I thought Nvidia just make graphics cards for games, how did they end up making general purpose CPUs like Intel that actually is more powerful than Intel
Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024
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Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Software and hardware from competitors will catch up, crunching 4/8/16 bit width numbers is no rocket science. I made the mistake of buying an A770 from Intel, based on the spec sheet. Hardware is comparable to what Nvidia is selling, for 70% of the price. It's basically a useless paperweight. The AI software crashes constantly, and when it's not crashing, it performs at half the level of Nvidia's cards. Turns out…
Its similar story with iPhone/ iOS vs Android. Endless talk about how Android is about to get so much better in performance compared to iPhone didn't yield much. I guess lately people have accepted perf will never match up. At least Android massive market share in rest of the world so with perf/pricing/compatibily/ localization it will remain competitive in some sense. I hope but do really foresee that AI/ML systems…
I haven’t crossed over to the other side in a while, what do you find lacking in Android performance? I was under the impression that these days it’s solidly in “good enough not to notice” territory.
Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024
#303Earlier 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.
Well, patents are certainly a good way to create monopolies, which wouldn't exist in an actually free market with no patents. In addition, there's interventions in place which don't allow certain tech exports to China, for example. Not sure how much better the situation would be without these.
I think the principle is called perfect market or perfect competition, but it's only a theoretical concept. However, it's certainly possible that the market is less perfect than it could be due to interventions and regulations.
Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024
#304Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024
#305Earlier 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.
Encycolorpedia looks like a great resource, thank you very much. A similar one would be Colorhexa. Not affiliated.
[Edit] Could not find it under the name, but it shows how color blind users perceive it. And it loads much faster.
https://www.colorhexa.com/76b900
[Edit] Encycolorpedia has a color blindness simulator too. Have to check on desktop.
Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024
#306Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024
#307Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
Customer support. I've never seen so many people get up to speed so fast on something. It's unlike anything ever. Yep. I believe so. I don't believe Pat. With the relevant audience, Nvidia is the brand which is the strongest. Google could just drop support for TPU, AMD isn't viewed as currently credible for people doing the work, nor Intel. You may be right, only time will tell. I've been involved with GPU use for ge…
> Customer support. I've never seen so many people get up to speed so fast on something. It's unlike anything ever. Are you saying that you've seen enterprises developing, training and running their own in-house LLMs from scratch directly on large (i.e. 100s to 1000s) GPU clusters, whether on-prem or cloud, for this to be relevant to Nvidia? Pardon my skepticism but it seems odd that a generic Fortune 500 co has the…
You seem to be moving the goalposts. First it was using in production, now it's building foundation models.. But, to answer: Not foundation models (although, Bloomberg did that for another use case). Fine tuned versions of falcon, now llama 2, open assistant and others. They are running both the fine tuning (not that it's much) and inference on A100s, inferentia and TPU. The skillset required to fine tune a model for a customer support use case is night and day from building a (good) foundation model.
Right now it doesn't matter, but you are suggesting there will be real competition soon. I'm saying, it will matter.
Intel did have a great brand. And they proceeded to screw up and it caught up with them, but it took a long time. A company with a moat can destroy it with time and effort.
It is huge market. And it's a huge lift to build a product that can compete with Nvidia at this point. I'd handicap it at 2-1 against someone being a real competitor within a decade.
Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024
#309The good new is that Nvidia's high GPU prices motivate everyone (Intel, AMD, ARM, Google, etc.) to try and tackle the problem by making new chips, making more efficient use of current chips, etc. For all the distributed computing efforts that have existed (prime factorization, SETI@Home, Bitcoin, etc.), I'm surprised there isn't some way for gamers to rent out use of their GPU's when idle. It wouldn't be efficient, b…
In bitcoin mining, GPU phase lasted only two years, before been outcompeted first by specialized FPGAs and then by ASICs. Nobody used GPUs for bitcoin mining since 2013. Maybe ML will follow similar path. But the computation is much different from ML, doesnt need memory at all.
Aren't tensorcores basically asics for ml?
Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can really see Intel figuring this out. A lot of people on HN talking about Intel as an also-ran just like they spoke about AMD before Zen. Raptor Lake is at 7nm and incredibly competitive there (~2700 single core on geekbench, taken with a pinch of salt). They’re still planning on being on 1.8nm/18A within 2 years, while at the same time ramping up their GPU efforts (albeit using TSMC for 4nm). Nvidia is very much…
The problem with Intel is: 1. They don't pay - Nvidia/Google/Apple easily pays 1.5-2x Intel before appreciattion. 2. They're cheap/beaurcratic. The office sucks, your laptop sucks. 3. They suck at software. https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/18/ispc-origins 4. They can't develop/retain talent. Half the ML-HW/FW teams at AMD/Google/Nvidia/Apple are ex-Intel.
How is that indicative of not developing talent? Sounds like they have a fairly robust pipeline if so many end up working at other companies...
(Retention notwithstanding :P)