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Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

Has Nvidia assembled one of the greatest engineering teams in human history, or is everyone else just not interested in competing?

I don't get it. Intel have decades of relevant expertise, and have been printing money for years due to AMD's effective absence from the top-class CPU market between 2005 and 2015.

And yet years and years and years go by, and Nvidia is now the world's fifth most valuable company, far surpassing all other chip manufacturers (except Apple), and nothing is happening on the market.

How the fuck is this even possible?

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CUDA. Jensen Huang saw the high performance computing market so many years ahead that it is built on nvidia's stuff. It is a software victory.

Nvidia managed to hit the right spot to win the market - developers. I wrote shaders for depth detection before CUDA, and it was already great back then, but was very graphics centric. Then CUDA came and pushed everything even further forward. I completely agree - it was a software victory.

Yes, Khronos, Intel and AMD managed to make a mess out of OpenCL.

Which is one of the reasons why Apple stop caring about OpenCL, apparently they have repented giving it Khronos, and how it was managed afterwards.

Intel has a lot of hidden unemployment, internal politics and people who honestly don’t really like working.

Intel hires about half of the graduates from my uni, everyone who likes coding fled to startups or super specific teams.

There are strong engineers in Intel for sure but it has a pretty awful culture.

Nvidia’a isn’t great but it’s heaps better in terms of actually taking results into account.

My personal experience is only with the local (Israel) branches of both.

Nvidia does have, at the very least, the best and greatest PhDs of computer graphics, and I think has been recently attracting the ML/DL folks. And of the three companies, it is the one that is still run by the original founder. Founder vision + best research team can't be a recipe for disaster.

Note: I dislike much of what Nvidia does (proprietary drivers, insane prices, ghetto anti-competition tricks, etc). But you gotta give it to them as far as innovation and quality of engineering goes.

> Has Nvidia assembled one of the greatest engineering teams in human history, or is everyone else just not interested in competing?

> I don't get it. Intel have decades of relevant expertise, and have been printing money for years due to AMD's effective absence from the top-class CPU market between 2005 and 2015.

Noone gets it. From an armchair-expert point of view, anything nvidia can do, anyone else can do, they only need money, and they (Intel, Qualcomm, FAANG) have it.

Probably indeed noone was interested in competing, it didn't seemed to be a good deal, until the past few years.

Consumer GPUs are not as large a market as you give credit for. Most GPUs are going to datacenters and consoles and devices like tablets and phones. The fact that Intel is willing to spend trillions to get a foot in the door is astonishing, and AMD is willing to let nVidia focus on ML and shoot themselves in the foot with the gamer market to hold on consoles and maybe get a leg up on desktops.

Trillions?

Excuse a bit of hyperbole.

Unspecified currency

Even in 2022, gaming was still the largest revenue generating sector for Nvidia...

Pretty close in 2022, but third quarter 2023 gaming revenue decreased 51% from previous year and data center revenue increased 31%, so it may be helpful to use up-to-date figures. I couldn't find profit breadowns by sector but I would be surprised if gaming even came close to datacenter profit-wise.

* https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financia...

To be fair, though, pretty much the entire (vocal) enthusiast PC gamer niche has universally panned the recent releases from Nvidia and is hoping and waiting for the next 5000 generation. If Nvidia had released a "good" and competitively priced 4060/70/ti segment, their numbers might have looked different.

Anecdata (n=1): I'm currently running a 3070 but increased my screen size lately, so I'd like to upgrade and hand down my current card to my wife. After checking the current market, I essentially have two choices: either spend ~300€ more than I should have to on a 4070ti/4080 or bury the chance of properly working with AI locally and go with AMD (which might increase my power costs immensely as well).

So I just do neither and wait, and I'm surely not alone in this position.

It seems dedicating their chips to AI and datacenter products are going to be the focus for a while. Not only is the profit better but the distribution is easier, they don't have to deal with third-party card manufacturers, and they don't have to deal with the notoriously picky gamer market. If they can sell every chip they produce in a datacenter card, why would they care about gamers?

No wonder considering the prices of the 4000 series. They look as if they didn’t want it to sell well.

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