Live data from Hacker News

Jensen Huang keynote at CES 2025 [video]

youtube.com

41–50 of 104 posts

Re: Jensen Huang keynote at CES 2025 [video]

#41
post #2

I liked this part: "one small step at a time, and one giant leap, together." I didn't like this part: 5090 for $2000, about $500 more than 4090 when it was announced. They didn't mention VRAM amount though, and I doubt it's more than 24GB. If Apple M4 Ultra gets close to 1.8 TB/s bandwidth of 5090, it'll crush GeForce once and for all (and for good). Also nitpick: the opening video said tokens are responsible for all…

Market price for a 4090 is ~$2700 today: https://stockx.com/nvidia-founders-geforce-rtx-4090-24gb-gra... When you have a retail price so far below "street" price, it just makes it harder to obtain and scalpers take a bigger cut. Raising the price to something more normal at least gives you more of a chance at the big-box store.

Or scalpers won’t be dissuaded and street price for a 5090 will be $3200 or more. $1500 was already an insane price tag for scalpers to pay but they did it anyways.

Re: Jensen Huang keynote at CES 2025 [video]

#42
post #35
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jensen didn't talk about it. Maybe he knows it's embarrassingly low. Everyone knows nvidia won't give us more VRAM to avoid cannibalizing their enterprise products.

The official specs for the 5090 have been out for days on nvidia.com, and they explicitly state it's 32GB of GDDR7 with a 512-bit bus, for a total of 1.8TB/s of bandwidth.

32GB is still not a lot.

Re: Jensen Huang keynote at CES 2025 [video]

#43
post #27

I actually got a lot more upbeat about the potential of AI after watching this keynote more so than any other demonstration or presentation. Blackwell is still based on N4, a derivative of 5nm. We know we will have N3 GPU next year, and they should be working with TSMC on capacity planning for N2. Currently Blackwell is pretty much limited by capacity of either TSMC, HBM or packaging. And unless the AI hype dies off…

The same industry opposition that killed the ARM acquisition would kill a mediatek acquisition.

The acquisition of ARM would have put Nvidia in the position of being able to impose to competitors uncompetitive restrictions on a quasi monopolistic market. Is it the case with MediaTek?

Re: Jensen Huang keynote at CES 2025 [video]

#44
post #37
post #27

I actually got a lot more upbeat about the potential of AI after watching this keynote more so than any other demonstration or presentation. Blackwell is still based on N4, a derivative of 5nm. We know we will have N3 GPU next year, and they should be working with TSMC on capacity planning for N2. Currently Blackwell is pretty much limited by capacity of either TSMC, HBM or packaging. And unless the AI hype dies off…

A major chip acquisition by Nvidia will probably never get global regulatory approval. I guess the question is what does Mediatek provide in the partnership. Nvidia is well versed in developing ARM SoCs already.

5g, wifi, bluetooth etc. what makes a mobile processor monile processor other than the CPU

Re: Jensen Huang keynote at CES 2025 [video]

#45
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The official specs for the 5090 have been out for days on nvidia.com, and they explicitly state it's 32GB of GDDR7 with a 512-bit bus, for a total of 1.8TB/s of bandwidth.

32GB is still not a lot.

"640k should be enough for anybody"

Re: Jensen Huang keynote at CES 2025 [video]

#46

AMD barely mentioned their next-gen GPUs, NVIDIA came out swinging right from the start. AMD announced two new models which by their own cryptic slide wouldn't even compete with their current top-end. Then NVIDIA came and announced a 4090-performance GPU for $549... If that's not just hot hair from NVIDIA, I totally get the business decision from AMD but man, would love some more competition in the higher end.

4090 (no frame generation) performance with a $549 card (4x frame generation), isn’t it?

In other words, the same performance at somewhere in the range of 2x-3.5x lighter workload. In other words, vastly different performance under same workload. It is veeery on the edge of false advertisement for them to omit the information in parentheses until later in the presentation. :)

That line should have been “4090 frame rates on budget hardware thanks to DLSS 4” or something like that.

Re: Jensen Huang keynote at CES 2025 [video]

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same industry opposition that killed the ARM acquisition would kill a mediatek acquisition.

The acquisition of ARM would have put Nvidia in the position of being able to impose to competitors uncompetitive restrictions on a quasi monopolistic market. Is it the case with MediaTek?

Mediatek is the largest smartphone SoC manufacturer, so yes. They're a supplier for Apple and the biggest competitor to Qualcomm, the two companies that were the most vocal in opposing the ARM acquisition.

Re: Jensen Huang keynote at CES 2025 [video]

#48
post #40
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DLSS upscaling is good. On a 4k display I can't see any visual reason not to run the Balanced preset. DLSS frame gen on the other hand I'm much more skeptical of. Every time I've tried it something just feels off.

DLSS in cyberpunk has a lot of issues. Faces look weird, tons of ghosting, hair and particle effects looking very jagged.

They’re claiming DLSS4 (only available on their new cards) fixes a lot of these issues. But we’ll have to wait for the cards to get in the hands of reviewers before we’ll know for sure. I'm still pretty skeptical.

That said, if you read between the lines, it looks like the new 5090 is about ~40% faster than the 4090 at rasterisation. That’s a solid inter generational improvement.

Re: Jensen Huang keynote at CES 2025 [video]

#49
post #44
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major chip acquisition by Nvidia will probably never get global regulatory approval. I guess the question is what does Mediatek provide in the partnership. Nvidia is well versed in developing ARM SoCs already.

5g, wifi, bluetooth etc. what makes a mobile processor monile processor other than the CPU

yeah, those are just modules that anybody can just buy. NVIDIA already makes jetsons which are basically SBCs with decent GPU. so again, what does Mediatek provide?

Re: Jensen Huang keynote at CES 2025 [video]

#50
As someone who has gone pretty deep in to robotics over the last 9 years I skipped right to the physical AI portion, and wasn't impressed.

This has been stated on HN in most robotics threads, but the core of what they show, once again, is content generation, a feature largely looking for an application. The main application discussed is training data synthesis. While there is value in this for very specific use cases it's still lipstick ("look it works! wow AI!") on a pig (ie. non-deterministic system being placed in a critical operations process). This embodies one of the most fallacious, generally unspoken assumptions in AI and robotics today - that it is desirable to deal with the real world in an unstructured manner using fuzzy, vendor-linked, unauditable, shifting sand AI building blocks. This assumption can make sense for driving and other relatively uncontrolled environments with immovable infrastructure and vast cultural, capital and paradigm investments demanding complex multi-sensor synthesis and rapid decision making based on environmental context based on prior training, but it makes very little sense for industrial, construction, agricultural, rural, etc. Industrial is traditionally all about understanding the problem or breaking it in to unit operations, design, fabricate and control the environment to optimize the process for each of those in sequence, and thus lowering the cost and increasing the throughput.

NVidia further wants us to believe we should buy three products from them: an embedded system ("nano"), a general purpose robotic system ("super") and something more computationally expensive for simulation-type applications ("ultra"). They claim (with apparently no need to proffer evidence whatsoever) that "all robotics" companies need these "three computers". I've got news for you: we don't, this is a fantasy, and limited if any value add will result from what amounts to yet another amorphous simulation, integration and modeling platform based on broken vendor assumptions. Ask anyone experienced in industrial, they'll agree. The industrial vendor space is somewhat broken and rife with all sorts of dodgy things that wouldn't fly in other sectors, but NVidia simply ain't gonna fix it with their current take, which for me lands somewhere between wishful thinking and downright duplicitous.

As for "digital twins", most industrial systems are much like software systems: emergent, cobbled together from multiple poor and broken individual implementations, sharing state across disparate models, each based on poorly or undocumented design assumptions. This means their view of self-state, or "digital twin", is usually functionally fallacious. Where "digital twins" can truly add value is in areas like functional safety, where if you design things correctly you avoid being mired in potentially lethally disastrous emergent states from interdependent subsystems that were not considered at subsystem design, maintenance or upgrade time because a non-exhaustive, insufficiently formal and deterministic approach was used in system design and specification. This very real value however hinges on the value being delivered at design time, before implementation, which means you're not going to be buying 10,000 NVidia chips, but most likely zero.

So my 2c is the Physical AI portion is basically a poorly founded forward-looking application sketch from what amounts to a professional salesman in a shiny black crocodile jacket at a purchased high-viz keynote. Perhaps the other segments had more weight.

Post reply on HN