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Comment by mjevans | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice if...

Maybe some regulatory body could declare this an obvious 'monopoly' and at least force the 'language spoken' to be free for anyone to implement without patent worries?

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Monopolies are not illegal per se.

Misusing monopoly power is illegal.

Nvidia has monopoly in the market, but unless they use their position illeagally, that's OK. GPU market is competitive and Nvidia has put in the work others like AMD or Intel never bothered to do.

This is it. Having a monopoly is OK. Being anticompetitive is when you run into trouble, even potentially without a monopoly.

Likely part of the move to merge their drivers into the linux kernel etc.

Putting drivers in the Linux kernel isn't anticompetitive. Saying they're the only drivers allowed in the Linux kernel would be anticompetitive.

Putting them in an opensource os also helps demonstrate that they aren’t trying to be anti competitive.

While this has mostly held, there’s a big push to redefine anti-trust. That’s what the MSFT-Activision case was actually about beneath the surface narrative. The challenger jurisprudence lost, but it got pretty close and has lots of political support.

(see: Lina Khan’s management of the FTC, or “New Brandeis movement”)

The push is not to make monopoly (defined as market share) illeagal.

Lina Khan and others are fighting good fight against misuse of monopoly powers, two sided markets, anticompetitive effects of platform-based business models and so on.

GPU market is not natural monopoly, nor is the market structured as monopoly. Nvidia just has a competitive advantage.

Legal? Sure.

OK? I sincerely disagree.

What about Alcoa?

OpenCL is only about a year younger than Cuda. Nobody stopped AMD from investing into it. But where Nvidia spent the last 16 years continuously investing into providing the best performance and development experience, AMD rarely invested into either. Instead they focused on video games, with some projects that helped them profit from the crypto hype but lacked the necessary commitment to achieve much of anything beyond that.

I think this is the right answer, NVidia struck a gold mine with CUDA. It's powerful enough not only for games, graphics and creatives; but could somehow also be easily retrofitted to work in other scenarios such as data center and AI / ML (language and image processing). AMD and Intel's software solutions seem to be pretty lacking and it looks harder to get a full end-to-end AI/ML stack working efficiently on those.

They offered what people where looking for, way to program their GPU that wasn't C.

C++, Fortran, anything else with a compiler toolchain against PTX, graphical debugging and IDE integration, and a library ecosystem.

Khronos was sceptical that Fortran was even meaningful, and SPIR only came up after NVIDIA was approaching the finish line.

Intel and AMD only have themselves to blame.

16 years ago AMD was on the verge of bankruptcy and was already smaller than Nvidia despite being a company that makes GPUs and CPUs and, at the time, had their own fabs. They had no money to invest in anything, and that didn't really change until Ryzen. You may be able to identify its release date from this graph:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMD/amd/market-cap

Now they have to take the money and use it to fix their software. It's pretty obvious why they didn't do that in 2008.

It runs a bit deeper than than money though. If a company doesn't have software as part of their culture, no amount of money is going to turn that around until they make a conscious decision to do so.

AI has been the first technology to really kick them in the pants to get off their asses and really invest in that aspect. There are a ton of job openings around AI software now within AMD. I'm seeing new ones get posted almost daily on LI. It'll take time, but they will fix it.

Dominating a market is not enough for a monopoly declaration. you’d need to prove some sort of anti competitive practice or similar abuse of said dominance

It would be nice if AMD got their act together a couple of years ago and wrote good software and drivers, you mean?

This lead won't last forever. Everyone in the industry has a vested interest in this collapsing, and there are ongoing assaults from all angles.

George Hotz' new company is working to undo this, and there are lots of others. All potential AMD acquisition targets, too.

There are lots of little OpenCL-like projects, and consensus is starting to form.

Then there's the growing TPU market...

Give it two years.

> George Hotz' new company is working to undo this

Is that before or after George Hotz solves homelessness and drug addiction and saves democracy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39206959)

Geohotz is baby Musk. He'll eventually find an area where he can put his brain to ideal use and change the world a bit. He's obviously sharp, but hasn't found the niche that works for him. Musk is obviously a transportation guy. Maybe Hotz will end up in Infra?

Reading about his 8-ish hour stint at post-Musk-acquisition Twitter was really funny.

Yeah, it was pretty clear that wasn't gonna work.

It will take a minimum of 5-10 years to see a meaningful change, if it's not already too late.

Absolutely nothing will change about the context in two years, other than Nvidia will be far stronger at that point with $50+ billion per year in operating income (formally joining the hyper profitable US tech giants).

It's going to be extraordinarily expensive to build in the GPU data center space at scale. Nvidia will have the money to do it and most of their smaller competitors will not (that includes AMD, which doesn't generate anywhere near enough cash to outlay billions of dollars in a single high risk capital investment pointed at the GPU data center space; AMD's operating income over the last four quarters is negative, and they have a mere $3b in cash). Nvidia will use their new cash spigot to build infrastructure moats in the space. Large governments, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Google, TSMC are the only entities capable of keeping up on spending.

> It will take a minimum of 5-10 years to see a meaningful change, if it's not already too late.

It isn't too late and I'm betting it will be closer to 5 than 10.

> It's going to be extraordinarily expensive to build in the GPU data center space at scale.

It already is expensive. But it isn't just NVIDIA doing it. CoreWeave is the largest and certainly backed by NVIDIA, but they are a separate business. AMD doesn't have to do it on their own either.

There is a lot of space for competing on price though. AMD or even Intel could release a datacenter GPU that's 3x slower than the H100 while using 2x more power and still sell it with a very decent margin. Of course that will likely mean that Nvidia will just cut prices to stay competitive and maintain 90%+ market share but their obscene margins will have to come down.

Investments have diminishing returns. Once you've spent a threshold amount of money, more is just incremental gains, until you're not even getting more out of it than you could by sticking the money in the S&P 500.

It's also weird that you're looking at operating income, which already has R&D expenses subtracted out of it. A company spending more of its revenue on R&D will have a lower operating income, but that hardly implies they can't spend on R&D -- because they are.

And customers hate moats. In many cases they get stuck with them, but most often this is individual consumers with no resources to do anything about it. Data center customers are large institutions, often with their own R&D budgets. Three of the companies that each have a larger market cap than Nvidia are Amazon, Google and Microsoft, the three largest cloud providers. Is any of them interested in letting Nvidia have a moat?

Nah, that might offshore the dominancy.

So they'd give up the US market? That doesn't seem likely to happen.

Or it would be nice if the regulatory body would fuck off

We need more anti monopoly action, not less.

We need more anti-anticompetitive action. Why should NVidia and those who use their products be punished because their competitors have not stepped up to the plate?

No one is being punished here. Where did anyone talk about prison or criminal charges?

Company profits are not the top priority, if it stuffers so that actually important values are preserved, there's no problem with that at all.

Exactly what Xirgil said, Nvidia shouldn't be punished for being good at their job

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