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Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

> Unfortunately the BoM on these things is probably super high.,, even for a datacenter GPU

You would save money on improved yields of chiplets and on using cheaper nodes where appropriate. I imagine that would help offset the increased packaging costs.

However, they are moving to compete in a market where the profit margins are so obscene that a small increase in the cost of materials really wouldn't be an important factor.

> Nvidia Makes Nearly 1,000% Profit on H100 GPUs: Report

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-makes-1000-profit-o...

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And that's the consequence of giving the market leader a decade and a half head start. No one and I mean no one was preventing AMD or Intel from building a competitive hardware and software ecosystem other than themselves.

In the case of AI computing, my layman's perspective of the last decade is that NVIDIA created a market where one did not previously exist "at scale" as a long bet that is paying off significantly.

It seems unfair to criticize AMD or Intel for placing losing bets on other market segments when things could have just as easily turned out differently.

It was a David against two Goliaths situation until recently.

Five years ago when AMD was recovering from near bankruptcy, it was battling Intel (100K+engineers) in CPUs and Nvidia (20K+ engineers) in GPUs

It was doing that with just 10K engineers and a fraction of the R&D budget of the giants.

Things have changed now. AMD has more than doubled their headcount and R&D budgets. Within the last year the company has pivoted to AI as their main focus.

It could be argued that Nvidia sabotaged OpenCL. Part of the reason that nobody used OpenCL was because that it didn't work very well on Nvidia hardware, which was the dominant hardware. So unseating Nvidia was an impossible chicken/egg problem. To unseat Nvidia you needed OpenCL to succeed but OpenCL couldn't succeed without good support Nvidia.

OpenCL sucked for other reasons too, but it likely wouldn't have succeeded even if it didn't suck.

That'd be a tough argument. Intel and AMD aren't responding to CUDA by pumping resources into OpenCL, they're building completely new libraries. That suggests NVidia was frustrated by its partners in the OpenCL design process and just built their own system that worked.

Yeah, NVIDIA was frustrated by disabling memory channels (3 concurrent transfers for CUDA, 1 for OpenCL) and not providing real support while advertising support for newer OpenCL versions (builds failing with cryptic compile errors). Causing OpenCL code to perform poorly and preventing it from running on their own hardware in some cases.

Other than locking out the technologies they see threatening, they’re completely a fair company, if you want to believe in that.

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