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Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

I liked this part:

    "one small step at a time, and one giant leap, together."

I didn't like this part:

    5090 for $2000, about $500 more than 4090 when it was announced.

They didn't mention VRAM amount though, and I doubt it's more than 24GB. If Apple M4 Ultra gets close to 1.8 TB/s bandwidth of 5090, it'll crush GeForce once and for all (and for good).

Also nitpick: the opening video said tokens are responsible for all AI, but that only applies to a subset of AI models...

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Market price for a 4090 is ~$2700 today: https://stockx.com/nvidia-founders-geforce-rtx-4090-24gb-gra...

When you have a retail price so far below "street" price, it just makes it harder to obtain and scalpers take a bigger cut. Raising the price to something more normal at least gives you more of a chance at the big-box store.

Or scalpers won’t be dissuaded and street price for a 5090 will be $3200 or more. $1500 was already an insane price tag for scalpers to pay but they did it anyways.

The scalpers are trying to arbitrage the difference in price between the prices bought directly from suppliers and those on the open secondary market. increasing the retail price doesn't increase the price on the secondary market, it just lowers the margin of scalpers.

Great, so nothing changes.

very naiive question... But why have a retail price at all and not just auction off batches to retailers (say 10 000 card at a time)

Let the market set the price and only control how many cards you auction and when

Being able to decide a price and who you sell your product to is a huge leverage. Nvidia can go to a retailer selling something they don't like to be side by side on a shelf, hey ditch this and we will make you a price. It is never that overt of course and it can play geopolitically too, hey government you want chips? We have chips and it would be a shame if the market grabs them before you, BTW don't forget my tax cut.

Well for one thing it’s a lot easier to communicate expectations to consumers at CES.

“Coming soon to auction at a price set by users, no idea what that will be though, good luck!” is much less compelling for consumers trying to plan their purchases in advance.

It's 32GB, that was leaked well before the event.

> If Apple M4 Ultra gets close to 1.8 TB/s bandwidth of 5090

If past trends hold (Ultra = 2x Max) it'll be around 1.1 TB/s, so closer to the 4090.

Jensen didn't talk about it. Maybe he knows it's embarrassingly low. Everyone knows nvidia won't give us more VRAM to avoid cannibalizing their enterprise products.

The official specs for the 5090 have been out for days on nvidia.com, and they explicitly state it's 32GB of GDDR7 with a 512-bit bus, for a total of 1.8TB/s of bandwidth.

32GB is still not a lot.

"640k should be enough for anybody"

This feels like a weird complaint, given you started by saying it was 24GB, and then argued that the person who told you it was actually 32GB was making that up.

Looks like Nvidia did a simple calculation:

    32GB (for 5090) / 24GB (for 4090) ≃ 1.33

Then multiply 4090's price by that:

    $1500 × 1.33 ≃ $2000

All else equal, this means that price per GB of VRAM stayed the same. But in reality, other things improved too (like the bandwidth) which I appreciate.

I just think that for home AI use, 32GB isn't that helpful. In my experience and especially for agents, models at 32B parameters just start to be useful. Below that, they're useful only for simple tasks.

Yes, home / hobbyist LLM users are not overly excited about this, but

a) they are never going to be happy,

b) it's actually a significant step up given the bulk are dual-card users anyway, so this bumps them from (at the high end of the consumer segment) 48GB to 64GB of VRAM, which _is_ pretty significant given the prevalence of larger models / quants in that space, and

c) vendors really don't care terribly much about the home / hobbyist LLM market, no matter how much people in that market wish otherwise.

It’s more enough for gaming.

Buy their datacenter GPU if you need more VRAM.

It makes for a hard choice. M4 Ultra with say 128GB of RAM vs ... 2 x 5090 with 64GB of RAM for about the same price?

More tokens/sec on the dual 5090, but way bigger model on the M4.

Plus the dual 5090 might trip your breakers.

If anyone in this thread had watched the linked video or even read a summary, they ought to be at least talking about the DIGITS announcement.

128GB of VRAM for $3000.

Slow? Yes. It isn't meant to compete with the datacenter chips, it's just a way to stop the embarrassment of being beaten at HPC workstations by apple, but it does the job.

For what 5090 is offering with 32GB RAM I thought it is a pretty decent price comparatively to 4090. I thought the whole lineup is really well priced.

Good for image generation, inadequate for local llms (on its own).

edit: 32GB is confirmed here https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/50-serie...

Supposedly, this image of a Inno3D 5090 box leaked, revealing 32GB of VRAM. It seems like the 5090 will be more of a true halo product, given the pricing of the other cards.

https://www.techpowerup.com/330538/first-nvidia-geforce-rtx-...

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