<story><title>Nvidia CEO says Google is the only customer building its own silicon at scale</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/15/nvidia-ceo-google-is-the-only-customer-with-silicon-at-scale.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>varelse</author><text>Sure, but the really lucky break IMO was a decade of INTC repeatedly punching itself in the face w&amp;#x2F;r to manycore computation.  I was at Nvidia from 2001 to 2011 (and now back) and I spent 2006-2011 as one of the very first CUDA programmers.  It was pretty obvious within a week or two that this technology was going to be huge, and I more or less made my career with it.&lt;p&gt;But instead of stepping up to the plate and igniting a Red Queen&amp;#x27;s Race that would have benefited everyone, INTC first tried to discredit the technology repeatedly, then they built an absolutely dreadful series of decelerators that demonstrated how badly they didn&amp;#x27;t understand manycore.  Eventually, they gave up, and now they&amp;#x27;re playing catch-up by buying companies that get within striking distance of NVDA rather than building really cool technology from within.&lt;p&gt;Now if someone threw a large pile of money at AMD again, things could get really interesting IMO.  But the piles of stupid money seem biased towards throwing ~$5M per layer at the pets.com of AI companies these days.</text></item><item><author>jonplackett</author><text>Nvidia really lucked out with VR, crypto and AI all happening at once and all just happening to need exactly what they make (surly they can’t have seen all that coming deliberately?)&lt;p&gt;I wonder if consumer VR would have faired better if gamers didn’t have to compete with miners and data centres for chips and had more reasonably priced cards a few years back.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jcranmer</author><text>Nvidia&amp;#x27;s coup was in getting people to switch to a different programming model and rewrite their code to achieve the necessary performance. Intel, especially in upper management, is stuffed with people who assumed that was impossible. And faced with new competition from GPUs, the only acceptable response to management was the many-x86, &amp;quot;you don&amp;#x27;t have to rewrite your code to get performance&amp;quot; approach which didn&amp;#x27;t actually work out.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not that Intel doesn&amp;#x27;t have people that recognize the issues, but rather the people who do have that foresight are drowned out by people who don&amp;#x27;t realize the game has changed. Intel, to be fair, does have the best autovectorizer--but designing vector code from scratch in a purpose-built vector language is still going to produce better results, as shown when ispc beat the vectorizer.&lt;p&gt;But Nvidia can also get drunk on its kool-aid, just as Intel has been. Nvidia&amp;#x27;s marketing would have you believe that switching to GPUs magically makes you gain performance, but if your code isn&amp;#x27;t really amenable to a vector programming style, then GPUs aren&amp;#x27;t going to speed your code up, and the shift from CPU-based supercomputers to GPU-based supercomputers are going to leave you happy. There&amp;#x27;s still room for third-way architectures that is anyone&amp;#x27;s game.</text></comment>
<story><title>Nvidia CEO says Google is the only customer building its own silicon at scale</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/15/nvidia-ceo-google-is-the-only-customer-with-silicon-at-scale.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>varelse</author><text>Sure, but the really lucky break IMO was a decade of INTC repeatedly punching itself in the face w&amp;#x2F;r to manycore computation.  I was at Nvidia from 2001 to 2011 (and now back) and I spent 2006-2011 as one of the very first CUDA programmers.  It was pretty obvious within a week or two that this technology was going to be huge, and I more or less made my career with it.&lt;p&gt;But instead of stepping up to the plate and igniting a Red Queen&amp;#x27;s Race that would have benefited everyone, INTC first tried to discredit the technology repeatedly, then they built an absolutely dreadful series of decelerators that demonstrated how badly they didn&amp;#x27;t understand manycore.  Eventually, they gave up, and now they&amp;#x27;re playing catch-up by buying companies that get within striking distance of NVDA rather than building really cool technology from within.&lt;p&gt;Now if someone threw a large pile of money at AMD again, things could get really interesting IMO.  But the piles of stupid money seem biased towards throwing ~$5M per layer at the pets.com of AI companies these days.</text></item><item><author>jonplackett</author><text>Nvidia really lucked out with VR, crypto and AI all happening at once and all just happening to need exactly what they make (surly they can’t have seen all that coming deliberately?)&lt;p&gt;I wonder if consumer VR would have faired better if gamers didn’t have to compete with miners and data centres for chips and had more reasonably priced cards a few years back.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bryanlarsen</author><text>&amp;gt; Now if someone threw a large pile of money at AMD again, things could get really interesting IMO.&lt;p&gt;That somebody might be Nvidia.  I believe that Nvidia is still battling and has not yet paid the 1.06 billion Euro fine to AMD imposed on it by the UK courts in 2009.   Hearsay claims that it was the similar US fine that basically paid for Zen R&amp;amp;D...</text></comment>