layperson with no industry knowledge, but it seems like nvidia's CUDA moat will fall in the next 2-5 years. It seems impossible to sustain those margins without competition coming in and getting a decent slice of the pie
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You are right, eventually something's gotta give. The path for this next leg isn't yet apparent to me.
P.s. how much is an exaflop or petaflop, and how significant is it? The numbers thrown around in this article don't mean anything to me. Is this new cluster way more powerful than the last top?
Nominally, a measurement in "flops" is how many (typically 32-bit) FLoating-point Operations Per Second the hardware is capable of performing, so it's an approximate measure of total available computing power.
A high-end consumer-grade CPU can achieve on the order of a few hundred gigaflops (let's say 250, just for a nice round number). https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/cpu_list.php
A petaflop is therefore about four thousand of those; multiply by another thousand to get an exaflop.
For another point of comparison, a high-end GPU might be on the order of 40-80 teraflops. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388-2.ht...