[treffer]

One thing everyone should keep in mind about this NVIDIA/AMD battle right now: CUDA has been published for 16 years, it's been a huge push by NVIDIA to do GPGPU computation. I remember seeing it as a new thing in university back then, after the advanced shaders that were only available on NVIDIA.

NVIDIA pretty rightful has the lead there, because they worked and invested into it for something like 20 years (you could do pretty advanced shaders on NVIDIA pre-CUDA).

It only started to pay off recently, and especially with the AI hype (GPU mining was nice, too).

Now everybody is looking at the profits and goes like "OMG, I want a part of that cake!", either by competing (AMD / Intel) or by paying less for the cards (basically everyone else in the AI space).

But you have to catch up to 16 years of pretty solid software and ecosystem development. And that's only going to work if you have good enough hardware. NVIDIA did the hard work here. They have earned this lead.

I am saying this as someone who would rather not buy NVIDIA. I really wish I can soon throw 1-2 7900XTX into a machine and use it for LLMs without issues. But I would also bet that it takes at least a few more years to catch up, even with the massive global interest.

[paulmd]

Yes, this is the counterpoint to the “ 55.58% Net Profit Margin last quarter isn't consistent with a functioning market” thread above. Sure, selling shovels during a gold-rush is very profitable… and nvidia invested a long time in building the best shovels for a lot of years where the net profit of doing so was intensely negative. They built the prospector community up and sponsored the development of geological science that spurred advancement of knowledge and practice - using their products, of course.

(The Michelin star model of hardware sales - did you know that Michelin actually makes money from that book!? They’re not doing it because they’re financially disinterested, can you believe that!?!?)

Anyway net profit is more like 15% in a normal year. Recently it is actually lower, Ada is already lower margin than pascal for example.

It is only this high because nvidia finally struck good - and they spent a lot of effort and money that might never have pqidnoffZ