341–350 of 444 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also focused on game consoles, where they won contracts for both major platforms this generation.
The other non-major Nvidia based console has higher sales numbers than both of so-called major consoles combined.
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…
How does the Nvidia stranglehold on AI compare to US Steel, Standard Oil and Bell Telephone etc., other monopolies that were broken up?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
to be fair Nvidia drivers are also a nightmare under linux
Not anymore
All systems hit snags. In most, you skid the tires a bit, maybe lose balance. With nvidia you're flying over the handlebars on to the asphalt.
I got snagged by this just about 2 weeks ago. It gets nasty. Not as bad as CUPS, but probably #2.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ~75% of computers with Steam running has a NVIDIA GPU, while ~15% has a AMD GPU. and thats the consumer market, which lets say is 30% of the B2B enterprise market, which is probably even higher % nvidia
And then there's the console market, with more units sold than PC gaming market, with 100% AMD GPUs.
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…
Are they so far ahead? AMD GPUs get comparable results as of late on Stable Diffusion. Software and hardware from competitors will catch up, crunching 4/8/16 bit width numbers is no rocket science.
I bought a RX 6800XT to do some AI work because of the 16GB VRAM, and while the VRAM allows me to do stuff that my 6GB RTX 2060 wasn't able to, on performance side it's actually a downgrade in many aspects.
But the main issue is software support. To get acceptable performance you need to use ROCm, which is Linux only. There was some Windows release of ROCm few weeks ago, but I am not sure how usable it is and none of the libraries have picked up on it yet.
Even with a Linux installed, most frameworks still assume CUDA and it's an effort to get them to use ROCm. For some tools all it takes is uninstalling PyTorch or Tensorflow and installing a special ROCm enabled version of those libraries. Sometimes it will be enough, sometimes it wasn't. Sometimes the project uses some auxiliary library like bitsandbytes which doesn't have an official ROCm fork, so you have to use unofficial ones (that you have to compile manually and Makefiles quickly get out of date). Which once again, may work or may not.
I have things set up for stable diffusion and text generation (oobabooga), and things mostly work, but sometimes they still don't. For example I can train stable diffusion embeddings and dreambooth checkpoints, but for some reason it crashes when I attempt to train a LORA. And I don't have enough expertise to debug it myself.
For things like video encoding most tools also assume CUDA will be present so you're stuck with CPU encoding which takes forever. If you're lucky, some tools may have a DirectML backend, which kinda works under Windows for AMD, but it's performance is usually far behind a ROCm implementation.
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…
I sold 600C for this Friday an hour or so before earnings. Free money with 168% IV.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> wouldn't it be a duopoly considering that AMD is also a big player? I don't think GPUs are commoditized. You can't swap a Nvida GPU with a AMD GPU, and get the same performance/results.
AMD seem to be catching up quickly lately. I'm running Stable Diffusion, Llama-2, and Pytorch on a 7900XTX right now. Getting it up and running even on an unsupported Linux distro is relatively straightforward. Details for Arch are here: https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2584462 The HIP interface even has almost exact interoperability with CUDA, so you don't have to rewrite your code.
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…
Nvidia and really all chip designers are limited by the fab companies who are trying to scale as fast as they can. But all the cutting edge fabs are limited by one single supplier - ASML. ASML make the lithography machines and have a total monopoly. Even they cannot make lithography machines fast enough to satisfy demand - their lithography machines are sold out 2 years in advance
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…
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).
There are now distro-provided packages on Arch, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora.