Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

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Everything is comparative. AMD isn't perfect. As an Ex Shareholder I have argued they did well partly because of Intel's downfall. In terms of execution it is far from perfect.

But Nvidia is a different beast. It is a bit like Apple in the late 00s where you take business, forecast, marketing, operation, software, hardware, sales etc You take any part of it and they are all industry leading. And having industry leading capability is only part of the game, having it all work together is completely another thing. And unlike Apple where they lost direction once Steve Jobs passed away and weren't sure about how to deploy capital. Jensen is still here, and they have more resources now making Nvidia even more competitive.

It is often most people underestimate the magnitude of the task required, ( I like to tell the story again about an Intel GPU engineer in 2016 arguing they could take dGPU market shares by 2020, and we are now 2025 ), over estimate the capability of an organisation, under estimate the rival's speed of innovation and execution. These three thing combined is why most people are often off the estimate by an order of magnitude.

Yeah, no.

We are in the middle of a monopoly squeeze by NVidia on the most innovative part of the economy right now. I expect the DOJ to hit them harder than they did MS in the 90s given the bullshit they are pulling and the drag on the economy they are causing.

By comparison if AMD could write a driver that didn't shit itself when it had to multiply more than two matrices in a row they'd be selling cards faster than they can make them. You don't need to sell the best shovels in a gold rush to make mountains of money, but you can't sell teaspoons as premium shovels and expect people to come back.

>I expect the DOJ to hit them harder than they did MS in the 90s given the bullshit they are pulling and the drag on the economy they are causing.

It sounds like you're expecting extreme competence from the DOJ. Given their history with regulating big tech companies, and even worse, the incoming administration, I think this is a very unrealistic expectation.

What effect did the DOJ have on MS in the 90s? Didn't all of that get rolled back before they had to pay a dime, and all it amounted to was that browser choice screen that was around for a while? Hardly a crippling blow. If anything that showed the weakness of regulators in fights against big tech, just outlast them and you're fine.

>We are in the middle of a monopoly squeeze by NVidia on the most innovative part of the economy right now.

I am not sure which part of Nvidia is monopoly. That is like suggesting TSMC has a monopoly.

> That is like suggesting TSMC has a monopoly.

They... do have a monopoly on foundry capacity, especially if you're looking at the most advanced nodes? Nobody's going to Intel or Samsung to build 3nm processors. Hell, there have been whispers over the past month that even Samsung might start outsourcing Exynos to TSMC; Intel already did that with Lunar Lake.

Having a monopoly doesn't mean that you are engaging in anticompetitive behavior, just that you are the only real option in town.

This gets at the classic problem in defining a monopoly: how hou define the market. Every company is a monopoly if you define the market narrowly enough. Ford has a monopoly on F150’s.

I would argue that defining a semiconductor market in terms of node size is too narrow. Just because TSMC is getting the newest nodes first does not mean they have a monopoly in the semiconductor market. We can play semantics, but for any meaningful discussion of monopolistic behaviors, a temporary technical advantage seems a poor way to define the term.

> Just because TSMC is getting the newest nodes first does not mean they have a monopoly in the semiconductor market.

Sure. Market research also places them as having somewhere around 65% of worldwide foundry sales [0], with Samsung coming in second place with about 12% (mostly first-party production). Fact is that nobody else comes close to providing real competition for TSMC, so they can charge whatever prices they want, whether you're talking about the 3nm node or the 10nm node.

[0] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/global-semicon...

Rounding out the top five... SMIC (6%) is out of the question unless you're based in China due to various sanctions, UMC (5%) mainly sell decade+-old processes (22nm and larger), and Global Foundries explicitly has abandoned keeping up with the latest technologies.

If you exclude the various Chinese foundries and subtract off Samsung's first-party development, TSMC's share of available foundry capacity for third-party contracts likely grows to 70% or more. At what point do you consider this to be a monopoly? Microsoft Windows has about 72% of desktop OS share.

Will they? Given the structure of global controls on GPUs, Nvidia is a de-facto self funding US government company.

Maybe the US will do something if GPU price becomes the limit instead of the supply of chips and power.

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