Selling shovels during a gold rush is the best way to get rich. :)
While suing everyone else that makes shovel handles that work with your shovel heads.
Fuck this stupid world we’ve built.
AI is this decades .com boom. Brace yourself for the crash.
God I hope so, but the next thing will likely be even more stupid than this, NFTs and crypto.
I didn’t know there were that many PC gamers out there. /s
Seriously, though, the pivot from making video cards to investing in AI and crypto is kinda genius. The crypto thing mostly fell into their laps, but they leaned in. The AI thing, though, I’m not sure how they decided to focus on that or who first pitched the idea to the board; but that was business genius.
To your point, when you look at both crypto and AI I see a common theme. They both need a lot of computation, call it super computing. Nvidia makes products that provide a lot of compute. Until Nvidia’s competitors catch up I think they’ll do fine as more applications that require a lot of computation are found.
Basically, I think of Nvidia as a super computer company. When I think of them this way their position makes more sense.
Also those thing are highly parallelizable and mainly deal with vector and matrix data, so the same “lots of really simple but fast processing units optimized for vectors and matrix operations working in parallel” that works fine for modern 3D Graphics (for example, each point on a frame image to display on the screen can be calculated in parallel with all the other points - in what’s called a fragment shader - and most 3D data is made of 3D vectors whilst the transforms are 3x3 Matrices) turns out to also work fine for things like neural networks were the neurons in each layer are quite simple and can all be processed in parallel (if the architecture of that wasn’t layered, GPUs would be far less effective for it).
To a large extent Nvidia got lucky that the stuff that became fashionable now works by doing lots of simple and highly paralellizeable computations, since otherwise it would’ve been the makers of CPUs that gained from the rise of said computing power demanding tech.
They were doing that for years before it became popular. The same tech for video graphics just so happened to be useful for AI and big data, and they doubled down on supporting enterprise and research efforts in that when it was a tiny field before their competitors did, and continued to specialize as it grew.
Supporting niche uses of your product can sometimes pay off if that niche hits the lottery.
Hardware made for heavy computing being good at stuff like this isn’t all that schokking though. The biggest gamble is if new technology will take off at all. Nvidia, just like google has the capital to diversify, bet on all the horses at once to drop the losers later.
same as with crypto. the software community started using GPUs for deep learning, and they were just meeting that demand
To their credit they’ve been pushing GPGPUs for a while. They did position themselves well for accelerators. Doesn’t mean they don’t suck.
DLSS was a necessity to make gains at speeds their hardware could not keep up with.
All that value and they still can’t get their video cards to work worth a shit in Linux.
Why does everyone always complain about Nvidia support on Linux? I’ve been using Nvidia GPUs on Ubuntu and Debian for years and it has never required any more effort than ‘sudo apt install nvidia-driver’.
Because they’re notoriously fickle and bug/breakage-prone.
I don’t know, I don’t find Linux folks very fickle. Seems like they have the opposite problem more often than not.
I’m referring to Nvidia’s dogshit Linux drivers.
It’s not difficult to install the drivers. I recently had to swap out my 3090 for an AMD card because Wayland just crashes and works poorly with Nvidia.
You should probably rephrase that to say Nvidia crashes and works poorly with Wayland.
Saying Wayland works badly with Nvidia is a bit like saying Linux doesn’t support Photoshop, rather than the other way around.
Tomato tomato
In my experience newer kernels and Wayland + nvidia is a huge mess.
I switched to AMD and have had 0 downtime, all the cool features nvidia touts, and fully working Wayland with no effort at all.
wont
I’m using a 2080 Super since 2020 and it’s been mostly gravy. Granted, I’ve not been using anything Wayland-related. But I’m gaming on Steam and shit and it works wonderfully. Better performance than on Windows. Though there is some slight audio delay. A few milliseconds over Windows.
I’ve been looking to switch to Hyprland but it was a bit glitchy with gaming and screen sharing sometimes so I’m holding off on that until I jump over to the AMD ship. It’ll be sweet.
I’ve been using Nvidia cards on Linux for many years and never had issues. I did have issues with the laptop cards (Optimus switching), but on the desktop it was always flawless for me.
I mean, they work. But the drivers aren’t as feature complete as AMD or intel. Wayland support was a strict no until very recently and gamescope support is still very hit n miss and they are less stable than their competition. They’re completely useable though. My 1650 runs well, most of the time.
When I was in the market for a new card 2 years ago I looked into AMD, but learned that they don’t work as well as Nvidia for GPU passthrough to VMs, which I need to work. I’d love to switch because Nvidia is a shit company, but AMD GPU’s just don’t work for my use case.
I’m curious though because I don’t know what I’m missing. What are the features in AMD drivers that make it more complete?
As I said, AMD works much better with wayland and gamescope, thus has, for example, HDR and VRR support. Besides that, their Linux drivers are open source and more stable.
But to my knowledge, AMD GPUs pass through just fine to VMs? What was your problem with them?
Do many distros use Wayland now? I use Kubuntu and it doesn’t, so that probably explains why I never ran into any issue with that. Gamescope looks like some Wayland tool too from what I see. I don’t have an HDR monitor either. Looks like good stuff, that I just never needed so never noticed it not working.
But to my knowledge, AMD GPUs pass through just fine to VMs? What was your problem with them?
I asked on the VFIO subreddit back then and was told AMD cards have a bug where you have to restart the PC to switch between host and VM (which makes it no better than dualbooting since you have to restart anyway), this was not the case on Nvidia.
So now that Nvidia has open source drivers and works on Wayland, what’s the difference? Just gamescope?
I guess you aren’t using Wayland. It’s abysmal with Wayland. Especially electron apps. They just flicker and crash.
No, I’m on Kubuntu, it doesn’t use Wayland.
Pretty sure Wayland is installed by default and maybe even enabled by default on new installs.
On the login screen there should be a button to switch between x11 and Wayland.
Oh yeah there is a button to switch on the login screen, but X11 is the default and I never saw a reason to switch the default.
Personally, I wouldn’t say “it doesn’t use Wayland” when it absolutely can with a single mouse click and it works great.
Yes, it can, and by default it doesn’t use it.
What card are you using? Their Linux support in the past years is impressive. They even have open source drivers now (still beta). And thanks to proton, gaming is seemless on Linux. I don’t see the issue you’re describing?
I was using 3090 but had to swap to an AMD card due to too many crashes and visual glitches/artifacts.
Time to sell Nvidia stock. Congrats to Huang for pulling it off. Get out when you’re on top.
imagine how many leather jackets he can buy now
Depends on if they acquire/acquhire from here or if they don’t and get their lunch stolen by photonics plays.
The big AI bubble
Nvidia and other chipmakers produce actual, useful products. They’ll be sitting pretty after the bubble pops.
Their main growth drivers are data centers, when demand will dry within 2 years, a bubble will pop. Especially when theoretical architecture of Neural Network change, the need for high performance will decrease.
CUDA has a lot of applications outside of AI. They’ll just refocus on the next bubble and will continue hoarding wealth.
Then we’ll all get cheaper GPUs! Oh no!
Well, there are a period after the last Bitcoin bubble burst when the best way to get a good Graphics card for cheap was buying a used one from on the Bitcoin miner operations that were closing down.
No not really, the GPUs that datacenters are buying doesn’t even have a display output so they are useless to the vast majority of home users.
If you run a home lab then maybe.
The real game now is how long will it last before the hype and with the the floor falls out of “AI” and a good chunk of their stock gains with it.
I don’t think generative AI is going anywhere anytime soon. The hype will eventually die down, but it’s already proved its usefulness in many tasks.
Most rational stock market analysis.
I wonder why AMD stock hasn’t really gone significantly up (500% vs over Nvidia’s 3000% in last 5Y). They make GPUs too
In one word: cuda
Because of a lot of things. From graphics side RTX and DLSS left AMD catching up (even if RTX isn’t really that big of a deal now), then there was Nvidia cards being better at crypto mining and now it’s Nvidia cards being better at AI computation + Nvidia pivoting into AI hardware space…
If you want to boil it down to the undeniable, it’s that Nvidia is just better at marketing. Everyone knows what Nvidia is doing. What is AMD doing? Besides playing catch-up to Nvidia.
This is all AI hyoe, which Nvidia is sadly much ahead of their competitors.
Problem is, that’s why they’re jacking up their price and pumping GPUs so quickly a good chunk of them are DOA and their customer service sucks too. No one likes dealing Nvidia on any level which is why everyone is making their own asics to get away from having to buy Nvidia gpus.
With a quarter the revenue of Apple
I’m holding on at least till the stock split
Pelosi’s insider trader is paying off for her.
Lmao, stupidity
