211–220 of 722 posts
Well informed gamers know Intel's discrete GPU is hanging by a thread, so they're not hoping on that bandwagon.
Too small for ML.
The only people really happy seem to be the ones buying it for transcoding and I can't imagine there is a huge market of people going "I need to go buy a card for AV1 encoding".
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The ML dev world isn’t a consumer mass market like PC gaming is.
Launching a new SKU for $500-1000 with 48gb of RAM seems like a profitable idea. The GPU isn't top-of-the-line, but the RAM would be unmatched for running a lot of models locally.
To have more memory, you have to design a new die with a wider interface. The design+test+masks on leading edge silicon is tens of millions of NRE, and has to be paid well over a year before product launch. No-one is going to do that for a low-priced product with an unknown market.
The savior of home inference is probably going to be AMD's Strix Halo. It's a laptop APU built to be a fairly low end gaming chip, but it has a 256-bit LPDDR5X interface. There are larger LPDDR5X packages available (thanks to the smartphone market), and Strix Halo should be eventually available with 128GB of unified ram, performance probably somewhere around a 4060.
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Nvidia's $30,000 is a 90% margin product at scale. They could charge 1/3 that and still be very profitable. There has rarely been such a profitable large corporation in terms of the combo of profit & margin. Their last quarter was $35b in sales and $26b in gross profit ($21.8b op income; 62% op income margin vs sales). Visa is notorious for their extreme margin (66% op income margin vs sales) due to being basically a…
> And indeed that's exactly what will be required for any serious attempt to cut into their monopoly position. You misunderstand why and how Nvidia is a monopoly. Many companies make GPUs, and all those GPUs can be used for computation if you develop compute shaders for them. This part is not the problem, you can already go buy cheaper hardware that outperforms Nvidia if price is your only concern. Software is the is…
It's impossible to assail their monopoly without utilizing far lower prices, coming up under their extreme margin products. It's how it is almost always done competitively in tech (see: ARM, or Office (dramatically undercut Lotus with a cheaper inferior product), or Linux, or Huawei, or Chromebooks, or Internet Explorer, or just about anything).
Note: I never said lower prices is all you'd need. Who would think that? The implication is that I'm ignorant of the entire history of tech, it's a poor approach to discussion with another person on HN frankly.
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I'm baffled that PC gamers have decided that 1440p is the endgame for graphics. When I look at a 27-inch 1440p display, I see pixel edges everywhere. It's right at the edge of losing the visibility of individual pixels, since I can't perceive them at 27-inch 2160p, but not quite there yet for desktop distances. Time marches on, and I become ever more separated from gaming PC enthusiasts.
Gaming at 2160p is just too expensive still, imo. You gotta pay more for your monitor, GPU and PSU. Then if you want side monitors that match in resolution, you're paying more for those as well. You say PC gamers at the start of your comment and gaming PC enthusiasts at the end. These groups are not the same and I'd say the latter is largely doing ultrawide, 4k monitor or even 4k TV. According to steam, 56% are on 10…
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You can’t just throw in more RAM without having the rest of the GPU architected for it. So there’s an R&D cost involved for such a design, and there may even be trade-offs on performance for the mass-market lower-tier models. I’m doubtful that the LLM enthusiast/tinkerer market is large enough for that to be obviously profitable.
Of course you can just add more RAM. Double the capacity of every chip and you get twice the RAM without ever asking an engineer. People did it with the RTX3070. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/3070-16gb-mod
Who is the target audience for this? Well informed gamers know Intel's discrete GPU is hanging by a thread, so they're not hoping on that bandwagon. Too small for ML. The only people really happy seem to be the ones buying it for transcoding and I can't imagine there is a huge market of people going "I need to go buy a card for AV1 encoding".
They do well compared to AMD/Nvidia at that price point.
Is it a market worth chasing at all?
Doubt.
Why don't they just release a basic GPU with 128GB RAM and eat NVidia's local generative AI lunch? The networking effect of all devs porting their LLMs etc. to that card would instantly put them as a major CUDA threat. But beancounters running the company would never get such an idea...
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I'm baffled that PC gamers have decided that 1440p is the endgame for graphics. When I look at a 27-inch 1440p display, I see pixel edges everywhere. It's right at the edge of losing the visibility of individual pixels, since I can't perceive them at 27-inch 2160p, but not quite there yet for desktop distances. Time marches on, and I become ever more separated from gaming PC enthusiasts.
I used to be in the '4k or bust' camp, but then I realized that I needed 1.5x scaling on a 27" display to have my UI at a comfy size. That put me right back at 1440p screen real estate and you had to deal with fractional scaling issues. Instead, I bought a good 27" 1440p monitor, and you know what? I am not the discerning connoisseur of pixels that I thought I was. Honestly, it's fine . I will hold out with this setu…
At 4K, it's like having 4 21" 1080p monitors. Haven't maximized or minimized a window in years. The sprawl is real.
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For sure its been a sweet spot for a very long time for budget conscious gamers looking for best balance of price and frame rates, but 1440p optimized parts are nothing new. Both NVidia and AMD make parts that target 1440p display users too, and have done for years. Even previous Intel parts you can argue were tailored for 1080p/1440p use, given their comparative performance deficit at 4k etc. Assuming they retail at…
I'm baffled that PC gamers have decided that 1440p is the endgame for graphics. When I look at a 27-inch 1440p display, I see pixel edges everywhere. It's right at the edge of losing the visibility of individual pixels, since I can't perceive them at 27-inch 2160p, but not quite there yet for desktop distances. Time marches on, and I become ever more separated from gaming PC enthusiasts.