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Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

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Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#241
post #4

Whelp, I guess those September NVDA call options I sold are going to get exercised. Who woulda guessed after the crypto fallout that "AI" would come along and bump the price back up. Record revenues, and a dividend of $0.04 on a $450 stock? That's not even worth the paperwork. For example, if you bought 100 shares, that's $45K. From that, around September $4 will show up in your account, which you have to pay taxes o…

There's a $25billion buyback this coming quarter. That's how they distribute profits these days.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#242
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.

> This is a textbook situation that would be perfect for a competitor to come in and undercut.

They already are undercutting.

Some business that are really into hyper-scaling are already pouring man-hours into making those "undercut" alternative products work. Specifically because sometimes you can't affort Nvidia at that scale. Or they have a large enough scale that they can make it work with suboptimal tech.

It's just that for most business the man-hours required to make "undercut" products work still aren't cheap enough to win in cost-benefit.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#243
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression was that they used "Efficient Market Hypothesis" to mean "the theory that free-market competition rapidly drives down prices and breaks up monopolies on its own".

> the theory that free-market competition rapidly drives down prices and breaks up monopolies on its own You mean a theory that no economic school actually believes? Not even Austrians would sign that.

You sound very confused. That’s economics 101 just about everywhere. The friction is generally termed “barriers to entry” if that helps reorient you.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is what having a monopoly looks like ! As someone who has been in the AI/ML space for over a decade, and even had an AMD/Radeon card for more than half of that, I can't help but feel that this is partially AMD's own fault. For many, many years it seemed to me that AMD just didn't take AI/ML seriously whereas, for all it's faults, NVIDIA seemed to catch on very early that ML presented a tremendous potential mar…

What really strikes me is Nvidia's been working hard on doing practical work on their GPUs even just 10~15 years ago with PhysX, while both Intel and AMD just existed. Nvidia's dominance today is the product of at least over a decade of work and investments to make better products. Today they are finally reaping their rewards.

>doing practical work ... even just 10~15 years ago with PhysX

practical work with PhysX 13 years ago: https://www.realworldtech.com/physx87/

"For Nvidia, decreasing the baseline CPU performance by using x87 instructions and a single thread makes GPUs look better."

Nvidia magically released PhysX compiled with multithreading enabled and without flags disabling SSE a week after this publication. But couple of days before release they made those funny statements:

"It's fair to say we've got more room to improve on the CPU. But it's not fair to say, in the words of that article, that we're intentionally hobbling the CPU," Skolones told Ars.

"nobody ever asked for it, and it wouldn't help real games anyway because the bottlenecks are elsewhere"

>Nvidia's dominance today is the product of at least over a decade of work

Nvidias decade of work:

Ubisoft comments on Assassin’s Creed DX10.1 controversy https://techreport.com/news/14707/ubisoft-comments-on-assass...

AMD says Nvidia’s GameWorks “completely sabotaged” Witcher 3 performance https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/05/amd-says-nvidias-game...

AMD Dubs Nvidia’s GameWorks Tragic And Damaging, Fight Over The Developer Program Continues https://wccftech.com/fight-nvidias-gameworks-continues-amd-c...

"Number one: Nvidia Gameworks typically damages the performance on Nvidia hardware as well, which is a bit tragic really. It certainly feels like it’s about reducing the performance, even on high-end graphics cards, so that people have to buy something new.

"That’s the consequence of it, whether it’s intended or not - and I guess I can’t read anyone’s minds so I can’t tell you what their intention is. But the consequence of it is it brings PCs to their knees when it’s unnecessary. And if you look at Crysis 2 in particular, you see that they’re tessellating water that’s not visible to millions of triangles every frame, and they’re tessellating blocks of concrete – essentially large rectangular objects – and generating millions of triangles per frame which are useless."

"The world's greatest virtual concrete slab" https://web.archive.org/web/20121002034311/http://techreport... (images "somehow" vanished from original article at techreport where Nvidia runs marketing campaigns)

"Unnecessary geometric detail slows down all GPUs, of course, but it just so happens to have a much larger effect on DX11-capable AMD Radeons than it does on DX11-capable Nvidia GeForces. The Fermi architecture underlying all DX11-class GeForce GPUs dedicates more attention (and transistors) to achieving high geometry processing throughput than the competing Radeon GPU architectures."

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

They mean big-endian NaN, taking only the first 3 bytes. No alpha channel. https://encycolorpedia.com/76b900 says Nvidia green #76b900.

Cool, thanks!

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#247

I’ve been a longtime Nvidia investor (since ~2014 or so) and have no plans on selling anytime soon. Their market dominance will be tough to unseat, and the only other company making strides in silicon is Apple.

Isn't Google the main competititor in AI training? Maybe tenstorrent, rivos & others too.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#248

Their GPUs have been very performant for my research (DNN training). However, their VRAM could be much larger. In my mind CPU ram is very cheap (for 32GB, it is currently around $65). But their GPUs for DNN that I use oh HPC are always less than 32GB but the GPUs are very pricey. Does anyone know why they don't increase their VRAM capacity so I can test models that require higher VRAM? Is VRAM considerably more expen…

Yes it is quite expensive. The issue is memory bandwidth is a lot more constrained when youre routing to hundreds or thousands of cores instead of the handful you need to support on a CPU.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#249
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. More resources might get applied to improving it.

I must admit my previous comment was mildly sarcastic. What I was after is: OpenCL is that language/framework that is consortium driven and open. It’s been there since the start of time. Still it cannot dethrone CUDA… Nvidia struck gold with CUDA and its lock-in

The main problem with OpenCL is most people eoue rather work with C++.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#250

What's also pretty interesting that they actually didn't sell more chips this quarter - they ... just pretty much doubled the prices (hence the huge margin). This is what having a monopoly looks like ! This is also why companies that manufacture their cards didn't report any uptick in profits. I'm wondering how this play out in some months ? Do they have any pricing power with respect to NVidia ? Or NVidia could just…

> This is what having a monopoly looks like ! As someone who has been in the AI/ML space for over a decade, and even had an AMD/Radeon card for more than half of that, I can't help but feel that this is partially AMD's own fault. For many, many years it seemed to me that AMD just didn't take AI/ML seriously whereas, for all it's faults, NVIDIA seemed to catch on very early that ML presented a tremendous potential mar…

Yes, this is true.

However, a lot of this has to do with the fact that AMD was on the brink of bankruptcy before the launch of Zen in 2016 (when their share price was ~$10). They simply did not have the capital to the kind of things Nvidia was doing (since '08 ?).

The bet on OpenCL and the 'open-source' community failed. However, ROCM/HIP etc. really seems to be catching up (I even see them packaged on Arch linux).

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