When you're competing with NVIDIA, 'nearly as fast' as the next best competitor is not going to cut it. I wonder what part of the market they're looking for here.
They want to be more than a hardware company, because commodification is antithetical to fat profit margins. They have ~80% of the GPU market, their only way to increase profit margins is to start gouging (which is easier if they control the stack higher up, e.g. if the main GPGPU language is built around their GPU architecture) or to branch into a different field entirely (which is why Nvidia has been going so hard into AI - they could leverage their GPU dominance to gain an early lead in the field).
they're a fast follow that competes for the middle and low end of the market. they won't produce anything that competes with NVIDIA's topend any time soon. Will take some outside competitor like LPUs or something that comes and changes the game to make a dent, that will take a while though I reckon. Hardware revolutions take years to scale.
Not necessarily. They're making GPUs but they're avoiding any head-to-head competition with NVidia and instead trying for a smaller share of the market but one they have some unique advantage or other.
Because Nvidia is run by a founder who has been playing the long game for the entire history of the company. Its competitors are run by non-founders who aren’t interested in the long game they’re interested in next quarter’s earnings.
Always such a weird argument. I assume Nvidia also doesn't try to aquire large companies unless they have pretty good reason to believe they will succeed.
How do we know the strategy wasn’t to avoid releasing a CUDA alternative until NVIDIA is wounded by an anti-trust lawsuit and then when they get broken up deploy your CUDA alternative and speed past them? Could be playing the long game.
Well this is glaringly obvious to whole world, and Nvidia managed to get it right. Surely a feat that can be repeated elsewhere when enough will is spread over some time. And it would make them grow massively, something no shareholder ever frowns upon.
I think the main purpose it serves for Nvidia is branding. This gets plastered all over the tech news and everyone knows Nvidia makes the fastest GPU. People then associate them with better technology (for better or worse).
Why someone would buy it? There are a lot of people who want the very best. It's the same reason people buy an Aston Martin over a Toyota.
From a more practical perspective though, there's also future proofing. This card will be able to deliver high frame rates for a few generations of games. People who don't want to regularly rebuild their rigs might prefer this card.
And they want to support people migrating from other cloud providers where they are already using nvidia/Cuda. Though it also helps support the opposite migration, they are the smaller cloud player trying to get customers, not the big one trying to constrain them as much yet.
there is also second mover advantage, where they just need to copy-cat the best part of nvidia's ML stack and dont waste time figuring out what works/what doesn't work.
they will get users simply because they will be alternative to nvidia. Add good pricing strategy and it can be immediate success
Nvidia will keep focusing on GPUs to the detriment of anything else. That's how larger established corporations always work, they have a lot of institutional inertia.
It gives them a large stake in a company that is both currently successful and in a position to be a leader in new markets (automotive and data centers were mentioned in the article).
It's hard to imagine a scenario where Nvidia is out of business in the next 5 years and very easy to imagine one where they are applying their accrued chipmaking expertise to other areas for a marginal advantage.
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