<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>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>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></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>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>aloer</author><text>I don’t think it affected the adoption of VR much.
OTOH it might be very beneficial in the long run that VR had a slow start.
Probably the most dangerous thing to happen here is if customers are forever scared away due to bad but expensive early experiences.&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, the hardware development continued and the next wave of VR will have much higher quality and more performant GPUs to make a good first impression.&lt;p&gt;It would look differently if the entire VR field would’ve collapsed due to low sales but tbh it looks like it’s maturing slow and steady and that’s how it should be&lt;p&gt;So essentially high gpu prices might have given the field just enough time to mature with patient early adopters before it goes main stream. At least that’s how I hope it will be</text></comment>