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Nvidia won, we all lost

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Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#511

Post by int_19h »

dagaci wrote: post #403

Jenson has managed to kneel into every market boom in a reasonable amount of time with his GPUs and tech (hardware and software). No doubt he will be there when the next boom kicks off too. Microsoft fails consistently ... even when offered a lead on the plate... it fails, but these failures are eventually corrected for by the momentum of its massive business units. Apple is just very very late... but this failure ca…

With respect to GPUs and AI I think it might actually be the case of engineering the boom more so than anticipating it. Not the AI angle itself, but the GPU compute part of it specifically - Jensen had NVIDIA invest heavily into that when it was still very niche (Ian Buck was hired in 2004) and then actively promoted it to people doing number crunching.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#512

Post by sillyfluke »

cipher_accompt wrote: post #456
tyre wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay let’s take off the tin foil hat for a second. HN has a very strong moderation team with years and years of history letting awkward (e.g. criticism of YC, YC companies) things stand.

I'm curious whether you're playing devil's advocate or if you genuinely believe that characterizing OP’s comment as “tin foil hat” thinking is fair. The concentration of wealth and influence gives entities like Nvidia the structural power to pressure smaller players in the economic system. That’s not speculative -- it’s common sense, and it's supported by antitrust cases. Firms like Nvidia are incentivized to abuse t…

>the concentration of wealth

On this topic, I'm curious what others think of the renaming of this post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44435732

The original title I gave was: "Paul Graham: without billionaires, there will be no startups."

As it was a tweet, I was trying to summarize his conclusive point in the first part of the sentence:

Few of them realize it, but people who say "I don’t think that we should have billionaires" are also saying "I don't think there should be startups,"

Now, this part of the sentence to me was the far more interesting part because it was a much bolder claim than the second part of the sentence:

because successful startups inevitably produce billionaires.

This second part seems like a pretty obvious observation and is a completely uninteresting observation by itself.

The claim that successful startups have produced billonaires therefore successful startups require billionaires is a far more contentious and interesting claim.

The mods removed "paul graham" from the title and switched the title to the uninteresting second part of the sentence, turning it into a completely banal and pointless title: Successful startups produce billionaires. Thereby removing any hint of the bold claim being made by the founder of one of the most succesful VCs of the 21st century. And incidentally, also the creator of this website.

I can only conclude someone is loathe to moderate a thread about whether billionaires are neccessary for sucessful startups to exist.

ps. There is no explicit guideline for tweets as far as I can tell. You are forced to use an incomplete quote or are forced to summarize the tweet im some fashion.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#513

Post by delusional »

pixelesque wrote: post #364
delusional wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ROCM is, to some degree and in some areas, a pretty decent alternative. Developing with it is often times a horrible experience, but once something works, it works fine.

> but once something works, it works fine. Is there "forwards compatibility" to the same code working on the next cards yet like PTX provided Nvidia? Last time (4 years ago?) I looked into ROCM, you seemed to have to compile for each revision of each architecture.

I'm decently sure you have to compile separately for each architecture, and if you elect to compile for multiple architectures up front, you'll have excruciating compile times. You'd think that would be annoying, but it ends up not really mattering since AMD completely switches out the toolchain about every graphics generation anyway. That's not a good reason to not have forwards compatibility, but it is a reason.

The reason I'm not completely sure is because I'm just doing this as a hobby, and I only have a single card, and that single card has never seen a revision. I think that's generally the best way to be happy with ROCM. Accept that it's at the abstraction level of embedded programming, any change in the hardware will have to result in a change in the software.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#514

Post by pjmlp »

jorams wrote: post #363
senko wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AMD GPUs aren't good enough. Software. AMD has traditionally been really bad at their drivers. (They also missed the AI train and are trying to catch up). I use Linux and have learned not to touch AMD GPUs (and to a lesser extent CPUs due to chipset quality/support) a long time ago. Even if they are better now, (I feel) Intel integrated (if no special GPU perf needed) or NVidia are less risky choices.

> I use Linux and have learned not to touch AMD GPUs The situation completely changed with the introduction of the AMDGPU drivers integrated into the kernel. This was like 10 years ago. Before then the AMD driver situation on Linux was atrocious. The open source drivers performed so bad you'd get better performance out of Intel integrated graphics than an expensive AMD GPU, and their closed source drivers were so poo…

The open source driver for the Netboooks APU was never as good as either the Windows version, or the closed source that predated it.

Lesser OpenGL version, and I never managed to have hardware accelerated video until it died last year.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#515

Post by pjmlp »

nirv wrote: post #368
josephg wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using a 4090 on my linux workstation for a few years now. Its mostly fine - with the occasional bad driver version randomly messing things up. I'm using linux mint. Mint uses X11, which, while silly, means suspend / resume works fine. NVIDIA's drivers also recently completely changed how they worked. Hopefully that'll result in a lot of these long term issues getting fixed. As I understand it, the change is…

No browser on Linux supports any other backend for video acceleration except VAAPI, as far as I know. AMD and Intel use VAAPI, while Nvidia uses VDPAU, which is not supported anywhere. This single fact means that with Nvidia graphics cards on Linux, there isn't even such a simple and important feature for users as video decoding acceleration in the browser. Every silly YouTube video will use CPU (not iGPU, but CPU) t…

I never managed to get it working on my Netbook APU.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#516

Post by [deleted] »

Mistletoe wrote: post #417
dagaci wrote: post #403

Jenson has managed to kneel into every market boom in a reasonable amount of time with his GPUs and tech (hardware and software). No doubt he will be there when the next boom kicks off too. Microsoft fails consistently ... even when offered a lead on the plate... it fails, but these failures are eventually corrected for by the momentum of its massive business units. Apple is just very very late... but this failure ca…

What is the next boom? I honestly can’t think of one. Feels like we are just at the Age of the Plateau, which will be quite painful for markets and the world.

[deleted]

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#517

Post by hadlock »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #446
artursapek wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just learned MTG this year because my 11 year old son got into it. I like it. How did it “go to shit”?

Don’t let my opinion affect you, MTG is still a fun game and you should do that if you find it enjoyable — especially if your son likes it. But here is why I had a falling out: 1. The number of sets per year increased too much, there are too many cards being printed to keep up 2. Cards from new sets are pushed to be very strong (FIRE design) which means that the new cards are frequently the best cards. Combine this w…

> 1. The number of sets per year increased too much, there are too many cards being printed to keep up

My local shop has an entire wall of the last ~70 sets, everything from cyberpunk ninjas to gentlemen academic fighting professors to steampunk and everything in between. I think they are releasing ~10 sets per year on average? 4 main ones and then a bunch of effectively novelty ones. I hadn't been in a store in years (most of my stuff is 4th edition from the late 1990s) I did pull the trigger on the Final Fantasy novelty set recently though, for nostalgia's sake.

But yeah it's overwhelming, as a kid I was used to a new major set every year and a half or so with a handful of new cards. 10 sets a year makes it feel futile to participate.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#518

Post by lukeschlather »

izacus wrote: post #503
lukeschlather wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking about the 5090 which is 575W.

But why are you talking about it? It's a hugely niche hardware which is a tiny % of nVidia cards out there. It's deliberately outsized and you wouldn't put it in 99% of gaming PCs. And yet you speak of it like it's a representative model. Do you also use a Hummer EV to measure all EVs?

I am interested in buying hardware that can run the full DeepSeek R1 locally. I don't think it's a particularly good idea, but I've contemplated an array of 5090s.

If I were interested in using an EV to haul particularly heavy loads, I might be interested in the Hummer EV and have similar questions that might sound ridiculous.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#519

Post by kassner »

surgical_fire wrote: post #118
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #49

> With over 90% of the PC market running on NVIDIA tech, they’re the clear winner of the GPU race. The losers are every single one of us. I have been rocking AMD GPU ever since the drivers were upstreamed into the linux kernel. No regrets. I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the world besides video games, and getting all in a huff about it isn’t worth my time or energy. But consumer gotta consoooooo…

> I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the world besides video games My main hobby is videogames, but since I can consistently play most games on Linux (that has good AMD support), it doesn't really matter.

Steam+Proton has been so incredibly good in the last year that I’m yet to install Windows on my gaming PC. I really do recommend anyone to try out that option first.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#520

Post by rightbyte »

alganet wrote: post #409
rightbyte wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that GPU factories are big static targets with sensitive supply chains and thus have no strategic importance in being so easy to distrupt.

So are airplane and car factories. I already explained all of this, what keeps the supply chain together, and what their strategic value is.

I have no clue if we agree with eachother or not?
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