GPU-buying gamers are subsidizing the future of analytics | Hacker News Reader

GPU-buying gamers are subsidizing the future of analytics

businessinsider.com

39 pointstmostak9 comments

Not a whole lot of content in the article... we all know GPUs are good for many data processing or machine learning tasks. Clearly gaming was the impetus to develop high performance GPUs initially, but I wonder if it still holds true that gamers "subsidize" big data significantly. Are most high-performance GPUs sold for gaming or for data processing?

I believe HPC still accounts for under 10% of Nvidia's GPU sales, so it is almost certainly true that there's no way it could be a profitable business if the R&D couldn't be shared with the gaming and workstation GPUs. On the other hand, the HPC GPUs are supposed to have by far the best margins of any of their products. So talking about "subsidizing" seems totally misguided.

Do you have a source for that 10% figure?

Sure, look at the "revenue by markets" slide here:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10050/nvidia-announces-q4-fy-2...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9500/nvidia-fy-2016-q2-results

The commentators on HN are vastly overestimating the size of the machine learning market compared to the size of the gaming market.

So if you have two market segments, and one is larger and has existed longer than the other, then the large one is subsidising the small one?

That seems like an odd definition of subsidy.

I'd argue that it'll soon be the other way around. Many of the improvements in Pascal were driven by scientific computing. It's easy to justify adding new features (like high speed 16 bit FP) when Facebook or Google is willing to buy datacenters full of the things.

Yeah I had similar thoughts when they announced the Nvidia 1000 line the other day. The 970 GTX, whilst great for gaming, was a huge disappointment for CUDA programming (dodgy memory issues). Whereas it seems they've really stepped up with the Pascal generation for CUDA, and gaming will benefit as a result.

If you're willing to bet actual money on your argument, I'll take the opposite side easily.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com