Hacker News Reader

Comment by herecomethefuzz | Hacker News Reader

"Platform company" means multi-chip in this case?

Seems logical since it's becoming impractical to cram so many transistors on a single die.

I don't really understand the bird's-eye view of the product line, but judging by some of the raw physical numbers and configurations Jensen was bragging about, it means that they want to basically play the mainframe game of locking high-end applications into proprietary middleware running on proprietary chassis with proprietary cluster interconnect (hello, Mellanox acquisiton).

The lock-in is more of a bonus for them. The underlying problem is that it's impossible to build a chip big enough, or even a collection of chiplets big enough. Training LLMs requires more silicon than can fit on one PCB, so they need an interconnect that is as fast as possible. With interconnect bandwidth as a critical bottleneck, they're not going to wait around for the industry to standardize on a suitable interconnect when they can build what they need to be ready to ship alongside the chips they need to connect.

Cerebras: -Hold my beer

In this case the interconnects are also doing compute.

It means all the main chips required for a large-scale datacenter. And many of the layers of software on top of it.

Hardware: * The GPU * The GPU-GPU Fabric (NVLINK) * The CPU * The NIC * The Network Fabric (infiniband) * The Switch

And that's not even starting to get into the many layers of the software stack (CUDA, Riva, Megatron, Omniverse) that they're contributing and working to get folks to build on.

no it means rent seeking.

imagine aws if they also sold all computers in the world, now you can only rent from them

So like IBM at the beginning of computers

"For only 100$ a month, you'll be able to turn on the gpu you already paid for"

--Nvidia, pretty soon

This is sort of already a reality. Their vGPU functionality (partitioning a single physical GPU into multiple virtual GPUs) is already separately licensed - https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/buy-grid/

And that's once you've bought an expensive Tesla/Quadro GPU too.

good. that only impact disgusting cloud providers who are hoarding all hardware everywhere.

no sympathy for them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com