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Comment by DiabloD3 | Hacker News Reader

You mean Vega. Volta is a Nvidia arch.

Vega's marketing pushed Nvidia to make what is ending up to be the best product series they will ever make: series 10. That isn't much of a joke, it scared the shit out of Nvidia, and they blinked.

Vega was too late in the pipeline to stop, and Raja was ultimately let go for his role in the whole thing. He refused to start making more gamer-friendly cards, and was obsessed with enterprise compute/jack of all trades cards.

Immediately afterwards was a pivot towards a split arch, allowing multiple teams to pursue their intended markets.

Its why AMD won against Nvidia. Nvidia still has no real answer to AMD's success, other than continuing to increase card prices and making ridiculously large chips that have poor wafer yields. Nvidia won't even have working chiplets until series 60 or 70, while AMD already has them in a shipping product.

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>Its why AMD won against Nvidia.

Won how?

>Nvidia still has no real answer to AMD's success

Which success? Answer to what? Are you from a paralel multiverse?

In this reality, it's the other way around. Nvidia is making so much money from the AI hype than AMD is the one trying to play catch-up.

Yeah, and before that they ruled the bitcoin craze. You literally couldn't buy Nvidia cards for an insanely long time time because the 30 series was so cost effective at mining that everyone and their uncle wanted in on the deal. AMD has some edge in the non high end server niche, but Nvidia rules everything else. In the AI craze AMD is not even an afterthought anymore, as everyone wants Nvidia. Even companies like Google and Tesla, who used to make their own AI chips.

Its weird people keep repeating that. I've been fortunate enough to meet a fair number of programmers who have moved onto make-AI-go-brrrr jobs, most of what they're handling is AMD hardware.

Nvidia strongly missed the boat by continually pushing CUDA lock in, while being on the Khronos steering committee and having made important contributions to OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, and the SPIR-V ecosystem while simultaneously having pretty poor support for standard APIs in their software stack.

Highest perf per watt and perf per dollar is AMD land. AMD keeps moving fowards while Nvidia keeps making weird missteps. There is a reason why I said series 10 is the best they will ever make, there will never be a return to that: they're stuck in the same loop Raja was: make everything bigger for the sake of bigger, instead of making actual performance improving changes.

I actually work in the field (for quite a few years by now) and basically everyone I know (who knows what they're doing and isn't just getting started) uses Nvidia. AMD drivers for GPGPU compute sucked so bad for so long, noone even bothered to try them anymore. CUDA might be closed source, but it is lightyears ahead in stability and usability. If you want to get things done in AI, you buy Nvidia. Everyone who actually has to make these decisions knows that.

Still, weird to hear the "everyone who actually has to make these decisions, the ones that know that" continue to make expensive suboptimal choices.

To each their own, I guess.

They are optimal in the overall sense, because flops per dollar is not everything in the real world. Though I can see why many people outside the field would think so, since that is what manufacturers write in big letters on their marketing brochures.

You are partially right. Flops isn't everything, its just a major component of your capex and/or opex if you rely on enterprise compute for the majority of what you do (ie, machine learning).

The cost of doing business that isn't flops is the realm of developer time. Nvidia tooling is where developer time goes to die. People who keep claiming Nvidia's tooling is great for developers and easy to use is someone who has a skill mismatch for the industry, or worse, someone trying to sell you something.

“Poor Volta” was the line from AMD’s marketing team.

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