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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

It is not a good article for a couple of reasons and disappointing for the Economist. While Intel is being challenged both in the mainstream (by ARM) and by applications like AI, the driver of NVidia profits for the last few years had been crypto coin mining.

While AI is great and all, it doesn't consume the sheer number of chips like the blockchain craze does. If history is any guide, once the block chain thing burns out or blows over, the number of available GPUs on the aftermarket is going to be pretty incredible.

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I agree on the assessment of the article, however not with the conclusion that blockchain is driving this market alone - its certainly there, but I don't know any ML practitioner who answers 'how many gpu's' with anything other than 'how many can I have/afford ?' We're starting to get more and more projects reporting their processing time in GPU/years - the singularity is bull, but ML ain't going away:-) That said, if people start dumping their mining rigs, I'm on ebay looking for them :-D

I always figured that the singularity idea might work in theory but in practice it would likely take an ungodly amount of time for it to work.

While Nvidia has benefitted from the crypto craze in the last 18 months, it is debatable that crypto mining was the primary driver.

First of all, AMD cards have been historically better suited for crypto mining(I had multiple AMD rigs in 2011) and yet still it did not drive the profits for AMD until 2017.

Nvidia's cash cow has been the workstation cards(Quattro) and Tesla computing cards(used just for processing not video) which carry much higher margins than the gaming chips while carrying the same architecture underneath.

Which vendors will be hurt/helped by the GPU/blockchain hangover?

> the driver of NVidia profits for the last few years had been crypto coin mining.

Do you have a source for this statement? Crypto currency demand is not the "driver" of Nvidia profits.

“We’re sold out of many of our high-end SKUs, and so it’s a real challenge keeping [graphic cards] in the marketplace for games,” he said, adding “At the highest level the way to think about that is because of the philosophy of cryptocurrency — which is really about taking advantage of distributed high-performance computing — there are supercomputers in the hands of almost everybody in the world so that no singular force or entity that can control the currency.” -- https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/27/nvidia-ceo-comments-on-gpu...

It is the mining of crypto currency that anyone can do in their garage and maybe mine a bitcoin worth thousands or some other coin of the day.

Again, Nvidia only became a real option for serious crypto miners in the last 18 months.

Until then anyone doing cost/profit analysis would have gone with AMD cards.

When Bitcoin was worth mining on GPU (ie 2011), AMD cards were much better suited than Nvidia cards.

It was about 2x difference for cards costing the same amount.

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