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Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

tomshardware.com

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Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#541

Post by shmerl »

lmm wrote: post #490
ho_schi wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conclusion: Buy AMD. Excellent Linux support with in-tree drivers. For 15 years! A bug is something which will be fixed. Nvidias GPUs are theoretically fast on initial benchmarks. But that’s mostly optimization by others for Nvidia? That’s it. Everything Nvidia has done is a pain. Closed-source drivers (old pain), out of tree-drivers (new pain), ignoring (or actively harming) Wayland (everyone handles implicit sync w…

> What we need? Reliability. And Linux support Both of which NVidia does a lot better in practice! I'm all for open-source in-tree drivers, but in practice, 15 years on, AMD is still buggy on Linux, whereas NVidia works well (not just on Linux but on FreeBSD too). > I don’t judge whether implicit sync or explicit are better. Maybe you should.

> Both of which NVidia does a lot better in practice!

Correction - if they care. And they don't care to do it on Linux, so you get them dragging feet for decades for something like Wayland support, PRIME, you name it.

Basically, the result is that in practice they offer abysmally bad support, otherwise they'd have upstream kernel drivers and no userspace blobs. Linux users should never buy Nvidia.

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#542

Post by SlightlyLeftPad »

SlightlyLeftPad wrote: post #258
NewJazz wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wdym FCC just shut down that antifa Jimmothy Kimmithy.

Not shut down; regulated.

For everyone who downvoted. This was intended to be tongue-in-cheek, yes they are effectively the same thing.

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#543

Post by jacobgorm »

ho_schi wrote: post #428
evanjrowley wrote: post #211

Nvidia's stake in Intel could have terrible consequences. First, it is in Nvidia's interest to kill Intel's Arc graphics, and that would be very bad because it is the only thing brighing GPU prices down for consumers. Second, the death of Intel graphics / Arc would be extremely bad for Linux, because Intel's approach to GPU drivers is the best for compatibility, wheras Nvidia is actively hostile to drivers on Linux.…

Conclusion: Buy AMD. Excellent Linux support with in-tree drivers. For 15 years! A bug is something which will be fixed. Nvidias GPUs are theoretically fast on initial benchmarks. But that’s mostly optimization by others for Nvidia? That’s it. Everything Nvidia has done is a pain. Closed-source drivers (old pain), out of tree-drivers (new pain), ignoring (or actively harming) Wayland (everyone handles implicit sync w…

Last I tried to file a bug for a crash in an AMD Windows driver I had to through an anonymous developer I found on Discord, and despite weeks of efforts writing and sharing test case they choose to ignore the bug report I the end. The developer even asked not to be named as he might face repercussions for trying to help out.

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#544

Post by KeplerBoy »

hopelite wrote: post #506
KeplerBoy wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means Intel already paid it back. The dilution hurt all other owners.

That is arguable. Regardless of everything else, currently Intel stock is up about 50% from recent averages. If investors were so hurt, they really should be selling right now, and there seems to be reason to do so because Intel's troubles have not gone away with this Nvidia stake that does not touch Intel's rotten underbelly.

Both statements can be true. Dilution hurts investors, but fresh cash and a strategic Nvidia partnership have huge potential upsides.

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#545

Post by hakfoo »

upboundspiral wrote: post #429
evanjrowley wrote: post #211

Nvidia's stake in Intel could have terrible consequences. First, it is in Nvidia's interest to kill Intel's Arc graphics, and that would be very bad because it is the only thing brighing GPU prices down for consumers. Second, the death of Intel graphics / Arc would be extremely bad for Linux, because Intel's approach to GPU drivers is the best for compatibility, wheras Nvidia is actively hostile to drivers on Linux.…

This seems like it could be a long term existential threat for AMD. AMD CPU + GPU combos are finally coming out strong, both with MI300+ series in the supercomputing space, Strix Halo in laptops, etc. They have the advantage of being able to run code already optimized for x86 (important for gamers and HPC code), which NVIDIA doesn't have. Imagine if Grace Blackwell had x86 chips instead of Arm. If NVIDIA can get Inte…

x86 is important for gamers, but is it for HPC? That tends to be far less dependent on binary blobs.

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#547

Post by hakfoo »

to11mtm wrote: post #253
jonbiggums22 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way back in the mid-late 2000s Intel CPUs could be used with third party chipsets not manufactured by Intel. This had been going on forever but the space was particularly wild with Nvidia being the most popular chipset manufacturer for AMD and also making in-roads for Intel CPUs. It was an important enough market than when ALi introduced AMD chipsets that were better than Nvidia's they promptly bought the company and…

> It was an important enough market than when ALi introduced AMD chipsets that were better than Nvidia's they promptly bought the company and spun down operations. This feels like a 'brand new sentence' to me because I've never met an ALi chipset that I liked. Every one I ever used had some shitty quirk that made VIA or SiS somehow more palatable [0] [1]. > Intel started releasing platforms with very little PCIe conn…

I'm thinking the era of "great ALI chipsets" was more after they became ULi in the Athlon 64 era.

I had a ULi M1695 board (ASRock 939SLI32-eSATA2) and it was unusual for the era in that it was a $90 motherboard with two full x16 slots. Even most of the nForce boards at the time had it set up as x8/x8. For like 10 minutes you could run SLI with it until nVidia deliberately crippled the GeForce drivers to not permit it, but I was using it with a pretty unambitious (but fanless-- remember fanless GPUs?) 7600GS.

They also did another chipset pairing that offered a PCI-Ex16 slot and a fairly compatible AGP-ish slot for people who had bought an expensive (which then meant $300 for a 256MB card) graphics card and wanted to carry it over. There were a few other boards using other chipsets (maybe VIA) that tried to glue together something like that, but the support was much more hit-or-miss.

OTOH, I did have an Aladdin IV ("TXpro") board back in the day, and it was nice because it supported 83MHz bus speeds when a "better" Intel TX board wouldn't. A K6-233 overclocked to 250 (3x83) was detectably faster than at 262 (3.5x75)

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#548

Post by uncircle »

utternerd wrote: post #423
kmacdough wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling BS on "gaming not part of the equation". Several of my friends and I have exclusively games on integrated graphics. Sure we don't play the most abusively unoptimized AAA games like RDR2. But we're here and we're gaming.

RDR2 is quite optimized. We spend a lot of time profiling before release, and while input latency can be a tad high, the rendering pipeline is absolutely highly optimized as exhibited by the large amount of benchmarks on the web.

RDR2 ran beautifully on Linux for me. If you were part of the team, excellent work.

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#549

Post by rusk »

bee_rider wrote: post #351
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the AI bubble will eventually pop since none of the major AI chatbots are remotely profitable, even on OpenAI's eyewatering $200/month pay plan which very few have been willing to pay, and even on that OpenAI is still loosing money on it. And when it pops, so will Nvidia's stock, it's only a matter of time. The AI hype train was built on the premise that AI will progress linearly and eventually end up replacing…

The AI bubble pop is probably not something NVIDIA is super looking forward to, but of anybody near the bubble they are the least likely to really get hurt by it. They don’t make AI chips really, they make the best high-throughput, high-latency chips. When the AI bubble pops, there’ll be a next thing (unless we’re really screwed). They’ve got as good chance of owning that next thing as anybody else does. Even better…

There will be a dramatic reduction in “demand” and Nvidia will be stuck with a massive “surplus”

There will undoubtedly still be a market for Nvidia chips but it won’t be enough to keep things going as they are.

A new market opening up with the same demand as AI just at the point that AI pops would be a miracle. Something like being an unsecured bond holder in 2010.

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#550

Post by rusk »

bdamm wrote: post #328
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the AI bubble will eventually pop since none of the major AI chatbots are remotely profitable, even on OpenAI's eyewatering $200/month pay plan which very few have been willing to pay, and even on that OpenAI is still loosing money on it. And when it pops, so will Nvidia's stock, it's only a matter of time. The AI hype train was built on the premise that AI will progress linearly and eventually end up replacing…

The white collar worker doesn't need to be replaced for the bots to be profitable. They just need to become dependent on the bots to increase their productivity to the point where they feel they cannot do their job without the chatbot's help. Then the white collar worker will be happy to fork over cash. We may already be there. Also never forget that in technology moreso than any other industry showing a loss while a…

> They just need to become dependent on the bots to increase their productivity to the point where they feel they cannot do their job without the chatbot's help

Correct, but said technology needs to be self sustaining commercially. The cost the white collar worker pays needs to be enough to cover the cost of running the AI + profit

It seems like we are a long way off that yet but maybe we expect an AI to solve that problem ala Kurzweil

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