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Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

extremetech.com

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Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#61

Post by latchkey »

wafngar wrote: post #55
KennyBlanken wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"needs work" is an understatement. ROCM only just came out for windows(!) and so far everyone in the LLM and SD scene says that ROCM on linux is a pain in the ass to get working, requires a lot of hackery and override environment variables, is buggy, and also only supports a small handful of cards - whereas CUDA runs on nearly everything NVIDIA makes, from laptop GPUs to datacenter compute cards. And there's very lit…

For AI you have to support PyTorch. That works well now on the big AMD GPUs. Consumer gpu capabilities do not matter here.

I think that PyTorch is part of the puzzle and it certainly helps that it is supported by AMD [0]. That said, there is code that needs to run closer to the metal too.

[0] https://pytorch.org/blog/experience-power-pytorch-2.0/

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#62

Post by AnthonyMouse »

incrudible wrote: post #35
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reputation is basically meaningless here. If they fix the software, people will figure that out in short order. They just have to actually do it.

They are not fixing the software though, and they never do. You have this problem with every new generation, it launches broken and never gets fixed by the time it is obsolete. If you told me they fixed it, I would not even believe you.

It doesn't matter if you believe the first person who figures it out. Ten other people will try it and then there will be ten people saying they fixed it and a hundred people will try it. At some point you either believe everyone who has tried it or you lose business because your competitors have figured it out and you haven't.

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#63

Post by nabla9 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #57
cesarb wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reputation is basically meaningless here. If they fix the software, people will figure that out in short order. What matters is not just "the software is working", but also "the software will keep working" (for both new releases and new hardware). Reputation is meaningful for that.

That's not usually a problem for software, especially this kind of software. New drivers and libraries for existing hardware are typically bug fixes because otherwise people wouldn't install them instead of using the existing code. The code for new hardware is generally based on the existing code, so if the existing code is good then it's likely to remain that way. Also, if the new hardware isn't any good then you ju…

I don't believe this is true competitive numeric software stack, like AI applications are.

1. Code must be hand optimized, refactored for each architecture while the API stays the same.

2. New APIs, algorithms must be backported and optimized for older hardware.

That's insane amount of testing and performance tuning.

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#64

Post by pjmlp »

samspenc wrote: post #39
wongarsu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenCL is only about a year younger than Cuda. Nobody stopped AMD from investing into it. But where Nvidia spent the last 16 years continuously investing into providing the best performance and development experience, AMD rarely invested into either. Instead they focused on video games, with some projects that helped them profit from the crypto hype but lacked the necessary commitment to achieve much of anything beyo…

I think this is the right answer, NVidia struck a gold mine with CUDA. It's powerful enough not only for games, graphics and creatives; but could somehow also be easily retrofitted to work in other scenarios such as data center and AI / ML (language and image processing). AMD and Intel's software solutions seem to be pretty lacking and it looks harder to get a full end-to-end AI/ML stack working efficiently on those.

They offered what people where looking for, way to program their GPU that wasn't C.

C++, Fortran, anything else with a compiler toolchain against PTX, graphical debugging and IDE integration, and a library ecosystem.

Khronos was sceptical that Fortran was even meaningful, and SPIR only came up after NVIDIA was approaching the finish line.

Intel and AMD only have themselves to blame.

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#65

Post by AnthonyMouse »

nabla9 wrote: post #63
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not usually a problem for software, especially this kind of software. New drivers and libraries for existing hardware are typically bug fixes because otherwise people wouldn't install them instead of using the existing code. The code for new hardware is generally based on the existing code, so if the existing code is good then it's likely to remain that way. Also, if the new hardware isn't any good then you ju…

I don't believe this is true competitive numeric software stack, like AI applications are. 1. Code must be hand optimized, refactored for each architecture while the API stays the same. 2. New APIs, algorithms must be backported and optimized for older hardware. That's insane amount of testing and performance tuning.

So there are two things you might want here.

One is, can I just buy this thing and run the existing somebody else's code on it and it will work and be faster than the previous generation? If it isn't, you just don't buy the new hardware until that changes.

The other is, you're going to buy a thousand of them or you're making software for the general public to use and you want to optimize it for each specific generation. But in that case you're redoing the work for each generation regardless and you don't have to be concerned about your current efforts carrying forward because you already know that they won't.

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#66

Post by adam_arthur »

nabla9 wrote: post #23
bryanlarsen wrote: post #8

IIRC, Intel peaked at 98% of the Data Center CPU Market. AMD released an arguably superior CPU almost 7 years ago, but Intel still has 70%. You might be able to argue that MI300 is competitive, but it is certainly hard to argue it's superior, so we're not yet at the GPU equivalent of the 2017 release of EPYC.

Industry estimate is that Nvidia market share declines 75% in 2027-2028. If the AI hype is real, then Nvidia revenue is $300 billion in 5 years. Assuming P/E 25 would mean $7.5 trillion valuation. That sounds insane. If hype is 1/3 true, Nvidia grows 17% per year and is valued $2.5 trillion in five years. ps. Intel vs. AMD is not completely symmetric competition because AMD is fabless and Intel is not. While AMD gets…

P/E is a ratio on earnings, not sales.

25 * $300B (revenue) = $7.5T, yes.

But that's using a P/S multiple, not P/E. Your math makes sense if you assume Nvidia will have 25x P/S... which historically is very high, and unlikely to be the "correct" multiple after all of that growth has already occurred. Unless you expect them to continue growing at same CAGR in perpetuity.

Also, very unlikely they will maintain that kind of market share if they reach those valuations. A relatively simple software solution to improve integration with AMD/Intel/TPU offerings that is worth trillions is a bit of a no brainer. It wasn't a financial prerogative until recently, so yes, all the competitor software here sucks, today.

Compute is fungible, despite what many say here. The cost differential between implementing good software support for AMD and paying Nvidia ~98% gross margin makes it kind of obvious.

A bull case could still see NVDA at a few trillion 5-10 years out... very unlikely it would go much beyond that. I fail to see any remotely rationally made, objective, case for it. At least not one that warrants investing in Nvidia today, at the current valuation, versus other opportunities

It can still be a multi-bagger in the short-term due to what looks like dotcom 2.0 enthusiasm.

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#67

Post by xcv123 »

2devnull wrote: post #56
latchkey wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was very difficult for me to get access to these chips and I'm building a whole business around it. It won't be possible for individuals for a long long time, if ever. Maybe in a few years on the secondary market. Case in point... try searching ebay for the previous generation... MI250. If you want access to these chips, you're going to have to rent them. Given that nobody is really renting them currently, at leas…

What’s to stop the government from taking your business from you for national security reasons?

He's not in China

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#68

Post by AnthonyMouse »

adventured wrote: post #18
echelon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if AMD got their act together a couple of years ago and wrote good software and drivers, you mean? This lead won't last forever. Everyone in the industry has a vested interest in this collapsing, and there are ongoing assaults from all angles. George Hotz' new company is working to undo this, and there are lots of others. All potential AMD acquisition targets, too. There are lots of little OpenCL-lik…

It will take a minimum of 5-10 years to see a meaningful change, if it's not already too late. Absolutely nothing will change about the context in two years, other than Nvidia will be far stronger at that point with $50+ billion per year in operating income (formally joining the hyper profitable US tech giants). It's going to be extraordinarily expensive to build in the GPU data center space at scale. Nvidia will hav…

Investments have diminishing returns. Once you've spent a threshold amount of money, more is just incremental gains, until you're not even getting more out of it than you could by sticking the money in the S&P 500.

It's also weird that you're looking at operating income, which already has R&D expenses subtracted out of it. A company spending more of its revenue on R&D will have a lower operating income, but that hardly implies they can't spend on R&D -- because they are.

And customers hate moats. In many cases they get stuck with them, but most often this is individual consumers with no resources to do anything about it. Data center customers are large institutions, often with their own R&D budgets. Three of the companies that each have a larger market cap than Nvidia are Amazon, Google and Microsoft, the three largest cloud providers. Is any of them interested in letting Nvidia have a moat?

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#69

Post by incrudible »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #62
incrudible wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not fixing the software though, and they never do. You have this problem with every new generation, it launches broken and never gets fixed by the time it is obsolete. If you told me they fixed it, I would not even believe you.

It doesn't matter if you believe the first person who figures it out. Ten other people will try it and then there will be ten people saying they fixed it and a hundred people will try it. At some point you either believe everyone who has tried it or you lose business because your competitors have figured it out and you haven't.

Ten people saying “it works now” is not going to lead to ten times that many risking their time and money on AMD. “Works for me” is a meme for a reason.

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#70

Post by Xirgil »

HeatrayEnjoyer wrote: post #51
temp_praneshp wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it would be nice if the regulatory body would fuck off

We need more anti monopoly action, not less.

We need more anti-anticompetitive action. Why should NVidia and those who use their products be punished because their competitors have not stepped up to the plate?
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