this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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That should be your very first clue that Nvidia needs to be broken up into smaller, competing companies.
How do you imagine that would work?
Yeah, don't be unrealistic. We can't just have a group of competent individuals properly plan out how to dismantle a monopoly to allow for proper competition in the industry. If they don't hold onto their monopoly, how will we ever see technological advancements?
No really. NVIDIA's entire business is based on one main chip design. How would you brake up a company, that essentially only has one design it implements in various degrees for their products.
There is literally nothing to break up.
Ai accelerators and gaming gpu could definitely be split apart. AMD already uses different architectures for those applications and they have notably smaller engineering teams.
Raytracing could also ostensibly be spun into a separate division. That's already split quite a bit in the architecture. Then Intel, AMD and whatever other competitors pop up could license the raytracing tech stack or even buy raytracing chiplets.
Some of the software solutions like DLSS could be spun off and allowed to license to competitors.
No they can't, because all Nvidia products are similar base designs at different scales.
NVIDIA has for many years designed the main chip first, the biggest baddest of them all, used for the very highest end products. All other products are based on selecting parts of that, to make the chips cheaper for their respective markets. There is no reasonable way to split this up.
There is no monopoly. If Nvidia doesn't play it right in the coming years they won't hold on to their current position. Nvidia aren't getting into custom chips just for fun. If the major cloud providers end up using their own custom silicon, that's a major blow for Nvidia.
The point that the article makes is that NVIDIA is pressing current customers by threatening shipping delays, which is an abuse of their power
And I hope they get punished for it, but that is not the same as Nvidia having monopoly.
They have as much a Monopoly as Google has on search. Sure, there are competitors, and there is a chance that new tech might disrupt them, but they are able to abuse their market position (for example, forcing websites to use Google analytics or be penalised in search results)
I disagree. Most of the big actors in the cloud/AI space got their own silicon that they are working on which is a big enough concern for Nvidia that they are looking into providing custom solutions. If the CUDA moat breaks, Nvidia will be in a much weaker position.
The search engine landscape is completely different, although I don't think you meant that those markets are really directly comparable to be fair.
I argue that Google is suffering kind of the same issues when it comes to LLM’s. They freaked out when chat GPT dropped, and I’m pretty sure that Bard got rushed just to compete with Bing Chat