I know it isn’t the what you mean, but as an aside (rather than a contradiction), the gaming marked is still much bigger than the ML model training one, right? So presumably people care about the graphics part in the sense that development there funds the development of the cards, haha.
I always assumed that was what killed Xeon Phi. Hard to justify a GEMM card in and of itself. However clever you get, NVIDIA will be back next year with twice as much bandwidth.
According to my googling, data center has been bigger than gaming for nvidia since 2022, and almost x2 in Q2 2023 following a crazy nosedive in gaming sales.
Nvidia burnt quite a lot of goodwill with the 40xx series cards and pricing.
Melting connectors, obscene pricing, marginal performance increase, zero availability; then when hardly any of that was addressed, Ti versions release which are equally expensive, and equally lacklustre. Combine that with patchy support for frame generation and 30xx series cards still going really strong, and you’ve got not a lot of incentive to upgrade.
I think dollars was the right figure to defeat my point. My thought was that they would be impossible for their more datacenter type competition to beat, because their R&D budget came from a much larger gaming segment. But, if they are around the same size, or the data center type users actually pay more, it is a level playing field.
I’m sure they don’t mind having both revenue streams of course! But on the other hand, they have to serve two sets of interests.
I'll bet against that. NVIDIA's margin is so large that Google/Microsoft and others can fund / are funding large teams to make TPUs and other dedicated hardware competitive. I also believe LLMs are part of the hype cycle just like crypto. In ten years the gaming market will return to being NVIDIA's primary market.
1. The hardware isn't nVidia's primary moat. CUDA is. Currently all machine learning tooling assumes you have a CUDA device.
2. The hype cycle may be real, but nobody really knows how much better AI will become. The uncertainty is driving the hype (which is obviously on the optimistic side), but it could well be that models become so good that everyone "needs" an AI chip like how we "need" a smartphone today.
3. The gaming/graphics market is probably going to slowly shrink. There's only so many pixels you can push to the eye. There's very real diminishing returns there. At some point people literally won't be able to tell the difference between the newer/better/faster graphics and the older generation, at which point the GPU vendor's margins drop significantly.
If by "LLMs are part of the hype cycle" you mean "people are hyping them more than their current capabilities entirely warrant" maybe. If you mean "LLMs are a hype technology that is going to peter out without leaving a major impact on society" as kindly as I can phrase it, what on earth are you smoking, or are you Amish?
To be fair, GP compared the LLM hype with crypto... And as niche crypto may be in the future, I don't think it will also "peter out without leaving a major impact on society"...
Crypto will not be niche in the future. Bitcoin has a market cap of 1,349,125,982,176 (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/) and recently surpassed the market cap of gold itself and has large investors from Black Rock to Apple, ans recently got approved for ETFs which means the general population's 401k's will have bitcoin in them starting this year. Other crypto currencies may die out, but bitcoin is here permanantly.
If you haven't yet, buy some bitcoin and stop letting the government steal your hard earned money through inflation.
I always assumed that was what killed Xeon Phi. Hard to justify a GEMM card in and of itself. However clever you get, NVIDIA will be back next year with twice as much bandwidth.