As time goes on I don’t see how you break the CUDA moat even if you had all of nvidia Al’s engineers.
CUDA means you need everyone in AI to target your new (hopefully open) platform and that platform is faster than CUDA is. Given how most frameworks of the last 10 years have been optimized for CUDA you would need to turn around a global sized cruise ship.
If Intel’s GPUs are only 3% faster, will that be enough to rewrite my entire software stack for something not CUDA? If intel opts for a translation layer, could they ever match nvidia’s performance?
If Intel is 10% slower but 50% cheaper and the open source stack you use has been heavily updated to work well with Intel drivers would that not be an enticing product?
Yes, and in fact both AMD and Intel have libraries. You can run Stable Diffusion and suchlike on AMD GPUs today, apparently. And you can export models from most ML frameworks to run in the browser, on phones and suchlike.
> If Intel is 10% slower but 50% cheaper [...] would that not be an enticing product?
Sometimes, yes. Some of the largest models apparently cost $600,000 in compute time to train [1], so halving that would be pretty appealing.
However, part of the reason for nvidia's dominance is that if you're hiring an ML engineer for $160,000/year spending $1,600 to give them an RTX 4090 is chump change.
[1] https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1563870674111832066
Lol... Intel is famously stingy when it comes to salaries.
Principals usually broke into the three digit range from what I hear.
Probably Intel's best bet now would be to try to be the fab for NVDA.
No.
For different people, the timespan between now and when they may want or need to sell it is different, and thus different people will arrive at different conclusions.
And note that “worth more” above simply means growth in market capitalization, so as long as someone is willing to buy the shares at a price supporting that increased market cap, then it does not matter if Tesla is still selling fewer cars than the others combined.
And as somebody with a significant short position, I would add - "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" !
Their numbers for this and next Q are absolutely amazing. It's also quite "refreshing" - a company with great product, almost without competition (so far - it will come real quick). And fun part being their main advantage is probably CUDA and not even the chips itself (which by the way they don't manufacture - they "only" do the design).
But still - even with those numbers, and even with this pace of growth (both being absolutely not sustainable, and will probably reverse hard next year) - the valuation doesn't make any sense, especially given the current interest rates.