Hacker News Reader

Comment by ex3ndr | Hacker News Reader

Very disappointing, much less cuda cores than in 4090, no nvlink (32G won't be enough anyway), price x3 to 4090.

I personally find it "sort of" funny how nvidia is caught between what they need for gamers and what they need for IA, and how they're trying to pull all the tricks to not have their gamer cards eat up their "AI enthousiast" cards sales.

Absurd pricing, ridiculous vram offering, I'm sure they're trying very hard to find a way to stop AI like SD or LLMs to run on their gamer cards at this point.

It's reached a point where not only has ATI/AMD essentially caught up to them in rasterization, but they're frankly a better offer at every price point against the 4XXX generation for pure gaming, with only DLSS and brand recognition keeping nvidia ahead.

Elsewhere in the comments they make a good case for this card being positioned for Enterprise computing and not for gaming or ML.

We just need some fierce foreign competition. I hope the Chinese will soon catch up and able to produce high performance gpus.

It won't happen.

The equipment from ASML and the know how of TSMC and Samsung is far far out of reach of china now.

Intel can't even seem to get down to 5nm.

I wouldn't underestimate China: https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/huawei-quietly-annou...

Meteor Lake on Intel 4 launched last month.

It seems super weird to say that given who they are and how many times they tried, but Intel is my hope right now. Their arc card where very good for a first salvo, they do great stride in drivers and modern tech (XeSS beating FSR on its first try for exemple), and they're really so scared of behing left behind by arm + cuda card that they just might take it seriously this time instead of killing it when it starts working.

I want to be hopeful, but these corporations will never do anything for the consumer. At their core they think in terms of squeezing the customer as much as they can. As Steve Jobs said, when the sales people run the company don't expect a good product.

A wonderful thing would be a GPU with open source drivers and a standartized API. AMD could do that and it would kill nVidia marketshare in a few years, but they don't do that because they want the server gpu money at a very inflated margin. Maybe Intel will do it but that depends who runs the company. With open source often corporations publish a feture stripped solution and keep the full drivers closed source. Sad reality we live in.

I've got my fingers crossed on them cramming a lot of vRAM in there. They were putting 16gb in the Xeon Phi 7110P when 8GB was acceptable for system RAM in gaming machines. If they dropped a 64GB+ prosumer card, I'd be so happy. Even if it was something like 32GB of super-fast memory and another 64-128 of slightly slower-but-unified memory, I'd be ecstatic. Being able to fine-tune a 175B LLM locally would be incredible.

Stopping SD or LLMs from their consumer cards would be dumb.

If 300M people in the US, let alone 7B in the world, need even a 4060 to run basic business workloads, NVidia is sitting pretty.

The reason is because they want to sell entre/medium business workloads cards at 1/2k€, and gamers cards at 4-700€. Right now, it's burning them on both side, and the only "fix" they found was to give just enough vram on their card to not be useless.

That's why you have an 8 GB 4060 Ti then a 16 GB one then the 4070 Ti with 12 GB ... It's a mess.

Why can't they just focus on improving manufacturing output and satisfy both markets by having enough supply?

Fabs cost a lot of money and take a lot of time to build.

Because then they are committing the mortal sin of capitalism: leaving money on the table.

They artificially segment the market because "pro" users are willing to pay almost 10k for a good card. So why not offer just that?

Because people who do AI are willing to pay several k€ per card, gamers are hitting a wall before 1k€. It's the same cards, only the vram change, and the vram is "cheap" to add, comparatively of the total price.

So now you have gamers who are pissed off at their 4060 Ti or 4070 Ti barely having enough vram for 1440p at modern quality of gaming, and AI enthousiast wondering why buy they "pro" card when a 4090 is not even 2k€.

essentially, they're trying to virtually segment a market that is not segmented, to take advantage of the much higher buying power in one of the segment.

AMD is still lagging on software though. I wish they would get their act together but their drivers are just not anywhere near as stable or compatible as Nvidia's. And then there's Intel, and it makes you appreciate the state of AMDs...

For pure gaming on windows I would disagree, as of the 7xxx cards. And I'm one who was on team ATI for a few generations before moving to nvidia because of terrible drivers.

Only reason I still have a nvidia card is the VR issues. Unless it’s been fixed recently they can’t compete in high end VR.

Extremely disappointing.

The 4090 wins in every benchmark for 1/3rd the price. Why would anybody buy this card? Is 8 GB more VRAM and lower power consumption really worth that much when the performance is so lackluster?

You know at first I was thinking the same thing, but after having 2x 3090's raise the temperature of my bedroom to 86 degrees in the middle of the night last week fine-tuning an LLM, I could see the draw of 64GB (for 2) with 400 watts total less heat than the 4090's in my work space.

Is nvlink still relevant to AI?

They claim PCIe4.0 makes it irrelevant, but that doesn't really make sense and it's most likely the case they want to charge a fortune for their high-memory options.

It is if you can pool the memory. It's easier than having to do the split of the models in software (though that's a somewhat solved problem) and from what I know allows higher GPU utilization on both cards when they don't have to wait for information to pass back and forth.

it is barely relevant to big players, but is extremely valuable for small players: distributing your workflow to multiple gpus manually is not that simple thing to do and there are a lot of much more interesting/important problem to solve than shoving your model to a gpu.

>much less cuda cores than in 4090

"fewer", not "less".

While that's true, it feels a bit pedantic to correct parent like that.

What would be the right way to correct him?

I think the right way is, don't. This kind of "mistake" can not really result in any misunderstanding so there is not really any benefit gained from a correction. Correcting serves only to disrupt the flow of the conversation.

It benefits me, the non native english speaker passing by in the comments and who learnt something today.

I'm a native English speaker. I don't personally like corrections like this, and I would never criticise anyone for using the 'wrong' term. There is too much convention in English which isn't useful because it bleeds into pedantry and I think this is such a case. Using either word gets the job done cleanly, and at the bottom that's all that counts.

The problem is you take this as a critic, which is not.

This feels so wrong to post in this thread, but I’m going to bite. It’s ‘critique’, I believe you mean.

I’m sorry.

Edit: as someone who can’t even figure out the markdown to italicise right now, maybe I should have kept my nose out!

See! I am learning even more because of this.

> you take this as a critic, which is not.

Interesting. What is it?

Well I was about to say correction but I think I got caught by a false cognate so it was indeed a critique but you weren't criticizing the previous post if my understanding of those words is correct.

OTOH, what I see is misuse of words like this ultimately ends with “well, lots of people use it like this, so now it’s correct.”

(See, for example, “literally,” or “comprise,” or “hopefully.”)

All the "incorrect" uses of those words are fine and are a part of the language. Outside of prescriptivism, that's just the use of the language, not misuse.

Even "literally"? While my original comment was just a Stannis joke, I really think you need to rethink how useless it is to have a word that means both "not figuratively" and "figuratively" (by common usage) at the same time. If it means both, we literally have no further use for it in the English language because it modifies nothing.

Why not have the word "no" mean "yes" and "no" while we're at it?

Cleave:

- to adhere firmly and closely or loyally and unwaveringly

- to divide by or as if by a cutting blow : split

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cleave

So cleave is it's own opposite. It causes no confusion because context is everything. q.v. homonyms.

Edit: "The word "cleave" has two opposite meanings - either to stick together or to split apart. Are there any other words that do the same thing?" https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-13...

    The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. 

    - James Nicoll

"Literally" has meant figuratively for centuries[0]. It's a language construct known as a contronym[1,2].

Yes, English is not strictly typed, and doesn't conform to a formal spec or mathematical proof. A word can have multiple definitions. A word can have contradictory definitions. The definition of a word can change over time without needing to submit to an approval process. A word can mean something different the next town over. Dialects and creoles and slang exist in wild, flagrant abandon and disregard for your rules. And all of it is valid.

Despite all of this, people manage to be able to comprehend one another, even when using literally to not literally mean literally.

Even the user who used "less" instead of "fewer" upthread that started this. Everyone understood exactly what they meant. The two words mean literally the same thing. But some people insist on maintaining a meaningless formality and insisting upon rules that don't matter, or rather insisting that even in casual conversations, their rules must take precedence over everyone else's.

[0]https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/the-300-year-history-of-using...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contronym

[2]https://www.quora.com/Etymology-When-did-the-word-literally-...

You're literally doing what you still think I was doing and are literally not realizing the hypocrisy. The "fewer" line was a Stannis Baratheon reference.

Yes it is correct. “Standard” English took one dialect and attempted it enforce it on hundreds of others. It’s authoritarian and not how language works

Yes but I think a soft resistance is still necessary in a society towards language errors otherwise the language becomes too fluid to be usable and understandable. Where to draw the line between information and rudeness is the difficult part.

You don't need to jail or slap someone in the face for using less instead of fewer but you don't want gynecologist to mean oncologist and cancer to mean gonorrhea from one week to another otherwise nobody knows what we are talking about.

Agreed, but is less vs fewer worth anything, really?

You can always shrug it off, possibly what most readers have done.

An odd thing, for a native English speaker to be given advice on the language by someone who is learning it, no?

In English there is both essential plumbing and pointless ornament, and I wish for that distinction to be recognised because confusing the two is damaging.

I am not the one who corrected the comment. I am only someone who said that this correction had a value and I am not telling you how you have to speak english.

My point was thatin my opinion I did not believe the correction had value. I was categorising it as a pointless ornament rather than something actually useful. But I emphasise, that's just my view.

What exactly did you learn? That some people try to enforce made up rules on native speakers and then feel superior for it?

This is a tech forum for discussing technology. This isn't the place for that, and honestly I'd prefer not to have to sift through a bunch of pedantic grammar nitpicking on here.

There are a lot of ways to correct people. While I agree it's clearly not adding a lot to the conversation, the forum is async so it's not really disrupting much, as the comment goes down the comment list.

I'm a non native speaker and surely make a lot of mistakes, and I would be OK with such a correction

It's extremely pedantic and condescending, which are the only emotions I can feel any more and that's why I posted it.

Both are used so both are correct, unless you're a prescriptivist, in which case a saying about stones and glass houses comes to mind.

Prescriptivist? Nah. Mandarin blow rid nails for happy deranged elf nestle corruptive hand wither. If it seems I stopped making sense, it's because I was briefly testing where your binary labels lead. Apparently, there are things between descriptivist and prescriptivist and both of us fall within those categories.

You're making my point for me, as your gibberish is not in use so is unintelligible.

The person you replied to used perfectly common and comprehensible English, so much so that you knew exactly how to "correct" them.

So the comment was grand and your prescriptivist response adds nothing of value. Hopefully you can see why this is true and reflect on why you felt the need to "correct" it.

>So the comment was grand and your prescriptivist response

There we go. The "response" was prescriptivist. The person posting it (me) and yourself are both somewhere in between the two. Now I think you're starting to get it.

Regardless, the original response was a just a joke referring to Stannis Baratheon (from Game of Thrones) saying it. I think some people read it that way. You didn't.

A bunch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com