[stupendousyappi]

Conversely, Nvidia has done a solid job of advancing GPU performance even in the face of weak competition, and with their additional resources, ARM performance may advance even faster, and provide the first competition in decades to x86 in servers and desktops.

[teruakohatu]

The tech may have advanced due to the insatiable hunger of machine learning, but the weak competition has meant pricing has not decreased as much as it should have or could have, only enough to move more GPUs. (nvidia biggest competitor are the GPUs they manufactured two years earlier).

[dannyw]

Really? You get 2x perf per dollar with Ampere. That’s not good enough on the pricing front?

[teruakohatu]

Yes really. Performance that is cleverly hampered by RAM (and driver licensing) on the low end from an ML perspective. The only reason they can do this is because of lack of competition. The performance of 3000 series cards could be dramatically improved for large models at a modest increase in price if RAM was doubled.

It really is possible to be critical of a monopoly without disparaging the product itself. It is when a true competitor arises that we see the monopolist's true capabilities (see Intel and AMD).

[dannyw]

The GeForce series is targeted at gamers. Video games are not making use of more than ~8GB of VRAM.

There is literally no benefit to 90% of the audience if they doubled the RAM. Of course, they also want to do market segmentation too, but you can’t blame GeForce for not being designed for ML training.