I always wondered why a bunch of different companies make identical graphics cards then complain that it's a horrible business and Nvidia is screwing them. I wondered even more strongly when I saw a dozen flavors of the NVL72 rack. If the rack is so complex and difficult to manufacture, why have N companies do redundant work?
Nvidia is gearing up to sell servers instead of just GPUs and components
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Re: Nvidia is gearing up to sell servers instead of just GPUs and components
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
In 2019 or 2020 that probably seemed reasonable. Now? You would have to tell me nVidia was also building multiple nuclear power plants to get the scale to make sense.
They're invested in nuclear power. Pairing datacenters with small modular reactors is at least on the minds of all the AI companies.
One day they will build AI out of radioactive source material directly and skip the reactor. Maybe.
Re: Nvidia is gearing up to sell servers instead of just GPUs and components
#53I talked to someone at Nvidia ~2019 or ~2020 and their plan at the time was to completely vertically integrate and sell compute as a service via their own managed data centers with their own software, drivers, firmware, and hardware so this seems like just another incremental step in that direction.
Maybe in 2019, but I find it hard to believe nvidia looks at google’s TPU business model enviously these days.
Are TPU’s a bad business model?
Re: Nvidia is gearing up to sell servers instead of just GPUs and components
#54This video shows the systems being built and shipped with cooling, cabling, etc.
It’s pretty mind blowing what this crisis shows from the manipulation of atoms and electrons all the way up to these clusters. Particularly mind blowing for me who has cable management issues with a ten port router.
Re: Nvidia is gearing up to sell servers instead of just GPUs and components
#55This video shows the systems being built and shipped with cooling, cabling, etc. It’s pretty mind blowing what this crisis shows from the manipulation of atoms and electrons all the way up to these clusters. Particularly mind blowing for me who has cable management issues with a ten port router. https://youtu.be/1la6fMl7xNA?si=eWTVHeGThNgFKMVG
what's mind blowing about the video you shared was the amount of coper cable used.
I thought with fiber we wouldn't need coper cables maybe just for electricity distribution but clearly I was wrong.
thanks for sharing
Re: Nvidia is gearing up to sell servers instead of just GPUs and components
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe in 2019, but I find it hard to believe nvidia looks at google’s TPU business model enviously these days.
Are TPU’s a bad business model?
Customers are increasingly wary of building their business on someone else's land because they've seen it happen too many times that once you're locked in the price goes up, or the company who is now your only viable supplier decides to enter your own market.
And at least if anyone can buy the hardware you'll have your own or have multiple competing providers you can lease it from. If you can only lease it and only from one company, who would want to touch that? It's like purposely walking into a trap.
Re: Nvidia is gearing up to sell servers instead of just GPUs and components
#57I always wondered why a bunch of different companies make identical graphics cards then complain that it's a horrible business and Nvidia is screwing them. I wondered even more strongly when I saw a dozen flavors of the NVL72 rack. If the rack is so complex and difficult to manufacture, why have N companies do redundant work?
Designing the board is a different business from designing the chip. You're negotiating with the DRAM fabs instead of the logic fabs, selling to a thousand retailers instead of a dozen integrators, etc. And once you've done all that, you do it more than once. ASRock isn't just making Nvidia GPUs, they're making AMD and Intel GPUs, motherboards, wireless routers, etc.
It's more efficient to have companies that specialize in making all kinds of boards than to make each of the companies making chips have to do that too. And it's a competitive market so the margins are low and the chip makers have little incentive to enter it when they can just have someone else do it for little money.
Re: Nvidia is gearing up to sell servers instead of just GPUs and components
#58Nvidia already sells servers? What I don't really get, is that Nvidia is worth like $4.5T on $130B revenue. If they want to sell servers, why don't they just buy Dell or HP? If they want CPUs want not buy AMD, Qualcomm, Broadcom or TI? (I know they got blocked on their ARM attempt before the AI boom) Their revenue is too low to support their value, shouldn't they use this massive value to just buy up companies to up…
> If they want to sell servers, why don't they just buy Dell or HP?
They want to sell HPC servers, not general purpose servers.
Re: Nvidia is gearing up to sell servers instead of just GPUs and components
#59I talked to someone at Nvidia ~2019 or ~2020 and their plan at the time was to completely vertically integrate and sell compute as a service via their own managed data centers with their own software, drivers, firmware, and hardware so this seems like just another incremental step in that direction.
> vertically integrate
Sounds like they are going the Apple way. How long until we have to pay 30% to get our apps in their AI-Store?
Re: Nvidia is gearing up to sell servers instead of just GPUs and components
#60I talked to someone at Nvidia ~2019 or ~2020 and their plan at the time was to completely vertically integrate and sell compute as a service via their own managed data centers with their own software, drivers, firmware, and hardware so this seems like just another incremental step in that direction.
> vertically integrate Sounds like they are going the Apple way. How long until we have to pay 30% to get our apps in their AI-Store?
We already pay a 100% premium on AWS.