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Comment by mrkstu | Hacker News Reader

As Seneca is said to have quipped- “Fortuna est quae fit cum praeparatio in occasionem incidit." or "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

Nvidia has been doing the hard work in preparing to succeed in this market. CUDA has been meticulously developed and maintained, creating an adhesion to their hardware that would not otherwise exist in the AI market.

It also has been willing and capable of creating lines of business hardware aimed at maximizing utility for their customers.

They also have hired and maintained a roster of the best engineers in their specialties, including the software part of the equation.

There is no part of their success that they weren't prepared to take advantage of when the opportunity presented itself. They didn't control the size of the opportunity itself, but no greatly successful company does.

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This. Jensen (Nvidia CEO) is being a bit humble here given the massive investments the company has made into CUDA for the past decade. Now they're simply reaping the benefits. Sure, ChatGPT's arrival last year was the spark but arguably it was inevitable sooner or later.

Case in point: Nvidia has been hosting "GPU Conferences" annually to build awareness and drive adoption of CUDA. These events surely aren't free to host but necessary to build momentum and give an edge to your custom stack.

Luck is more applicable to the cryptomining boom and bust cycles that Nvidia also profited from. Their gaming GPUs (along with AMD's) just happened to be the best available at the proof of work.

Nvidia in the past made only GPUs, CUDA is used to program GPUs and get use out of them. It doesn't take any magical foresight to want to invest in CUDA, it is the most obvious way to expand your TAM.

> It doesn't take any magical foresight to want to invest in CUDA, it is the most obvious way to expand your TAM.

Tell that to ATI/AMD, and all the now-defunct and also-ran (Matrox, 3dfx) graphics companies.

What if I told you ...

Matrox is still alive.

Iirc they found a niche in medical device imaging.

> What if I told you ... Matrox is still alive.

What if… you read my comment more closely, and saw it was a parenthetical example after "also-ran" and not "now-defunct".

AMD does not just make GPUs, and pre-2008 their resources were spent on their fab, post-2008 they simply had no resources. They did not need to expand the TAM, just try to increase their revenue share. CPUs did not need the same level of investment for return.

> pre-2008 their resources were spent on their fab, post-2008 they simply had no resources

this underplays the AMD board refusing a merger with NVIDIA (because jensen wanted to be CEO of the resulting company and hector ruiz didn't like that), and then overpaying for ATI and leaving themselves depleted of funds.

(staff writer, not blog "contributor") https://www.forbes.com/sites/briancaulfield/2012/02/22/amd-t...

Bulldozer/etc could have gone very differently if they hadn't been broke and forced to underinvest. They might not have ever been in the position of "consoles having to carry them" if they had simply done a merger-of-equals with NVIDIA, or if they had simply walked away from the graphics market afterwards instead of rushing to buy ATI.

A lot of people just can't bring themselves to admit that good decisions had a large role in putting NVIDIA where they are today, and that bad decisions had a large role in putting AMD where they were in the late 2000s/early 2010s. It wasn't just bad things happening to AMD - the bad things happened because of bad decisions, they were consequences of actions.

People overfixate on the Intel thing as being the root of all of AMD's woes, as opposed to the other 75% of the problem that they could control. Like hector ruiz was just an utter disaster all around, not just even this one thing. And even today, AMD does discounts/rebates for bulk purchases. And the best rebates come if you buy all of your hardware from them (and thus, none from your competitor) - same as Intel did, which is why the decision was eventually significantly reduced. The eventual finding was - like many things, it may or may not be anticompetitive, depending on how you use it - but volume rebates and even outright exclusivity agreements are not inherently illegal in the way AMD fans generally imply they are. Ask Pepsi.

Matrox and 3dfx never came close to making general purpose GPUs, they just got completely outcompeted in the regular PC graphics market of the late 90s. Matrox and 3dfx last tried to compete on architecture in 2002 [1] and 1999 respectively, while the first GPUs capable of general purpose computing were released many years later at the end of 2006 (by Nvidia) and mid 2007 (by AMD/ATI). High performance GPUs have been a completely Nvidia and AMD/ATI affair for two decades until Intel entered the fray last year, since before people even conceived of GPGPUs.

Matrox and 3dfx were gone before they could even conceive of a general purpose GPU strategy.

[1]: The Matrox Parhelia itself being out of date tech on release to boot, lacking a Direct3D 9.0 class architecture that ATI launched two months later.

Matrox is still around in computer graphics though.

You could argue they successfully pivoted out of consumer and into b2b.

But they gave up on making their own cores.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrox

> Matrox and 3dfx were gone before they could even conceive of a general purpose GPU strategy.

Hence "also-rans".

It doesn’t need magical foresight?

What are you trying to argue here?

and yet, if they had chosen to go in a different direction they wouldn't have been ready for ML/AI.

The point isn't that they didn't invest in the direction that ended up being right, it's that they didn't do it specifically with ML/AI in mind years before it was even a twinkle in google's eyes.

I thought you were gonna go with “Audentes Fortuna Iuvat” for a minute.

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