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AMD now has more compute on the top 500 than Nvidia

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195 points rbanffy | 1 comments | 18 Nov 24 18:54 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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pie420 ◴[18 Nov 24 20:14 UTC] No.42176400[source]▶
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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metadat ◴[18 Nov 24 20:17 UTC] No.42176440[source]▶
But how will AMD or anyone else push in? CUDA is actually a whole virtualization layer on top of the hardware and isn't easily replicable, Nvidia has been at it for 17 years.

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?

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1. jillesvangurp ◴[19 Nov 24 05:02 UTC] No.42180214[source]▶
Software will bridge the gap. There are simply too many competing platforms out there that are not Nvidia based. Most decent AI libraries and frameworks already need to support more than just Nvidia. There's a reason macs are popular with AI researchers: many of these platforms support Apple's chips already and they perform pretty well. Anything that doesn't support those chips, is a problem waiting to be fixed with plenty of people working on fixing that. If it can be fixed for Apple's chips, it can also be fixed for other people's chips.

And of course there is some serious amount of money sloshing around in this space. Things being hard doesn't mean it's impossible. And there's no shortage of extremely well funded companies working on this stuff. All your favorite trillion $ companies basically. And most of them have their own AI chips too. And probably some reservations about perpetually handing a lot of their cash to Nvidia.

If you want an example of a company that used to have a gigantic moat that is now dealing with a lot of competition, look at Intel. X86 used to be that moat. And that's looking pretty weak lately. One reason that AMD is in the news a lot lately is that they are growing at Intel's expense. Nvidia might be their next target.