What is Nvidia's gold mine? They don't make their own chips, right? Doesn't that mean that other companies can quickly catch up, if they are even behind?
They built cuda and embedded it as a foundational technology through university partnerships and generally paying attention to developers. Wrote documentation, talked about their tech a lot, generally made the onboarding broadly work.
They then had the good fortune that their competitors tried to leverage open source and cross company collaboration. While misc open source winning is sometimes thing, the industry built all their stuff on cuda instead of opencl or openmp.
Nvidia thus built their gold mine.
I don't think it's impenetrable. There are some design mistakes baked into their system that are going to be difficult to unravel without breaking backwards compatibility.
Look at the history of 3dfx . They were up there with envidia at the dawn of 3D graphic cards wars. But bad logistics brought them down.
Mainly they decided to manufacture their tech here in Mexico instead of in Asia. But here on Mex we dont have the skills to to such high tech manufacturing.
What does Microsoft make? You download bits over a wire and store them on your personal SSD. They don’t make SSDs so it should be trivial for other companies to quickly catch up.
For the sake of argument, let’s reduce Nvidia (my employer but I don’t speak for them) to just a silicon vendor.
You’re not only ignoring the work of thousands who design the stuff that goes on that silicon, the billions of $ in R&D, you’re also dismissing the decisions about what to put in that design, way before other people do it. Some of those decisions were made years before the actual implementation started. It happens to be something a few people at Nvidia are very good at.
Yes, my short post may sound dismissive, but I work in tech and I'm aware that our industry has lots of legitimate creativity and intellectual property. Of course we also have hype, marketing, BS, and herd stampedes. Some aspects of GPU/parallel design are commonly understood and other companies make such chips. So I guess I was just wondering if Nvidia had a secret sauce, are they ahead of others, and if so by what measure? I work more in software, and I'm not in a position now to evaluate their hardware on the merits.
In 2023, this is a moot point. Neither does Apple. Neither does AMD. Neither does Qualcomm (which makes the vast majority of mobile phone CPUs). Neither does Broadcomm.
To your second point: I am surprised that AMD hasn't tried harder to chase the high-end enterprise GPU market. Maybe that is a longer term secret plan after they gain more CPU market share. It is possible that a GPU ecosystem cannot out-compete NVidia's CUDA at this point.
JonChesterfield|2 years ago
They then had the good fortune that their competitors tried to leverage open source and cross company collaboration. While misc open source winning is sometimes thing, the industry built all their stuff on cuda instead of opencl or openmp.
Nvidia thus built their gold mine.
I don't think it's impenetrable. There are some design mistakes baked into their system that are going to be difficult to unravel without breaking backwards compatibility.
TechnicolorByte|2 years ago
xtracto|2 years ago
Mainly they decided to manufacture their tech here in Mexico instead of in Asia. But here on Mex we dont have the skills to to such high tech manufacturing.
tverbeure|2 years ago
For the sake of argument, let’s reduce Nvidia (my employer but I don’t speak for them) to just a silicon vendor.
You’re not only ignoring the work of thousands who design the stuff that goes on that silicon, the billions of $ in R&D, you’re also dismissing the decisions about what to put in that design, way before other people do it. Some of those decisions were made years before the actual implementation started. It happens to be something a few people at Nvidia are very good at.
rnikander|2 years ago
throwaway2037|2 years ago
To your second point: I am surprised that AMD hasn't tried harder to chase the high-end enterprise GPU market. Maybe that is a longer term secret plan after they gain more CPU market share. It is possible that a GPU ecosystem cannot out-compete NVidia's CUDA at this point.
somsak2|2 years ago