[sophrocyne]

Couple of comments to this point suggest that it couldn't have been predicted since the official timing of the merge was only announced in 2022, and silicon supply chain requires planning in advance of that.

But that point is ignorant of this truth - Proof-of-stake has been on the roadmap since ~2017 if not earlier.~ Edit: 2016 - Thanks friend! :)

I think the reality is that the impact of Ethereum on Nvidia's business was not fully appreciated, and that 'veil of ignorance' may well have been intentional. They never truly served the crypto market directly (e.g., there wasn't really a "miner" line of cards), and as a result didn't do the due diligence to understand how those customers played into their business performance and strategy. Or they did, and just really underestimated the Ethereum devs on ever making the merge happen. But I lean towards the first.

Either way, I think that with crypto in the rearview, I'm actually more confident in their leadership team. They seem better suited to gaming and AI.

[paulmd]

> But that point is ignorant of this truth - Proof-of-stake has been on the roadmap since 2017 if not earlier.

it's been on the roadmap since 2016. That's actually still a problem though, a perpetually-rolling-deadline is effectively worse than not having a deadline at all.

Was NVIDIA just supposed to cut production for the last 6 years in anticipation of something that was continuously pushed back 6 months every 6 months? That's not a reasonable expectation.

[sophrocyne]

As an observer, I never got the sense that there were strong commitments being made on timelines until A) beacon chain was live (running in parallel), and B) testnets started getting merged successfully.

The moment of Genesis for the beacon-chain started a clock that Nvidia should have been paying attention to, and I think would have given them plenty of time to foresee the present situation.

[jonas21]

Regardless of whether they foresaw it or not, what should they have done differently?

[sophrocyne]

Great question, and perhaps at the point where decisions were being made, it'd be hard to argue a different path internally (hindsight being 20/20).

However, it seems clear that the business built both insane prices and the crypto lockup of devices (whether explicitly, or implicitly) into their forecasts for the business. They didn't have a good pulse on the actual demand/usage of their product, and when that usage pattern would shift.

The path they're taking right now, specifically regarding pricing towards & serving higher-end enthusiasts with newer products, makes sense while the used inventory gets cycled around the lower end of the market.

From a product perspective, I don't have any useful opinions to share because I'm not in hardware, and I don't have the information set they're operating from internally. But, they should have hoovered up as much cheap capital as they could while their stock price was high and the going was good to make the next period of heavy investments (to be fair, shares outstanding did grow, just not by a ton, %-wise, and they have a fair bit of cash on the balance sheet)

https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/NVDA/financials/quart... is painful to see, and I don't foresee it getting better in the next year.

[_carbyau_]

> The path they're taking right now, specifically regarding pricing towards & serving higher-end enthusiasts with newer products, makes sense while the used inventory gets cycled around the lower end of the market.

This approach might take a beating if AMD is willing for a price war. And AMD can because of their chiplet approach being cheaper.

I will buy nVidia purely because of dabbling interests in ML images... so a price war might not be so effective thanks to a technical moat.

[paulmd]

people absolutely SCREAMED a year ago when there was a rumor going around that NVIDIA was pulling back on new chip starts, it was going all around that it was a plan to "spike prices during the holidays".

In the end 2021Q4 shipments were actually up according to JPR, of course. But people were mad, and I still see that MLID article brought up as proof that NVIDIA was deliberately trying to "worsen the shortage" and "spike prices during the holidays".

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-allegedly-halting-RTX-3...

https://www.jonpeddie.com/press-releases/q421-sees-a-nominal...

Now, what MLID may not really know, is that wafer starts typically take about 6 months, so if he's hearing about reduced starts in October, it's probably more like NVIDIA is pulling back on expected Q1/Q2 production... which indeed did come down a bit.

But as to the public reaction... people were fucking mad about any sign of pulling back on production. People are just unreasonably mad about anything involving NVIDIA in general, every single little news item is instantly spun into its worst possible case and contextualized as a moustache-twirling plan to screw everyone over.

Like, would it have really been a bad thing to pull back on chip starts a year ago? That actually looks pretty sensible to me, and gamers will generally also suffer from the delay of next-gen products while the stockpile burns through anyway.

It's nowhere near the "sure miners may be annoying, but deal with it for 6 months and then we all get cheap GPUs and everyone holds hands and sings" that LTT and some other techtubers presented it as. Like, yeah, if you want a cheap 30-series card at the end of its generation/lifecycle great, but, you'll be waiting for 4050/4060/4070 for a while. Even AMD pushed back their midrange chips and is launching high-end-only to allow the miner inventory to sell through.

And people hate that now that they've realized the consequence, but they were cheering a year ago and demanding the removal of the miner lock / etc. More cards for the miners! Wait, no, not like that!

It's just so tiresome on any article involving NVIDIA, even here you've got the "haha linus said FUCK NVIDIA, that makes me Laugh Out Loud right guys!?" and the same tired "turn everything into a conspiracy" bullshit, constantly.

[smoldesu]

And that's just the hardware drama. The software hate against Nvidia is partially unwarranted too - Nvidia's Wayland issues mostly boil down to GNOME's refusal to embrace EGLStreams, which got whipped up into a narrative that Nvidia was actively working to sabotage the Linux community. The reality is that desktop Linux isn't a market (I say this as an Nvidia/Linux user), and they have no obligation to cater to the <.5% of the desktop community begging for changes. Honestly, they'd get more respect for adding a kernel-mode driver to modern MacOS.

In the end, Nvidia is still a business. Putting any money towards supporting desktop Linux isn't going to have an adverse effect on their overall sales. We're just lucky that they patch in DLSS/ray tracing support to Linux games and software like Blender.

[sophrocyne]

I have no particular animosity towards Nvidia, and while I'm critical of the ignorance/mistakes made regarding crypto, I think they're doing incredible work and running an insanely difficult business as best they can.

It's easy to forget that the world isn't as simple as we imagine it to be, and that gnostic conspiracies are attractively intuitive.

[cma]

Probably not much, but different investor guidance.

[doikor]

Nvidia did (does?) have a miner line of cards (CMP HX). Though they were mainly their server cards that failed QA but could still work as a miner.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/

These also had models that you can’t find anywhere on Nvidia website like HX170 that is basically a A100 with less memory

A lot of miners preferred consumer cards though as those can be sold to gamers once the bust comes again (and with crypto it always will every few years)

[sophrocyne]

Completely unaware of this line. Thanks for sharing.

Frankly, doesn’t paint a better picture for an Nvidia…

[doikor]

NVidia (and AMD for their own line) did not talk about these in the public much as they were really bad PR during the worst moments of the gpu shortages.

To the point that they never even updated the site for the later/better models (like the already mentioned 170HX). Only mentions of it you can find are the sellers you have to go to to get one (NVidia did not sell these directly to anyone as far as I know)

https://www.viperatech.com/product/nvida-cmp-170hx-professio...

[paulmd]

AMD developed a line of mining cards as well as well, and also some PS5-based mining rigs from asrock (it's a PS5 apu reject on a motherboard with VRAM...) that utilized AMD BC-250 mining processors.

https://wccftech.com/amd-rdna-crypto-mining-graphics-cards-r...

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-navi-12-bc-160-mining-...

https://www.techspot.com/news/93980-14800-asrock-mining-rig-...

We regret to inform you, the milkshake duck was selling mining cards too.

Welcome to capitalism, nobody cares about consumers all that much.

[throw101010]

> They never truly served the crypto market directly (e.g., there wasn't really a "miner" line of cards)

There were deliberate, and miserably failed, attempts to make lines of cards that could not be used for mining, while in parallel keeping their non-limited lines in production, making them the defacto miners' lines.

So yes they did know about it and tried to address it by catering to both markets, but were unable to do it correctly.

[izacus]

What would "correct" approach look like?

[sophrocyne]

ASICs probably.

The point you responded to is also fair; the fact they tried to lock miners out was a de facto acknowledgment that crypto had an impact on their sales, and is more critical evidence they handled it poorly.

[asciimike]

This is the route Intel is going down: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/intel-launches-new-bitc...

Time will tell if it works out (different chain, etc., etc.)