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The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

mohitdagarwal.substack.com

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Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#61

Post by solidasparagus »

voidspark wrote: post #35
liuliu wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course corporations will have a lot of different bets. Most of them will not pan out but they will try. Meta will not be able to produce a chip that can run GenAI workload in the next 2 years. Microsoft is doing a side-quest, and they haven't even proved themselves with their FPGA adventure and ARM server adventure. Amazon is legit, they have done well on ARM server, but trainium is TBD, and how much they will pul…

Yeah that's right. The chip may not be as good as Nvidia's, but it doesn't need to be. As the article explains, Nvidia can still lose their position even if they have the best chips.

They have to be competitive. TPUs are wildly ahead of the pack. And even they aren't particularly competitive. 12 years of ecosystem development by the most advanced AI ecosystem company on the planet and your (ex-Google!) researchers are still going to pelt you with tomatoes if you tell them you are swapping out their H100 cluster with TPUs. JAX remains niche (not saying bad) and extremely hard to use efficiently without the help of Google (no CUDA for going off the beaten path).

I suspect the closed nature of the ecosystem will preclude them from winning as much as they could.

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#62

Post by dwattttt »

makeitdouble wrote: post #53
voidspark wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everyone who has so far proven unable to compete The article explains that Nvidia's biggest customers (50% of datacenter revenue) are switching to their own hardware.

But then they're not boosting NVidia's competitors either, so wouldn't NVidia stay in the top position in their market ? The article seems focused more on stock price and where to bet, than the market for GPUs or generic hardware vendors.

> But then they're not boosting NVidia's competitors either, so wouldn't NVidia stay in the top position in their market ?

Nope; if hypothetically 100% left NVidia, whether to their own hardware or to not use GPUs at all, it'd be easy to say NVidia would be last in the market

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#63

Post by ryao »

stingraycharles wrote: post #44
voidspark wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You linked to an article about Google renting an insignificant amount of additional capacity. Google runs AI / HPC workloads on their own hardware and has been doing that for more than a decade. Google Gemini was trained on TPUs developed in house. It does not run on Nvidia hardware.

And I believe Apple refuses to use NVidia as well, they’re actually using Google’s TPUs. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

That was for training. For inference, they reportedly use their own silicon.

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#64

Post by ryao »

chneu wrote: post #16
fnordpiglet wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaming GPUs is a side business for them at this point. It’s all about AI.

Gosh, I have a coworker who acts like gaming GPUs are the only hardware that matters. I've tried explaining that one or two AI data center clients for Nvidia dwarfs the entire gaming GPU market, but he just doesn't get it.

Around 15 years ago in college, I took the opposite position that datacenter workloads mattered more to Nvidia’s future than gaming and no one believed me. It is amazing how times have changed.

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#65

Post by [deleted] »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #36
voidspark wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His coworker simply has no idea that datacenters provide 93% of Nvidia's revenue, and a single B200 GPU sells for $40k.

> His coworker simply has no idea that datacenters provide 93% of Nvidia's revenue, and a single B200 GPU sells for $40k. Currently. :-)

[deleted]

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#66

Post by makeitdouble »

mycall wrote: post #55
makeitdouble wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then they're not boosting NVidia's competitors either, so wouldn't NVidia stay in the top position in their market ? The article seems focused more on stock price and where to bet, than the market for GPUs or generic hardware vendors.

By switching to their own hardware, they become NVidia's competitors.

That's kind of arguing that people cooking at home are restaurants' competitors.

There's a kernel of truth in it, but if I was McDonalds I'd care a lot more about what KFC is doing than the market trends of cast iron pans.

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#67

Post by lvl155 »

I am starting to think AMD is doing this on purpose and they have some secret handshake deal with Nvidia. Nvidia has at least two more years of “sellout at any price” market. Not because they have the best solution (which they do atm) but because they basically share the monopoly with Apple at TSMC. And Apple is content wasting that away on iPhones.

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#68

Post by brazzy »

makeitdouble wrote: post #66
mycall wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By switching to their own hardware, they become NVidia's competitors.

That's kind of arguing that people cooking at home are restaurants' competitors. There's a kernel of truth in it, but if I was McDonalds I'd care a lot more about what KFC is doing than the market trends of cast iron pans.

No, you wouldn't, not if that market trend causes your revenue to plummet. Changes in the size of the market matter just as much as market share.

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#69

Post by mushufasa »

voidspark wrote: post #28
01100011 wrote: post #27

Seems like another article based on the assumption that Nvidia just sits there doing nothing while everyone who has so far proven unable to compete suddenly figures it out and steals their lunch. At some point one of these Nvidia doomers will be right but there is a long line of them who failed miserably.

> everyone who has so far proven unable to compete The article explains that Nvidia's biggest customers (50% of datacenter revenue) are switching to their own hardware.

I'm skeptical of this. They have been doing this for a decade already. So far, those same companies have just become bigger and bigger customers of NVIDIA.

NVIDIA is very strategic about building product to avoid commodification -- both by building out network effects where software is tied to their proprietary sdk libraries, and by always focusing on being at the cutting edge of product.

Both these things can be true: a large company should try to build their own hardware to reduce supplier risk, and a large company should be open to suppliers that have better product that delivers business value.

So far, these large companies' internal hardware has been useful internally but never a complete replacement for NVIDIA, which keeps staying at the cutting edge of new capabilities.

NVIDIA already faced existential risk when Intel was commodifying all the dedicated motherboard components in the late 90s, 2000s, (like sound cards etc), so they're hyper-aware of this.

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#70

Post by bee_rider »

alephnerd wrote: post #2

Services! Services services services! This is what will help protect Nvidia now that DC and cluster spend is cooling. They own the ecosystem thanks to CUDA, Infiniband, NGC, NVLink, and other key tools. Now they should add additional applications (the AI Foundry is a good way to do that), or forays into adjacent spaces like white-labeled cluster management. Working on building custom designs and consulting on custom…

Yeah, that immediately came to mind—they talk about distributed systems being a problem, but Nvidia owns the battle-tested and well-regarded HPC networking hardware (Infiniband).

There’s maybe some wiggle room, in that these AI distributed systems might not (?) look like HPC/scientific computing systems—maybe they don’t need Infiniband style low latency. So these other funky networks might work.

But like, Nvidia has the good nodes and the good network. That’s a rough combination to compete against.

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