"Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed" • Hacker News Board

Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#181

Post by Jlagreen » Wed, Dec 18, 2024, 1:03 PM UTC

Sabinus wrote: post #123

Wytwwww wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So company profit margins should be capped? At what level and how would that work exactly? What about all other stuff? i.e. maybe you or somebody else can "afford" to sell their labour at 10-80% of what they are paid?

If NVIDIA had real competition they would do this naturally to gain market share. The GP saying they 'should' do x isn't something we can expect companies to do out of the goodness of their hearts, it's what the market should force them to do.

No, they wouldn't. Nvidia focuses more on premium and margin than on unit share. Nvidia looks at Apple. Apple has 75% of profit share with 25% of unit share of the whole smartphone market. Apple makes 3x more profit than all other smartphone makers combined. Why should Apple reduce pricing in such a situation?

Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#182

Post by Jlagreen » Wed, Dec 18, 2024, 1:11 PM UTC

baal80spam wrote: post #12

ryao wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What made Intel seem unbeatable was its process node advantage. Nvidia does not have fabrication plants, so it is able to get the best process node from whoever has it. Nvidia is therefore not vulnerable to what befell Intel. What makes Nvidia seem unbeatable is that Nvidia does the best job on hardware design, does a good job on the software for the hardware and gets its designs out quickly such that they can charge…

> In any case, I am sure that in a generation or two after Blackwell, Nvidia will have some other bright idea for changing the paradigm and its competition will lag behind in adopting it. This is the most important point. Everyone seems to think that Nvidia just rests on its laurels while everyone and their dog tries to catch up with it. This is just not how (good) business works.

Nvidia once rested on their laurels and that was the Geforce FX over 20 years ago. Jensen was so pissed, he literally screamed at every person in the company.

But he also made sure that resting won't ever happen again. Andy Grove from Intel once said that only the paranoid survive and I bet Jensen is the most paranoid CEO alive. You won't see him in public that way because Jensen in public is Nvidia marketeer.

Nvidia has also understood early on how important marketing and brand recognition is. They learned it the hard way with the utter failure of their first chip the NV1 which was a technological master piece which no one wanted. Witht the bad GeForce FX Nvidia even made marketing videos to make fun of themselves and that helped. ATI didn't crush Nvidia as much as expeceted because of such activities despite having the ultra superior Radeon 9700/9800 series back then.

Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#183

Post by Jlagreen » Wed, Dec 18, 2024, 1:14 PM UTC

CharlieDigital wrote: post #120

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the point I am making. And the reason Amazon or Microsoft can't deploy them is the hardware, not CUDA.

Yeah, and if you're using Nvidia, you're using CUDA.

And because the world buys all the shelf stuff from Nvidia and uses CUDA, Nvidia get the largest debugging user base there is. This way Nvidia can continue to make CUDA even better and cycle repeats.

Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#184

Post by zeusk » Wed, Dec 18, 2024, 3:55 PM UTC

hamandcheese wrote: post #180

zeusk wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different markets, similar semantics. Both are artificially supply restricted. Infact you can argue that something is really wrong in our governance if housing is human right and yet there are people profiteering from how unaffordable it has become. I am more appalled at how long it has taken for the big tech other than Google to standardized ML workload and not be bound by CUDA.

As far as I know, there is no political barrier preventing Intel and AMD from making competitive GPUs. There is, however, a political barrier to increasing the housing supply.

The artificial limit does not have to be political, it can be as simple as nvidia blowing fuses to reduce compute on lower tier cards.

Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#185

Post by Wytwwww » Wed, Dec 18, 2024, 4:36 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #140

Wytwwww wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So company profit margins should be capped? At what level and how would that work exactly? What about all other stuff? i.e. maybe you or somebody else can "afford" to sell their labour at 10-80% of what they are paid?

> So company profit margins should be capped? At what level and how would that work exactly? That a competitive market drives prices to zero economic profit is a fairly basic result; no active measures besides the existence of competition are necessary for this. > What about all other stuff? Yes, this applies in all competitive markets. If it doesn't apply in a market, there is a constraint on competition causing it.

> prices to zero economic profit is a fairly basic result

Yes and that's not necessarily a good thing in all markets. Very low profit margins can result in less innovations and would certainly discourage companies from taking risks (basically by definition)

Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#186

Post by fransje26 » Thu, Dec 19, 2024, 10:40 AM UTC

dotancohen wrote: post #125

fransje26 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but rather if Nvidia were to provide a paid upgrade path to unlock these features that would help. You do not revert a blown e-fuse with a software update.

Yes, but an e-fuse would not be the only way to lock the feature if Nvidia were to want to unlock it later.

The point being that they knowingly went down the e-fuse route to make sure nobody could unlock it later.

They probably learnt their lesson in the early 2000s, when users could do a bit of soldering and apply a patch to unlock more performance on cards that had been artificially throttled.