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Comment by sameersegal | Hacker News Reader

“Owning it all ... from cloud to edge” is an exciting ambition not only for Nvidia but also as a developer and a consumer. It’s going to be hard to pull it off, of course, but it’s worth a shot.

EDIT - explaining the benefits for developers, and therefore consumers.

A "cloud to edge" stack from hardware to the application layer could create new application patterns that can tremendously accelerate autonomous driving, everyday robots, gaming. It could democratize this for small (maybe indie) developer teams. Wouldn't this have a great impact on consumers?

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The idea of a company "owning it all" does not sound like something that I am going to benefit from as a consumer long term.

Don’t forget their competitors in the space are Amazon, Microsoft and Google. They won’t be able to do more than make a dent to that market share.

Yes, but owning the IP that runs Amazon CPUs gives them a clear advantage?

If you are licensing the ISA but have your own implementation design, pivoting to RISC-V should be easy.

Market calls for competition...

I'm no fan of Apple, but they now own everything from chips and hardware to the OS and 30% of app store revenue, and they are the most valuable company on Earth.

> I'm no fan of Apple

This suggests that as a consumer, you haven't benefited from this.

The fact that they are the most valuable company on Earth suggest that many consumers do benefit from it.

Or it suggests patent laws prevent consumer friendly companies from competing with Apple.

Many consumers benefit from a good product they enjoy using, regardless of ownership of the stack behind it

The fact they own their full stack, has resulted in some of the most anti consumer parts of the business. Allowing monopolization on repairs / part pricing etc

Benefited from a price that's 30% higher than it could have been?

That's what I'm saying. The above comment was implying that due to Apple's worth, they were benefiting consumers.

I was pointing out that the above commentors personal experience showed otherwise.

AMD and Intel also already "own it all" in this sense. NVIDIA is merely a third competitor in this space, with a much more undesirable CPU IP.

You should welcome a third competitor to the duopoly that has strangled CPU development. We surely could have made much more progress if x86 was not limited to only two (really three) competitors, you can already see how much change that AMD getting back in the game has made.

And I'm not sure Huang is going to burn it all down anyway. That seems like it would be a shortsighted move that would negatively affect the long-term value of ARM.

But I mean - I don't think anyone can deny that Huang would do great things with ARM. Terrible, perhaps, but also great.

(and it says a lot that a lot of people are probably nodding along with a comparison of one of the greatest tech CEOs of all time to literal Voldemort, the public opinions on NVIDIA and Huang are just ridiculously hyperbolic)

AMD and Intel don't actually own it all, certainly not from a software perspective. That's the difference here. The upshot of this article is that Nvidia basically wants to "CUDAify" the entire datacenter software stack. Intel and AMD absolutely do not have that kind of lock-in. You don't need to use their proprietary language to write programs that run on their systems.

This is such an important point.

Plus CUDA shows what can happen even when alternatives are available (OpenCL for example) you just have to use the hardware / software integration to be sufficiently ahead and establish a virtuous circle.

CUDA is basically just C/C++ with parallel-programming concepts. The "alternatives" like OpenCL are still tied to their graphics API origins.

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