Whats Up with Nvidia | Hacker News Reader

Whats Up with Nvidia

1 pointcatasaurus4 comments

I've been kind of conflicted lately. On one hand, Nvidia produces high end chips that meet the demand. But on the other hand, they just suck. Some of the chips you can't even buy if your not some corporate client, or whatever you have to do to qualify. But even if you could, who in their right mind would spend 10 grand on one GPU. Because of this, the overall tech community seems to hate them because of this. But, many other places (the media, etc) heap insane amounts of praise on them for producing "cutting edge" chips for AI. Can they not see how overpriced they are for everything? Even for gaming. The new 4000 series largely marketed towards gamers, is also considered insanely overpriced. They are beginning to face competition in that area, with Intel and AMD having released budget options that have come close to rivaling the flagship Nvidia GPUs. Close. Nvidia still dominates, but how can they not realize that they are going to DIE if they do not bring down their prices. It can be done. The Intel Arc series is around 200 dollars (even less). Intel Arc does not do very well on the performance side, it runs games mostly as well as chips from a couple years ago. But still, 200 dollars? So here I ask, what the hell is up with Nvidia?

This article explains the chip market in a very good way, and articulates what I was trying to say about the A100: https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2021/06/13/a-br...

Nvidia is a good chip company as a whole, but the A100 is a real problem.

A100 is an enterprise class GPU like AMD's MI series and Intel Ponte Vecchio. In that regard the pricing is not unreasonable - They are in separate class from Geforce or Radeon cards.

>Can they not see how overpriced they are for everything

Overpriced compared to what? The A100 (the $10,000 GPU) has no competition. Tesla bought ~6,000 A100s for themselves. The moat in AI/CUDA means Intel nor AMD can reasonably catch up.

Overpriced compared to nothing. But for a chip that was released 3 years ago, maybe it is a little bit too much? Also yes, Nvidia does have a moat with CUDA, and it would take a long time for Intel and AMD to overtake them. So for the short term, Nvidia is probably fine just charging a lot of money for their chips. But in the end, if AMD or Intel releases a chip that competes with the A100 (or any flagship chip that Nvidia currently has a monopoly on), for a lower price, it is only a matter of time before high performance computing moves to the hardware interface of choice for said company. AMD released GPUFORT two years back, an alternative to CUDA for AMD products. Nvidia can afford to be doing what it is right now because of its monopoly. But that won't always be there. I don't have a firm opinion on what they should do, I am just trying to make sense of this.

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