Nvidia has been doing the hard work in preparing to succeed in this market. CUDA has been meticulously developed and maintained, creating an adhesion to their hardware that would not otherwise exist in the AI market.
It also has been willing and capable of creating lines of business hardware aimed at maximizing utility for their customers.
They also have hired and maintained a roster of the best engineers in their specialties, including the software part of the equation.
There is no part of their success that they weren't prepared to take advantage of when the opportunity presented itself. They didn't control the size of the opportunity itself, but no greatly successful company does.
Case in point: Nvidia has been hosting "GPU Conferences" annually to build awareness and drive adoption of CUDA. These events surely aren't free to host but necessary to build momentum and give an edge to your custom stack.
Luck is more applicable to the cryptomining boom and bust cycles that Nvidia also profited from. Their gaming GPUs (along with AMD's) just happened to be the best available at the proof of work.
Tell that to ATI/AMD, and all the now-defunct and also-ran (Matrox, 3dfx) graphics companies.
Matrox and 3dfx were gone before they could even conceive of a general purpose GPU strategy.
[1]: The Matrox Parhelia itself being out of date tech on release to boot, lacking a Direct3D 9.0 class architecture that ATI launched two months later.
You could argue they successfully pivoted out of consumer and into b2b.
But they gave up on making their own cores.
Hence "also-rans".
this underplays the AMD board refusing a merger with NVIDIA (because jensen wanted to be CEO of the resulting company and hector ruiz didn't like that), and then overpaying for ATI and leaving themselves depleted of funds.
(staff writer, not blog "contributor") https://www.forbes.com/sites/briancaulfield/2012/02/22/amd-t...
Bulldozer/etc could have gone very differently if they hadn't been broke and forced to underinvest. They might not have ever been in the position of "consoles having to carry them" if they had simply done a merger-of-equals with NVIDIA, or if they had simply walked away from the graphics market afterwards instead of rushing to buy ATI.
A lot of people just can't bring themselves to admit that good decisions had a large role in putting NVIDIA where they are today, and that bad decisions had a large role in putting AMD where they were in the late 2000s/early 2010s. It wasn't just bad things happening to AMD - the bad things happened because of bad decisions, they were consequences of actions.
People overfixate on the Intel thing as being the root of all of AMD's woes, as opposed to the other 75% of the problem that they could control. Like hector ruiz was just an utter disaster all around, not just even this one thing. And even today, AMD does discounts/rebates for bulk purchases. And the best rebates come if you buy all of your hardware from them (and thus, none from your competitor) - same as Intel did, which is why the decision was eventually significantly reduced. The eventual finding was - like many things, it may or may not be anticompetitive, depending on how you use it - but volume rebates and even outright exclusivity agreements are not inherently illegal in the way AMD fans generally imply they are. Ask Pepsi.
Matrox is still alive.
Iirc they found a niche in medical device imaging.
What if… you read my comment more closely, and saw it was a parenthetical example after "also-ran" and not "now-defunct".
What are you trying to argue here?
The point isn't that they didn't invest in the direction that ended up being right, it's that they didn't do it specifically with ML/AI in mind years before it was even a twinkle in google's eyes.
IIRC were on CUDA 5 or something when imagenet came out and changed the world.
They might not have imagined LLMs when they decided to invest in making their GPUs programmable but I guarantee you they extrapolated the future compute potential of vector programmable machines and decided it was not a huge risk to enable it as it is simply betting that some important application would be around to tap into it.
What people find contentious is this claim that they specifically did it for ML/AI. That's not why they invested the way they did.
It was hugely experimental but does demonstrate that the idea of a GPUs being used for compute isn’t a recent one.
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-gpu-company-1993...
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-machine-learning...
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-dawn-of-the-ai-e...
>I'm a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more of it I seem to have.
Nvidia has been working hard(er than their competition) on the software side for almost 2 decades to be in the position they find themselves today. 16 years ago, they released CUDA for general-purpose computing on GPUs, and then 9 years ago they followed that up with cuDNN. They have a consistent pattern of making a intentional, long-term bets to diversify their market exposure and unlock new product areas while building a software ecosystem moat.
Yes, they obviously got super lucky with the cryptocurrency frenzy, but there's a reason all the miners were mostly buying Nvidia cards instead of AMD cards.
>While it is true that Nvidia cards are generally preferred by miners due to better price-to-performance, AMD GPUs such as the Radeon RX 6600 XT could still be mined on profitably until recently. […] So yes, carefully consider the condition of all used graphics cards—Nvidia or AMD.
[0] https://www.pcworld.com/article/395149/should-you-buy-a-used...
Because they were broke and didn't have the resources to invest properly even if they wanted to.
That's not quite true -- they bet the farm on Zen, and that bet paid off. Which means that now they have the resources to also invest in AI. I'm fairly sure if they had bet the farm on AI instead of Zen or if they had tried splitting that bet they'd be bankrupt now.
Well yes and no. They were certainly lucky to be at right place in the right time. But they were also consistently investing into CUDA and the AI/ML ecosystem while their competitor(s) ignored it to such an extent that NVDIA became the only real option (and deservedly so).
This is why they can effectively behave like a monopoly these days and just almost inconceivably high margins.
Then this luck should have equally found AMD, who even today are struggling to pick up the ball they've been dropping for a decade now. My last PC had a Radeon, and I waited the life time of that PC assuming AMD support was just around the corner, all the while renting Nvidia cards in the cloud for any serious projects.
I've been in the ML space long enough to remember when people were just speculating about doing ML/computation on GPUs. Nvidia made that much easier and has continued to improve support and features for the past decade+ There insane success is certainly part luck, but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss all of it as merely happenstance.
It didn't wane, it was decimated when ETH switched to PoS, and off of GPU mining entirely.
All of the other mined coins dropped in value as miners moved to them and dumped all their rewards, making mining those coins unprofitable as well.
It was ETH that was propping up the entire GPU mining ecosystem.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/26861060
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLq9zv3k5n0
The race was on, but nobody else was running.
Think you're just looking at this from the angle of a gamer and not someone who's been paying attention to GPGPU compute earlier than the past 6 months.
The crypto craze waned just as LLMs were picking up. Any more delay with LLMs, and perhaps nvidia would have been overextended with no demand to take their inventory. There may in fact , be no nvidia in that future depending on the level of the bet.
Or take it 1 step further . if COVID hadnt happened, the crypto craze would never have occurred, and nvidia would have only been a bit-level player in the LLM craze we are now in.
I still remember nvidia ads in pc game magazines. That and 3dfx. Who knew?
Why? They were the only ones taking GPGPU seriously? AMD completely ignored it for years and Intel only became serious about GPUs very recently.
NFTs at 100K , etc.
Thats the "craze"
Before that it was still a speculative play, but hardly pervasive and available to so many.
Copy-pasting a comment from a discussion a little while[1] ago: CUDA was first released in 2007:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA
* https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/1.0/NVIDI...
Two years before the Bitcoin paper (2009):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
They had a presentation called "The Era of the Personal Supercomputing" at SIGGRAPH 2007:
* https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1281500.1281647
* https://www.nvidia.com/content/events/siggraph_2007/supercom...
Ian Buck (co-?)creator of CUDA speaking in 2008:
> Ian Buck talks about his background developing Brook for GPUs at Stanford university and what paths were taken for developing a C platform for GPUs.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cmh1EHXjJsk
> In 2003, a team of researchers led by Ian Buck unveiled Brook, the first widely adopted programming model to extend C with data-parallel constructs. Ian Buck later joined NVIDIA and led the launch of CUDA in 2006, the world's first solution for general-computing on GPUs.
* https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-zone
* http://graphics.stanford.edu/~ianbuck/
Nvidia purposefully went after parallel computing. Specific applications (cryptocurrency, ML/AI) appeared later.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38446957#unv_38447944
In its early days, NVidia focused on its delivery speed by having a unified software driver/integration strategy. The TNT video card was meh, the TNT2 a little better but inferior to 3Dfx... by the time they launched GeForce, 3Dfx didn't have a product ready to compete. Their driver/integration/product test strategy made that speed possible.
With that background you can understand why CUDA wasn't lucky, they repeated the same approach: combine their hardware with the software.
It is true that they got lucky several times in a big way. But CUDA was an expensive R&D for many years without clear payouts.
Nvidia wisely recognized that only so much horsepower could be used by a conventional 3d graphics pipeline with a given screen resolution, and they needed to invest in growing future compute-heavy adjacent markets.
They invested in generalizing their GPU into a more flexible vector coprocessor for HPC and then adjacent markets. They convinced fundamental engineers and researchers in this area to come work for them.
There was deep fundamental work done by Ian Buck in 2004 on leveraging GPUs as general vector processors ( https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/brookgpu/ ) and that leadership and deep thinking went to Nvidia, not to Intel. Intel did not have the passion from the top to care about this. They couldn't even care enough to field competitive 3D chips (and associated software), much less extend their thinking to generalize beyond it skillfully. Nvidia did.
Anyone who spent every day thinking about how to grow the vector coprocessor market would have pursued crypto and AI when they came along but Nvidia's strong engineering and profits from a leading 3D position gave them competitive advantages which they are, for now, reaping.
They were already building GPUs mainly for gaming. Crypto then came along and swiped up a bunch of GPUs. When the self mining craze somewhat waned the AI craze started as the boundaries on its ethicality were broken down in an uncertain economic environment where corporations started racing to see who will get to the top.