| The problem for Nvidia is they do NOT do the entire stack. So Google has the ability to better optimize and here we are seeing those results as using TPUs is about 1/2 the price of Nvidia hardware. Baggage is a company thing. Google really has been an AI company since in the late 90s when Larry Page was asked about using AI to improve search and he replied he was using search to make AI happen. Ha! When you amortize you are still spending money and you saying this really bothers me and is such a problem. Too many look at things like you do and why companies get into problems. Capitalizing is not magic. BTW, Google is also going to be able to iterate much quicker as the AI breakthroughs happen and come out with new versions that should stay well ahead of Nvidia. The dynamics of the chip business have changed. Use to be companies bought chips from someone and then put them in to servers and sold the servers. The problem is the company making the chips are NOT running the chips and do not have any skin in the game or the data needed to improve. Now we have companies like Google making the chips and also running the chips and why we see power footprint being the focus far more than the past. We will see all the big operations including Amazon make their own chips more and more. A perfect example if Capsule networks replacing some uses of CNNs. Google with Hinton developed the Capsule network approach and will be supporting it far faster then you will see from Nvidia. Then there is the canonical framework for AI being TF. All of this was theoretical advantageous for Google and now we get to see they appear to be real with the pricing of the TPUs being about half of the cost of using Nvidia. |
You seemed to have completely missed why Nvidia's stock has gone up 17x in 4 years while google only 3x. The dynamics of the chip business have not changed; you are focusing on a single market, DNN, which is a small piece of the entire science/engineering community. Google made a chip that accelerates DNN. They also chose not to make an API to use that hardware with outside TF. So if you could buy a tpu and put it in your own server, it would beat the V100 in performance/watt. You can't do that, so nvidia wins, because I can buy a V100, and in 51 days the price I bought it for ($8K) has already been burned through in GCP. If you need me to do the math to help you realize that now your only recurring cost on the v100 (power) is more than 100x less than the TPU, I can do that for you. But hopefully you understand now that the TPU is for a niche market outside of google, and it will never be a large source of revenue for them at $6.50/hour.
TF is not exclusive to google. Nvidia has engineers working on TF.
Your capsule example is again extremely poor. You think google can respin an asic quicker than nvidia? Not only does history say the exact opposite, but they both use TSMC.