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Comment by gregorygoc | Hacker News Reader

It’s mind boggling why this resource has not been provided by NVIDIA yet. It reached the point that 3rd parties reverse engineer and summarize NV hardware to a point it becomes an actually useful mental model.

What are the actual incentives at NVIDIA? If it’s all about marketing they’re doing great, but I have some doubts about engineering culture.

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As a real time rendering engineer, this is how it’s always been. NV obfuscates much of the info to prevent competitors from understanding changes between generations. Other vendors aren’t great at this either.

In games, you can get NDA disclosures about architectural details that are closer to those docs. But I’ve never really seen any vendor (besides Intel) disclose this stuff publicly

With mediocre documentation, NVIDIAs closed-source libraries, such as cuBLAS and cuDNN, will remain the fastest way to perform certain tasks, thereby strengthening vendor lock-in. And of course it makes it more difficult for other companies to reverse engineer.

Plenty of circumstantial evidence pointing to the fact NVIDIA prefers to hand out semi-tailored documentaion resources to signatories and other "VIPs", if not the least to exert control over who and how uses their products. I wouldn't put it past them to routinely neglect their _public_ documentation, for one reason or another that makes commercial sense to them but not the public. As for incentives, go figure indeed -- you'd think by walling off API documentation, they're shooting themselves in the feet every day, but in these days of betting it all on AI, which means selling GPUs, software and those same NDA-signed VIP-documentation articles to "partners", maybe they're all set anyway and care even less for the odd developer who wants to know how their flagship GPU works.

Nvidia has ridiculously good documentation for all of this compared to its competitors.

What makes you think that? It appears most of this material came straight out of NVIDIA documentation. What do you think is missing? I just checked and found the H100 diagram for example is copied (without being correctly attributed) from the H100 whitepaper: https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-hopper-architecture/nvidi...

Much of the info on compute and bandwidth is from that and other architecture whitepapers, as well as the CUDA C++ programming guide, which covers a lot of what this article shares, in particular chapters 5, 6, and 7. https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-c-programming-guide/

There’s plenty of value in third parties distilling and having short form versions, and of writing their own takes on this, but this article wouldn’t have been possible without NVIDIA’s docs, so the speculation, FUD and shade is perhaps unjustified.

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