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Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

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Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#601

Post by shmerl »

lmm wrote: post #553
shmerl wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> And they don't care to do it on Linux I don't understand what you're saying here. I've used NVidia on Linux and FreeBSD a lot. They work great. If your argument is they don't implement some particular feature that matters to you, fair enough. But that's not an argument that they don't offer stability or Linux support. They do.

Taking very long to implement stuff is a perfect argument of bad support for the platform. Timely support isn't any less important than support in general.

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#603

Post by xp84 »

rhetocj23 wrote: post #442
tracker1 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or... we could still be using blackberry-like devices without much in the way of active/touch interface development at all. Or worse, the Windows CE or Palm with the pen things.

Lol exactly. That poster should quickly realise hes got it pretty good given the alternatives.

Why? Was Steve Jobs literally the only human who was capable of seeing the massive unserved demand that existed back then?

Sidekick was amazing for its time, but only on one also-ran carrier. BlackBerry had great features like BBM (essentially iMessage) but underpowered for multimedia and more difficult to learn. If Apple was out of business, one or more companies would have made the billions on MP3 players that iPod made, and any of them could have branched into phones and made a splash the same way. Perhaps Sony, perhaps Microsoft. Microsoft eventually figured it out -- the only reason they failed was that they waited for both Apple and Android to become entrenched so in this timeline they could have been the second-mover, but unlike with Apple and Android, maybe neither MS nor Google would have automatically owned the US marketshare the way Apple does[1]. If that were the case, we may have competition, instead of the unhealthy thing we have where Apple just does whatever they want.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/united...

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#604

Post by xp84 »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #521
xp84 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Apple user (and even an Apple investor), I'd rather that Apple went out of business back then. If we could re-roll the invention of the (mainstream) smartphone, maybe we'd get something other than two monopolistic companies controlling everything. For instance, maybe if there were 4 strong vendors making the devices with diverse operating systems, native apps wouldn't have ever become important, and the Web pla…

Nope, we know exactly where it was headed. Phones controlled by carriers full of NFL ads.

There's nothing supernatural about Apple that meant only they could do something better than that shitty generation of devices. Remember, the portable consumer electronics market would certainly have other huge players if Apple hadn't existed to make the iPod. BlackBerry, Microsoft, and Sony come to mind. iPhone, based mainly on Apple's popularity from the iPod era, got a huge jump from that, and then the rush for native apps, which encourages consolidation, smothered every other company's competing devices (such as WebOS, BlackBerry 10, Windows Mobile) before they had a chance to compete.

To be honest, Android may have met a similar fate if Apple had been able to negotiate a non-exclusive contract with Cingular/AT&T. My understanding though was that they had to give exclusivity as a bargaining chip to get all the then-unthinkable concessions, as yeah, every phone was full of garbage bloatware and festooned with logos.

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#605

Post by xp84 »

behringer wrote: post #464
xp84 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Not only would there be no money in it to try to replace Iris graphics or whatever they call them now -- it would be ultra pointless because the only people buying integrated graphics are those where gaming, on-device AI, and cryptocurrency aren't even part of the equation. Now, that is like 80%+ of the PC market, but it's perfectly well served already. I saw this move more as setting up a worthy competitor to…

Intel sells discrete cards and their next card was setup to do AI and games competently. They were poised to compete with the low to mid range Nvidia cards at HALF the cost. It was definitely going to upset the market. Now i understand the radio silence on a card that was supposed to have been coming by Xmas.

Oh for sure. Arc is in jeopardy. Though tbh it was already, wasn't it? Can't you see an alternate universe where this story never happened, but Intel announced today "Sorry, because our business is dying in general and since Arc hasn't made us a ton of money yet anyway, we need to cut Arc to focus on our core blah blah blah".

I just meant their integrated GPUs are what's completely safe here.

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#606

Post by behringer »

xp84 wrote: post #605
behringer wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel sells discrete cards and their next card was setup to do AI and games competently. They were poised to compete with the low to mid range Nvidia cards at HALF the cost. It was definitely going to upset the market. Now i understand the radio silence on a card that was supposed to have been coming by Xmas.

Oh for sure. Arc is in jeopardy. Though tbh it was already, wasn't it? Can't you see an alternate universe where this story never happened, but Intel announced today "Sorry, because our business is dying in general and since Arc hasn't made us a ton of money yet anyway, we need to cut Arc to focus on our core blah blah blah". I just meant their integrated GPUs are what's completely safe here.

I doubt it's safe, it competes directly with Nvidia on handhelds.

Also the arc wasn't in jeopardy, the arc cards have been improving with every release and the latest one got pretty rave reviews.

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#607

Post by xp84 »

famouswaffles wrote: post #444
xp84 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I'm happy for you, and I do play Minecraft on an iGPU. I just meant that about 80% of the PCs sold seem to be for "business use" or Chromebooks, and the people writing those POs aren't making their selections with gaming in mind. (And also, I'm pretending Macs don't exist for this statement. They aren't even PCs anymore anyway, just giant iPhones, from a silicon perspective.)

RDD2, Ghosts Of Tsushima, Black Myth Wukong. These games will play at 40 to 50 + fps at 1080p low to medium on the intel ARC igpus (no AI upscaling). To anyone actually paying attention, igpus have come a long way. They are no longer an 'I can play minecraft' thing.

That performance is not surprising, Arc seems pretty dope in general.

I hadn't realized that "Arc" and "Integrated" overlapped, I thought that brand and that level of power was only being used on discrete cards.

I do think that integrated Arc will probably be killed by this deal though, not for being bad as it's obviously great, rather for being a way for Intel to cut costs with no downsides for Intel. If they can make RTX iGPUs now, and the Nvidia and RTX brand being the strongest in the gaming space... Intel isn't going to invest the money in continuing to develop Arc, even if Nvidia made it clear that they don't care, it just doesn't make any business sense now.

That is a loss for the cause of gaming competition. Although having Nvidia prop up Intel may prove to be a win for competition in terms of silicon in general versus them being sold off in parts, which could be a real possibility it seems.

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#608

Post by mandevil »

DanielHB wrote: post #569
mandevil wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key for getting (financial) value out of fabs is their time after they are the overtaken by the next node. The ability to keep the order book full after you have a better node is what pays off the fab. So its all the other chips- the chips for cars, for low-power internet connected devices, etc. that make the fab profitable. That is where TSMC's ability to work with different customers enables them to extract val…

Ah, that makes sense. I guess Intel is stuck with making x86 CPUs for datacenters even on their old-node factories so they need to retool them for newer nodes more often/earlier because they don't have a foundry business.

Oh, the integrated players (now pretty much just Intel and Samsung, but in the past people like AMD as well) have other things they make on these older fabs- modems, OOB managers, USB controllers, all the other chips that go on a motherboard, but these are lower margin than a pure-play fab can get selling to all of those customers who don't need the latest node.

This is one reason Intel and Samsung are both hesitant about going to the next node- Intel has put out official statements that they are only going to 14A if they can get Foundry up with a significant partner, and Samsung is hedging their bets and being cagey about their own 1.4nm node (at least in English, I haven't seen any direct demand for a major foundry customer from Samsung, just statements saying that they were going to be delaying and might not be building it at all).

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#609

Post by xp84 »

behringer wrote: post #606
xp84 wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh for sure. Arc is in jeopardy. Though tbh it was already, wasn't it? Can't you see an alternate universe where this story never happened, but Intel announced today "Sorry, because our business is dying in general and since Arc hasn't made us a ton of money yet anyway, we need to cut Arc to focus on our core blah blah blah". I just meant their integrated GPUs are what's completely safe here.

I doubt it's safe, it competes directly with Nvidia on handhelds. Also the arc wasn't in jeopardy, the arc cards have been improving with every release and the latest one got pretty rave reviews.

It wasn't in jeopardy for being no good, it was in jeopardy because Intel is so troubled. Like the Bombardier C-Series jet: Everyone agreed it was a great design and very promising, but in the end they had no choice but to sell it to Airbus (who calls it the A220), I think because they didn't really have the money to scale up production. In like manner, Intel lacks the resources to make Arc the success it technically deserves to be, and without enough scale, they'll lose money on Arc, which Intel can hardly afford at this point.

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#610

Post by trhway »

purpleflame1257 wrote: post #578
trhway wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Nvidia is fabless and has concentrated supplier and geopolitical risk with TSMC. East India Company has been conducting continental wars on its own. A modern company with $4T valuation and a country-GDP-size revenue and possessing key military technology of today and tomorrow wars - AI software and hardware, including robotics - can successfully wage such a continental war through a suitable proxy, say an oversized…

Defending against territorial conquest is considerably easier than defending against kinetic strikes on key manufacturing facilities

Not necessarily. Territorial war requires people. Defense from kinetic strikes on key objects concentrated on smallish territory requires mostly high-tech - radars and missiles - and that would be much easier for a very rich high-tech US corporation.

An example - Starlink antenna, sub-$500, a phased array which actually is like a half or a third of such an array on a modern fighter jet where it cost several millions. Musk naturally couldn't go the way of a million-per-antenna, so he had to develop and source it on his own. The same with anti-missile defense - if/when NVDA gets to it to defend the TSMC fabs, NVDA would produce such defense systems orders of magnitude cheaper, and that defense would work much better than the modern military systems.

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