Re:Why Nvidia Keeps Winning: The Rise of an AI Giant
by AstralStorm on Friday July 07, 2023 @04:32AM
(#36628903)
Indeed, you do need kind of a loss leader weak compute GPU to get people interested and experimenting with your platform.
Cloud does not fulfill that purpose being too expensive, too limited and not secret enough.
Normal gaming nVidia GPUs fill that role. You need big guns, you buy a lot of their compute cards next.
AMD had decent compute capabiliites in their CDNA line, but they didn't follow through with drivers. The cards were pretty bad to try to use for compute with early ROCm, and just as bad for gaming.
The RDNA line is targeted at gamers. The reasoning apparently being "let's be careful that these RDNA GPUs are bad enough so they can't really be used for anything else but games; if the user is into compute, they should pay the big money for CDNA GPUs".
This is also reflected into the ROCm situation. ROCm has good support for CDNA GPUs, which is the hardware that is deployed in the huge national-lab GPU projects, where money is not an issue. The problem with that approach? normal people do not have access to CDNA GPUs that cost a multiple of 10000 USD apiece.