Hacker News Reader

Comment by samspenc | Hacker News Reader

Folks on Reddit's /r/pcmasterrace have been discussing this for years - the consensus seems to be that Nvidia could add more VRAM to its GPUs without too much additional cost - but they don't want to, in order to push higher spending businesses and consumers to buy their more expensive chips to get more VRAM at exponential higher costs.

View on HN

Yeah their high VRAM cards (80gb h100) cost $40k.

That's their price differentiator. It's the reason for their profits. nVidia is now <20% gaming in terms of revenue and that gaming revenue has much tighter margins than the 80% datacenter/professional market revenue which is almost all profit sine 80gb ram doesn't cost $40k more.

So yes it'd be nice if nVidia made it so there was no reason for their $40k AI cards to exist. But they aren't going to do that.

I hope Intel, as the underdog, can do mid-tier cards, but with lot more VRAM. I can see myself using multiple LLM models at once, not necessarily running at once, but interleaved.

Agreed. I think people would accept the <50% perf as long as there's plenty of RAM to play in. I think that's the biggest risk to Nvidia right now.

No one's catching up to the topline perf or even power efficiency (Intel actually suck at perf/power right now) but they might be able to compete with raw GPU costs at least. Give us a $2k card with 256gb ram and we'll probably take it over the $40k 80gb cards despite the power efficiency and topline perf that the $40k card has.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com