Disclaimer: long AMD, and not precise on percentages. Just illustrating a point.
Funny timing though, today NVDA lost $589 billion in market cap as the market got spooked.
ah ... no ... that's nonsense trying to hide behind stilted math lingo.
This does not match my experience from the past ~6 years of using AMD graphics on Linux. Maybe things are different with AI/Compute, I've never messed with that, but in terms of normal consumer stuff the experience of using AMD is vastly superior than trying to deal with Nvidia's out-of-tree drivers.
* Groq can't produce more hardware past their "demo". It seems like they haven't grown capacity in the years since they announced, and they switched to a complete SaaS model and don't even sell hardware anymore.
* I dont know enough about MLX, Triton, and JAX,
I think you should consider it as, if they're trying to avoid Nvidia and make sure their code isn't tied to NVidia-isms, and AMD is troublesome enough for basics the step to customized solutions is small enough to be worthwhile for something even cheaper than AMD.
The same is true of electricity - neither nuclear power nor fusion will not be online anytime soon.
Not nearly all data centers are water cooled, and there is this amazing technology that can convert sunlight into electricity in a relatively straightforward way.
AI workloads (at least training) are just about as geographically distributeable as it gets due to not being very latency-sensitive, and even if you can't obtain sufficient grid interconnection or buffer storage, you can always leave them idle at night.
Stock price is based on future earnings.
The smart money knows this and is reacting this morning - thus the drop in NVDA.
Current world marketed energy consumption is about 18 terawatts. Current mainstream solar panels are 21% efficient. At this efficiency, the terrestrial solar resource is about 37000 terawatts, 2000 times larger than the entire human economy:
~ $ units
Currency exchange rates from exchangerate-api.com (USD base) on 2024-11-25
Consumer price index data from US BLS, 2024-11-24
7290 units, 125 prefixes, 169 nonlinear units
You have: 21% solarirradiance circlearea(earthradius)
You want: TW
* 36531.475
/ 2.7373655e-05
So, once datacenters are using seven hundred thousand times more power than currently, we might need to seek power sources for them other than terrestrial solar panels running microgrids. Solar panels in space, for example.
You could be forgiven for wondering why this enormous resource has taken so long to tap into and why the power grid is still largely fossil-fuel-powered. The answer is that building fossil fuel plants only costs on the order of US$1–4 per watt (either nameplate or average), and until the last few years, solar panels cost so much more than that that even free "fuel" wasn't enough to make them economically competitive. See https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... for example.
Today, however, solar panels cost US$0.10 per peak watt, which works out to about US$0.35 to US$1 per average watt, depending largely on latitude. This is 25% lower than the price of even a year ago and a third of the price of two years ago. https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...
lol
What came out of it (and the semianalysis article) was that Anush would step up to the plate and work on improving the software.
George making noise is just a momentary blip in time that will be forgotten a week later…
He says this and talks about it in The Fallout section - even at BigCos with megabucks the teams are starved for time on the Nvidia chips and if these innovations work other teams will use them and then boom Nvidia's moat is truncated somehow which doesn't look good at such lofty multiples
(Famous for hacking the PS3–except he just took credit for a separate group’s work. And for making a self-driving car in his garage—except oh wait that didn’t happen either.)
Why do you think otherwise? Can you share specific details?
Not really, his article focuses on Nvidia's being valued so highly by stock markets, he's not saying that Nvidia's destined to lose its advantage in the space in the short term.
In any case, I also think that the likes of MSFT/AMZN/etc will be able to reduce their capex spending eventually by being able to work on a well integrated stack on their own.
Nvidia are doing phenomenal things with robotics, and that is likely to be the next shoe to drop, and they are positioned for another catalytic moment similar to that which we have seen with LLMS.
I do think we will see some drawback or at least deceleration this year while the current situation settles in, but within the next three years I think we will see humanoid robots popping up all over the place, particularly as labour shortages arise due to political trends - and somebody is going to have to provide the compute, both local and cloud, and the vision, movement, and other models. People will turn to the sensible and known choice.
So yeah, what you say is true, but I don’t think is going to have an impact on the trajectory of nvidia.
Unless something radically changed in the last couple years, I am not sure where you got this from? (I am specifically talking about GPUs for computer usage rather than training/inference)
This was the first thing that stuck out to me when I skimmed the article, and the reason I decided to invest the time reading it all. I can tell the author knows his shit and isn't just parroting everyone's praise for AMD Linux drivers.
> (I am specifically talking about GPUs for computer usage rather than training/inference)
Same here. I suffered through the Vega 64 after everyone said how great it is. So many AMD-specific driver bugs, AMD driver devs not wanting to fix them for non-technical reasons, so many hard-locks when using less popular software.
The only complaints about Nvidia drivers I found were "it's proprietary" and "you have to rebuild the modules when you update the kernel" or "doesn't work with wayland".
I'd hesitate to ever touch an AMD GPU again after my experience with it, haven't had a single hick-up for years after switching to Nvidia.
This isn’t a barrier for Linux veterans but it adds significant resistance for part-time users, even those that are technically inclined, compared to the “it just works” experience one gets with an Intel/AMD GPU under just about every Linux distro.
goat.
Cerbras and Groq need to solve the memory problem. They can't scale without adding 10x the hardware.
In which way? As a user who switched from an AMD-GPU to Nvidia-GPU, I can only report a continued amount of problems with NVIDIAs proprietary driver, and none with AMD. Is this maybe about the open source-drivers or usage for AI?
As pointed out in the article, Nvidia has several advantages including:
Each of the advantages is under attack: The article concludes that NVIDIA faces an unprecedented convergence of competitive threats. The flaw in the analysis is that these threats are not unified. Any serious competitor must address ALL of Nvidia's advantages. Instead Nvidia is being attacked by multiple disconnected competitors, and each of those competitors is only attacking one Nvidia advantage at a time. Even if each of those attacks are individually successful, Nvidia will remain the only company that has ALL of the advantages.