← Back to context

Comment by matheusmoreira

5 hours ago

> NVIDIA is one of the most open labs.

Of course they are. They're commoditizing their complement.

I want to own the hardware, not play around in an nvidia fiefdom full of nvidia rules.

15 comments

matheusmoreira

Reply
wjnc  2 hours ago

I'll expand on the economics somewhat. My intuition is that you can like a moat left of you in the supply chain, but dislike moats to the right of you. (I'm using left and right as I picture this horizontally drawn. It is usually called vertical integration by economists.) But free competition in your market is worst of all. Free competition right outside your moat is pretty sweet, and that's were parent is commenting on.

Nvidia probably likes that ASML is a monopolist (it's called a monopsony). The price is high and Nvidia can't scale as hard as they want to (more general: capital intensive market). This monopsony makes sure that other chip companies can't rapidly scale up and try to beat Nvidia. That there only ever was one other GPU firm (I'm prehistoric; once there were more) and they bungled it on software, is pretty sweet for Nvidia.

On the side of their customers. It would be best for Nvidia if there is free competition for the outputs generated from there GPUs. This maximizes consumer surplus and thus demand. Maximum demand for tokens, is maximal demand feeded in their monopoly. If there is a monopoly right from you, demand is curtailed, and your value is limited.

And that exactly is why you see interest from token generators for chips. Bridge that moat and gain a larger value surplus. Both NVidia and, say, China actively undercutting the token-supplier value chain is quite interesting to watch. It's like the Opium wars with us as somewhat happy customers.

In this same vein, why isn't ASML raising thousands of billions for building their own (subsidiary) chip foundries, while raising prices and starving the market (a little) for their machines.

amelius  41 minutes ago

> > NVIDIA is one of the most open labs.

> Of course they are. They're commoditizing their complement

Then why don't they sell consumer GPUs with tons of memory. They clearly segment the market into consumer versus server/business.

Iolaum  1 hour ago

While nvidia 's drivers are closed source there's enough interest in running LLM's that you are not locked in using nvidia. Strix Halo chips have been around before dgx spark came out and deliver very similar performance.

bigyabai  3 hours ago

You do own the hardware. Nvidia GPUs have FOSS driver alternatives (Nouveau, NOVA) and have supported OpenCL on the proprietary drivers since 2009.

If you don't want to use CUDA, they expose the PTX bindings to write your own CUDA alternative too: https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/parallel-thread-execution/index...

  • bayindirh  2 hours ago

    When last looked at it, NVIDIA was not supporting OpenCL beyond 1.0.

    Also, when running OpenCL, NVIDIA hardware disables multiple DMA engines, and allows only one memory transfer at a time to prevent OpenCL running as fast as CUDA.

    Did NVIDIA finally allow open source drivers to access all parts and features of the card to allow feature parity? Last time I checked they were considering a plan for planning a solution to that.

    • pjmlp  2 hours ago

      People love to blame NVidia on OpenCL failure, maybe Intel and AMD should actually deliver something compute researchers want to use?

    • bigyabai  2 hours ago

      OpenCL up to 3.0 is ostensibly supported: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-is-now-opencl-3-0-c...

      I don't think bits like the GSP firmware will ever be open-sourced, but the opportunity to write better OpenCL drivers has always existed. Some of Nvidia's other proprietary driver backends (eg. GBM, Vulkan) are also decently neglected, but mostly out of disuse rather than malice. I don't think any of these things mean you don't own the hardware.