AMD 2019 Revenue: $6.73b [1] NVIDIA 2019 Revenue: $11.72b [2]

Roughly half, as I said.

AMD 2019 Profit (as earnings per share): $0.30 [1] NVIDIA 2019 Profit (as earnings per share): $6.63 [2]

4.52%, rounds to 5%, as I said.

However, you still proved my point. Lightweight or not, they do not, and have not had the amount of money available compared to NVidia and Intel. It's growing, they'll be able to continue to invest, and they have an advantage in the CPU space that should last for another year or two, giving them a great influx of cash, and their focus on Zen 2 really paid off allowing them greater cash flow to focus on GPUs as well.

[1] https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/930/amd... [2] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financia...

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#188

Post by drivebycomment »

darksaints wrote: post #142
dragontamer wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RISC-V still seems too ad-hoc to me, and really new. Hard to say where it'd go for now. I know momentum is currently towards ARM over POWER, but... OpenPOWER is certainly a thing, and has IBM / Red Hat support. IBM may be expensive, but they already were proven "fair partners" in the OpenPOWER initiative and largely supportive of OSS / Free Software.

OpenPOWER is pretty awesome but would be nowhere near as awesome as an OpenItanium. IMHO, Itanium was always mismarketed and misoptimized. It made a pretty good server processor, but not so good that enterprises were willing to migrate 40 year old software to run on it. In mobile form, it would have made a large leap in both performance and battery life. And it would have been a fairly easy market to break into: the…

Itanuim deserved its fiery death and resurrection doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It's a dead end architecture, and humanity gained (by freeing up valuable engineering power to other more useful endeavors) when it died.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#190

Post by kllrnohj »

nolaspring wrote: post #173
QuixoticQuibit wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at their AI/CUDA documentation and associated githubs. Many of their tools and libraries are open source. Tell me, what other AI platform works with x86 and PowerPC and ARM? Currently NVIDIA’s GPUs do.

I spent most of this afternoon tying to get cuda in docker to work on my Mac for a machine learning use case. It doesn’t. Because nvidia

Apple is why you can't use Nvidia hardware on a Mac, not Nvidia. Apple has exclusive control over the drivers. Nvidia can't release updates or fix things on Mac OS.

I'm all for railing on the shitty things Nvidia does do, but no reason to add some made up ones onto the pile.

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