These nascent inference chip efforts are reminding me of the early 3dfx / riva / mach / powervr days. Will be interesting to see if inference chips are here to stay and, if so, who the eventual dominant player(s) will be
I remember one soundblaster card I bought came with a Lara Croft demo, that exploited the incredible immersion of real time dynamic reverb.
Genuinely I think game audio took a few steps back from that heady era, the innovation in audio likely didn't sell as many cards as graphics innovations did.
First we had to have the audio processor. Good EAX was available on top of the line cards, and they were not always cheap. Lower end chips got less features.
Then we had to have the speaker setup to have the greatest sound, or needed to get a real 5.1 headphones, which were bulky and never provided the same fidelity.
Then Microsoft changed the Windows driver model, cutting the driver's direct access to the card. All of the timing sensitive effects were gone in an instant. I remember installing the new drivers and getting literally nothing. Sound Blaster was the only card with an hardware mixer, and Microsoft didn't feel like enabling them. Mixing at the DirectX layer killed the cards.
Soundblaster's very closed stance didn't help them either. None of the cards after Audigy2 worked with Linux when I had my desktop system.
After my Audigy2ZS, I moved to Asus Xonar D2X. Its positional audio capabilities were nice, but I mostly bought it for its Linux support and sound quality, and that was top notch in that regards.
Then sound cards became commodity. Everybody stopped making good cards. Musicians moved to audio interfaces, audiophiles moved to DACs.
Just looked to the SoundBlaster website. Internal cards are very limited. One DAC, one DTS enabled 7.1 sound card for PC cinema systems, three game oriented lower end cards, nothing else.
In early 2000s for example, friend with something like a Sound Blaster Live, but couldn't use it anymore as they lost the drivers, their website only had downloads for driver updates, requiring you to still have a driver CD, so no more CD meant no way to get the drivers.
They had not done very much meaningful stuff since the release of EAX and used patents to prevent anyone else from competing with them. Onboard sound cards were by and large indistinguishable from a quality perspective as Creative Labs ones, but cheaper which Creative Labs combated mostly with lawyers as opposed to upping their game.
Some guy after being frustrated with a long-standing bug in drivers for their Creative Labs sound card, dug into the binaries and made a fix for it. During which they also discovered that you could simply flip a switch in the driver to unlock features only meant to be available on more expensive hardware. Creative Labs of course went straight to lawyers to shut them down.
My brother bought the Creative Labs WoW headset which would have its mic get progressively softer until he would leave and re-join the call/voice chat room. They never released a driver update to fix this.
By the time that Microsoft announced no more "hardware acceleration" for sound cards, I had zero sympathy for Creative Labs, I was already convinced that they made pretty shoddy hardware/software and were mostly riding on their reputation from the 90s and some patents they managed to get.
Windows Vista moved away from kernel mode drivers where possible to help address the issue of BSODs which were not uncommon on Windows XP. It turns out that Microsoft was incorrectly getting the blame for BSODs when it was actually the fault of buggy video and sound card drivers.
While Vista was regarded as a "bad" Windows, it laid most of the foundations which allowed Windows 7 to be regarded as "really good" (by Windows standards).
From a hardware perspective, by the time Windows 7 arrived pretty much all drivers had been updated for Vista and had their kinks worked out (mostly, I would still have my NVidia drivers crash on occasion, but because they were user mode now, instead of a BSOD the screen would go black for a few seconds after which my desktop would come back with a Windows pop-up saying something to the effect of "the video drivers crashed and had to be restarted", the real perpetrator now being blamed!). Windows 7 also did optimizations to make things less resource intensive and it also helped that PCs had more RAM compared to when Vista came out.
On the UAC front Windows 7 was also much better, they calibrated the UAC prompts to come up less often, but what also happened is a lot of the 3rd party software which was needlessly requiring admin rights for no good reason (except that it was badly written), had finally been fixed by the time Windows 7 was released.
It wasn't really the cool reverb effects or wave tables, though those were a nice bonus. It was just "I can tell my computer to make sound and it actually makes sound without days of troubleshooting."
Granted, similar things could be said about 3dfx. It's was a 3D card with drivers that actually worked.
And then there's the obvious "sound blasters and voodoos go in my computer, jalapeno goes in someone else's computer" thing.
In fairness on board (depending on the board but on the whole) is pretty good.
Apple is in the software first, the hardware second. Everyone at Apple has been trained to understand this for decades, and Jobs pointed it out endlessly. Apple's real moat is software (services, iOS, experience, MacOS).
Windows, Office, Azure, et al. Microsoft accumulated approximately one zillion dollars in profit on the back of software. It's a vastly superior business to anything hardware has traditionally seen. Nvidia is the first true juggernaut hardware profit machine, and the AI boom in extended hardware (RAM, storage) will prove temporary (even if there is a feast during that time). Microsoft's advantage and moat was Windows-Office for decades. It was a far better business than Intel's chip biz.
Google is a software company first. Every aspect of what made them and maintains them is software first, hardware second. They're a $400 billion software company. Their ad machine is software. Search is software.
Facebook is software. Instagram is software. WhatsApp is software. A $200 billion software company. They're not selling hardware, they're selling ads via software, they're monetizing users that use their software.
AWS is at least half software as an entity in terms of complexity, competitive advantage, et al. That's a two trillion dollar business.
LLMs can run successfully with various hardware approaches. The software is the value at the end of this, regardless of the hardware under it. The sole exception so far that may be sustainable is Nvidia, and we'll see if the bottom falls out from under that margin monster (China, specialized AI chips, whatever it happens to be that cuts under them massively).
Hardware always gets its margin squeezed eventually because it's a manufactured good (with inventory, fabs, etc). Software is hyper margin by default, you have to layer a lot of garbage on top of it to kill the margin. Nvidia is 33 years old, they have had a rich business for three years, that's it.
The AI boom is the sole reason anything in hardware has looked great in the past 20 years. Check the margins & op income for the top 20 hardware companies, from TI to AMD to Intel to Nvidia to Micron to Sandisk to Samsung to TSMC to ASML, prior to the AI boom of the past couple years. It won't last indefinitely. And after the return to a more normal environment happens, the hyper margins in software will persist.
This couldn't have been easy. The team at OpenAI has worked a miracle.
For example, Meta and Microsoft’s AI ASIC programs not getting off the ground despite being at it for much longer shows that cost is only one part of the equation.To me, the efficiency gains of inference chips are so significant that they are certainly here to stay — barring a revolution of sorts that leads to a world devoid of AI as we know it.