Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/06/meta-and-microsoft-to-buy-am...

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-scores-two-big-wins-or...

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

the trajectory looks good if they can just resist giving up early without seeing instant success

Intel may end up back on top.

https://www.asml.com/en/news/press-releases/2022/intel-and-a...

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/intel-receives-it...

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/manufacturing/tsm...

The bait and switch.

The likely height of big-cap tech regulation was the regulated monopoly of ATT/Bell Labs/Western Digital all through the 20th century.

I prefer the outcomes in that era to the present status quo.

You can agree or disagree, and disagreeing is simple: “I prefer these outcomes because…”. I welcome such disagreement. And FWIW I’m not one of the many people who downvoted you: but they were justified in doing so because you moved a comparison of policies and their outcomes into a more abstract space of 1-bit generalizations, e.g. “talking points” vs “law/precedent”. I gave examples, it’s public record and trivially Googleable.

You didn’t fail to understand my point, you didn’t like it and took a cheap shot.

Price discrimination is generally prohibited in naked form: it often if not usually induces market failures. So companies spare no expense working around it (there's a reason why ITA software people made a mint approximating NP-hard problems acceptably well and rather cheaply to compute airplane ticket prices).

"Market segmentation generally benefits consumers" is exactly the kind of Wien's Law first-order approximation that sounds compelling but doesn't fit the data.

It does not benefit consumers that a 4090 has the same amount of GDDR6 in it as a 3090, which is incidentally 2.6Gb shy of `dolphin-8x7b-v1-q4_k_m` (or whatever the NVIDIA equivalent is, I use Apple gear now because inference is the game now), while the price of that RAM dropped. The fact that an H100 or whatever the next Hopper iteration is costs more than an M-series BMW on paper says nothing about what Meta paid for 150k of them or whatever it was, and it certainly doesn't help someone who'd like a decent chat bot without sending their data to eyeball-scanner database guy. When you see a leading edge x090 for MSRP or less at Best Buy, it's a good idea to stock up if you're in the market over the last 5 years (London has been running ETH2 for what, a year and change now?). That hardly seems a subsidy to the consumer paid for by those spendthrifts in FAANG.

NVIDIA pioneered serious "GPGPU" engineering. 5-10 years ago their microarch and fab-sourcing and software and the whole show were legitimately differentiated, no one had done it. And they made a pile, and that pile seems "conflict-free". But anyone can make a fused multiply-add unit these days, EE undergraduates do it in Verilog. Intel makes PCI express cards that cost $300 and have higher memory bandwidth in the <hand-wave>decoder-only language attention model</hand-wave> use case. And their drivers are documented and work on everything.

Now did Lisa Su decide to "concentrate on the supercomputing market with the MI300XYZ" and Jensen decided to "concentrate on AI with Hopper" independently to a degree where the market is perfectly partitioned? Who knows, I certainly don't have proof one way or the other. But if someone made a call being like "I'm thinking of focusing on X but don't really see our differentiation in Y. How's Cathy?", it wouldn't be the fucking first time.

But even that isn't critical to the point: this, the here and now, isn't good for consumers, or society, or our industry, and unlike e.g. Stallman's melodrama, it fucking matters this time.

However, the real killer feature now is CUDA. Everyone's coding for CUDA, which AMD's hardware doesn't support, so even if they have a GPU that's on par with Nvidia, most libraries still can't make full use of it.

The recent news was about AMD giving up on that path.

> Shortly thereafter I got in contact with AMD and in early 2022 I have left Intel and signed a ZLUDA development contract with AMD. Once again I was asked for a far-reaching discretion: not to advertise the fact that AMD is evaluating ZLUDA and definitely not to make any commits to the public ZLUDA repo. After two years of development and some deliberation, AMD decided that there is no business case for running CUDA applications on AMD GPUs. > > One of the terms of my contract with AMD was that if AMD did not find it fit for further development, I could release it. Which brings us to today.

It's worth noting that while ZLUDA is a very cool project, it's probably not so relevant for ML. Also from the README:

> PyTorch received very little testing. ZLUDA's coverage of cuDNN APIs is very minimal (just enough to run ResNet-50) and realistically you won't get much running. > However if you are interested in trying it out you need to build it from sources with the settings below. Default PyTorch does not ship PTX and uses bundled NCCL which also builds without PTX:

PyTorch has OOTB ROCm support btw and while there are some CUDA-only libraries I'd like (FA2 for RDNA, bitsandbytes, ctranslate2, FlashInfer among others), I think sponsoring direct porting/upstreaming compatibility of the libraries probably makes more sense. Also from the ZLUDA README:

> ZLUDA offers limited support for performance libraries (cuDNN, cuBLAS, cuSPARSE, cuFFT, OptiX, NCCL).

That's the point. They're not trying to do gamers a favor, if it was that they'd just make more cards. What they're trying to do is market segmentation, which customers despise and resent.

But those are mostly AMD, and doesn't really have anything to do with what features someone puts on their discrete gaming cards, except insofar as it implies gamers don't need the cards some amateur ML hobbyist might buy.

> In a shrinking market, the midrange and low-end products will cease to be profitable.

That's assuming the products have high independent development costs, but that isn't really the case. The low end products are essentially the high end products with fewer cores which use correspondingly less silicon -- which have higher yields because you don't need such a large area of perfect silicon or can sell a defective die as a slower part by disabling the defective section, making them profitable with a smaller margin per unit die area.

> Furthermore, node advancements have stopped scaling $/transistor. So the transistors aren't getting cheaper, just smaller.

Which implies that they can profitably continue producing almost-as-good GPUs on the older process node.

> Lastly, Nvidia wants to allocate every last wafer they pre-purchased from TSMC to their server GPUs.

Which is why the proposal is for them to make as many GPUs as the gamers could want at Samsung.

There are still plenty of things being produced in fabs with older technology than that. Global Foundaries is the third largest in the world and they're offering 12nm or worse. People buy it because not everything needs a node which less than six months old and the price is right.

This could, theoretically, change at any moment, and Canon is trying something with their new generation of nano-print tech.

>Early in his career, Schmidt held a series of technical positions with IT companies including Byzromotti Design, Bell Labs (in research and development),[19] Zilog, and Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

During his summers at Bell Labs, he and Mike Lesk wrote Lex,[23][7] a program used in compiler construction that generates lexical-analyzers from regular-expression descriptions.

Sun Microsystems In 1983, Schmidt joined Sun Microsystems as its first software manager.[19]

I am curious about your PaaS because we were analyzing that business for fun first. A small thread here in HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39329764

Later on they acquired PGI, which thanks to PTX, had C, C++ and Fortran compilers, thus adding Fortran into the mix.

Followed along by all the IDE, graphical debuggers tooling and library ecosystem.

Meanwhile Intel and AMD were doing who knows what at Khronos stuck in their "C is good enough" mentality, and barely released useful developer experiences.

https://www.xda-developers.com/intel-roadmap-2025-explainer/

In 3-5 years what will a 10% performance difference matter to you? Then calculate how much that 10% performance difference is going to cost in real dollars to run on nvidia hw and then the fun math should start.

Which could lead to Intel realizing the opportunity they have. Create decent libraries that work across every vendor's GPUs. In the short term this helps AMD at the expense of Nvidia, which in itself helps Intel by preventing Nvidia from maintaining a moat. In the medium term Intel then has people using Intel's libraries to write code that will work on their future GPUs and then their problem is limited to producing competitive hardware.

Yes. Especially once you take the Chinese electric car companies into account, that are already outselling Tesla.

Also, Apple has a longstanding dislike for Nvidia and even if they weren't going to design their own chips at launch, they could be using AMD.

This book lauded Xerox's success at reforming its corporate culture, regaining a strong position in the photocopier market and even spent a chapter detailing their success in getting into electronic typewriters!

With the benefit of hindsight the company didn't survive its core product losing all relevance any better than Kodak did, but that was still some way in the future (if foreseeable by the 1980s).

That said, much of the material about a hugely bloated organisation, with a sclerotic bureaucracy and lots of cushy middle managers assembled through a previous period of explosive growth, turning out poor-quality product, sounds very reminiscent of some of what we now hear about the current big tech companies.

The title reflects another American obsession at the time - the idea that the US was "losing" to Japan.

Where's the research showing the empirical relationship between P/E ratios and the risk free rate?

Also, we are living in a a time of unprecedented monetary aggregate growth (for the US at least). I posit his why the yield curve has been inverted for so long and yet there is no recession in sight. The predictive power of asset prices seemingly no longer exists.

If you go through my posting history you'll see I've more than once mentioned that velocity is much more important than simple quantity.

A good analogy from Cullen Roche that I often use:

> But also – why do so many people insist that inflation is an increase in the money supply? This makes zero sense. Here’s why – our economy is mostly a credit based economy. So, if I take out a loan for $100,000 then the money supply has technically increased by $100,000. But what if I don’t actually tap that loan? What if I borrow the money because, for instance, house prices just went up 25% and I want to have some cash around for emergencies? This doesn’t tell us anything about prices, living standards or really anything. But this is what so much of the money supply represents – money that has been issued and is just sitting around unused. Why is this useful? It’s like calculating your weight changes by counting how much food you have in your refrigerator. No. That’s potential calories consumed and potential weight gain. The amount of food in your fridge tells you little about your future weight changes just like the amount of money in the economy tells us little about the actual price changes in the economy.

* https://www.pragcap.com/three-things-i-think-i-think-i-see-d...

I recently exited positions in US Steel and Encore Wire which were selling for single-digit PE ratios and with >$1 equity per $1 market cap at the time. My plan was to hold them forever, but the price just shot up so much and there are other things to buy.

I like really boring businesses like banks, utilities, airlines that can trudge along for decades if they have to before I get my return. When you catch them in a bad news cycle, you can pick up a solid business for less than it's worth.