Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

Post by dekhn » Thu, Aug 24, 2023, 12:59 AM UTC

jjoonathan wrote: post #216

dekhn wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember meeting with them in the mid aughts when they were first talking to HPC folks about using their cards for science. I'll never forget what the chief scientist from nVidia said. "What is the color of a NaN? That is, when you render a texture with a nan value, what does it look like? I'll tell: it's nvidia green."

It's a quality meme but I'm having trouble figuring out the settings that make it work. It looks like RGBA8 would be blue: >>> struct.pack('f',math.nan) b'\x00\x00\xc0\x7f' maybe that becomes green if you composite over white or something? Or maybe there is a common type of NaN that fills some of the unspecified bits? ("Just use the particular NaN that makes it green" is cheating unless you have an excuse)

Post by jjoonathan » Thu, Aug 24, 2023, 1:06 AM UTC

WanderPanda wrote: post #217

dekhn wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember meeting with them in the mid aughts when they were first talking to HPC folks about using their cards for science. I'll never forget what the chief scientist from nVidia said. "What is the color of a NaN? That is, when you render a texture with a nan value, what does it look like? I'll tell: it's nvidia green."

That is a funny way to signal their commitment to HPC! But compared to other tooling (non GPU) CUDA is still really clunky. Way ahead of everything else in the GPGPU space but still surprisingly clunky. Also I don't get what they are fearing with all their "Account required for download" (e.g. for CuDNN) what are they fearing? And is it really worth the trade-off for the pain it causes for dev environments and CI pip…

Post by systemvoltage » Thu, Aug 24, 2023, 1:10 AM UTC

TechnicolorByte wrote: post #34

Incredible company. It’s absolutely insane how far ahead they are with the investments they made over a decade ago. So nice to see a “hard” engineering (from silicon to software) SV-founded company getting all this recognition. Especially after what has felt like a decade of SV hype software companies dominating the mainstream financial markets pre-pandemic with a spate of overpriced IPOs or large ad-revenue generati…

Post by andrewjl » Thu, Aug 24, 2023, 1:17 AM UTC

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #199

sph wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That theory is still valid, the issue is that the competition can't or won't even try to make a better product or a cheaper one. The rule only applies if there exist competing products in the first place. If there was any, the prices would go down as we have seen a billion times.

This is the point. This is a textbook situation that would be perfect for a competitor to come in and undercut. However not only is that not happening, nobody is even trying. Making the “theory” pretty worthless if it’s not even applicable in cases that would naturally produce this market entrant. The reality is that private equity does not actually want to compete with large global brands.

Post by nealabq » Thu, Aug 24, 2023, 1:22 AM UTC

jjoonathan wrote: post #216

dekhn wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember meeting with them in the mid aughts when they were first talking to HPC folks about using their cards for science. I'll never forget what the chief scientist from nVidia said. "What is the color of a NaN? That is, when you render a texture with a nan value, what does it look like? I'll tell: it's nvidia green."

It's a quality meme but I'm having trouble figuring out the settings that make it work. It looks like RGBA8 would be blue: >>> struct.pack('f',math.nan) b'\x00\x00\xc0\x7f' maybe that becomes green if you composite over white or something? Or maybe there is a common type of NaN that fills some of the unspecified bits? ("Just use the particular NaN that makes it green" is cheating unless you have an excuse)