Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would I blame NVIDIA? If it wasn't for them, we'd still only have needlessly cumbersome APIs and ecosystems. They did what Khronos always failed to do: They created something that is both easy, powerful and fast. Khronos always heavily neglects the easy part.
Blame them for being anti competitive and anti consumer.
AMD may get across the CUDA moat
301–310 of 312 posts
Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's never this simple. Their SIMD extensions differ for one, or at least did in the past.
How long ago is that past? If we are talking about 3D-Now, that is long dead and buried. If we are talking about the latest AVX-whatever, not even Intel is consistent, with different processor families supporting different subsets and applying different clock policies.
Yes it was Intel's own spec, so of course they're gonna implement it first, but that's exactly what I mean. This is a recurring dance, and I'll pay a little more for the one that sets the standard. If this weren't a thing, they'd both just be commodity.
Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
Semver is a joke and doesn't work. Languages like C and C++ can easily have problems if you link code built with different versions together (even if you aim for them to be compatible, or even if they are indeed the same source version but with subtly different flags), and there are no good solutions for this, except not doing it. A docker container is not really any different from any other process; the main differe…
> problems if you link code built with different versions But that has nothing to do with semver. Semver gives you information about when when you can replace one version with another version. It doesn't promise that you can mix multiple versions together.
And you are mixing multiple versions if you are building against version x.y and linking against version x.(y+z).
Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
> problems if you link code built with different versions But that has nothing to do with semver. Semver gives you information about when when you can replace one version with another version. It doesn't promise that you can mix multiple versions together.
It gives you information about intent , not reality. And you are mixing multiple versions if you are building against version x.y and linking against version x.(y+z).
If linking against a different version of the code breaks like that, that sounds like someone did semver wrong. If that happens a lot to you, then oh, I'm sorry about that happening.
Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a counter-argument, I ran Arch Linux + nvidia GPUs + Intel CPUs between 2012 and 2020, and still run Arch + nvidia (now with AMD CPU) to this day. I won't say it has been bug free at all, but it generally works pretty well. If you find a problem in Arch that you cannot fix without reinstalling, you do not sufficiently understand the problem or Arch itself. "Installing" Arch is refreshingly manual and "simple" comp…
I'm sure that I could have fixed it, but I gave up after spending multiple evenings on it. Have you ever spent hours debugging a system exclusively in text mode? It isn't fun. Reinstalling the OS takes less than 30 minutes. It's a clear choice for me
Anyway, no judgement, just my POV.
Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat
#306Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
Describing kernel panics and general nightmare scenarios as the general course with Nvidia doesn’t make sense either. Nvidia has 80% market share of the discrete GPU desktop market and at least 90% market share of cloud/datacenter. Nvidia GPUs are used almost exclusively for every cloud powered AI service and to train virtually every ML model in existence. Almost always on Linux. Do you really think any of this would…
Nvidia is bad when combined with Wine/Firefox/Chrome on Wayland Which is literally only 1% of users anyway
Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is oligopoly pricing. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/oligopoly.asp With that few competitors pricing would not change much.
That's mostly when there isn't a lot of price elasticity of demand. If you're Comcast and Verizon, each customer wants one internet connection and you're not going to change the size of the market much by offering better prices. If you're AMD and NVIDIA and lowering the price would double the number of customers, you might very well want to do that, unless you're supply constrained -- which has been the issue because…
> This is also a market with a network effect
That is what the demand curve describes. In your hypothetical that would mean the demand curve is more vertical in slope.
Higher prices are more likely due to several items. Participants willing to pay more (crypto and ai). But also less companies making the things than 15 years ago so less supply and oligopoly style pricing. Plus one company being the hinge pin on building the chips and another company consuming large portions of its supply. The supply curve shifted left and up. While the demand curve is going the up and right. There is no 'one thing' that causes it. But oligopoly pricing is very much in effect. With 3 companies making the things.
> Which isn't actually in their interests once the supply of fab capacity loosens up
Which would change the supply curve and they would re-evaluate which way to move the price. That could mean bad things or nothing happens other than possible lower prices (eventually).
Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat
#309Anyone who has to work in this ecosystem surely thinks this is a naive take
For someone who doesn't work in this ecosystem, can you elaborate? What's the real situation currently?
Only way I could see AMD making inroads if they were willing to provide power of the level Nvidia puts in a data center at consumer prices and relaxed licensing to justify retooling the entire ML chain to work on a different architecture.
Geohot has documented his troubles trying to go all in on AMD and he's back on Nvidia now I believe.