[seabass-labrax]

Quite possibly; I'm not sure why calls would be better than straight-up buying the stock, but I am certain that Nvidia is going to have a pretty good time of the LLM hype.

Nvidia seem to me to have been consistently competent in improving their product lines. Perhaps my only criticism would be of their artificial hampering of some of their products, which they do in order to appease certain PC gamers by excluding the gaming market from usual supply/demand effects. This has the knock-on effect of severely reducing the compatibility of the hardware with Linux, which of course is by far the most sensible option for cloud computing hosts right now.

[__jonas]

> Perhaps my only criticism would be of their artificial hampering of some of their products, which they do in order to appease certain PC gamers by excluding the gaming market from usual supply/demand effects

Can you elaborate what you mean by this? I thought Nvidia is outpricing their PC gamer customers because of their focus on AI? I’m curious how they have hampered their products in your opinion.

[seabass-labrax]

Here's one reference: https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Lock-Broken

My reading of the saga is that the cryptocurrency mining bubble was causing huge demands for Nvidia GPUs as parallel processors (with ASICS for mining only starting to appear at this point). This meant that GPUs were being priced-out of the market for most PC gamers, as it was always profitable for cryptocurrency miners to buy more of them.

Nvidia introduced a lock on 'non-professional' cards which prevented alternative firmware from being loaded on them, effectively splitting the market into two, one for 'gamers' and the other for 'miners'. That lock interferes with the open source driver for Linux, Nouveau, meaning that normal things like CUDA (and not least running games!) couldn't be done on Linux without a labyrinthine network of proprietary drivers that, for instance, couldn't be updated automatically.

It seems as if Nvidia succeeded, because from my passive awareness of the PC gaming world, people seem very happy with their new GPUs. But for those using Linux for servers, at home or for AI research, it has been an ongoing nightmare.

[latchkey]

That lock was broken with the NVIDIA leak.

H100's were not used for mining.

Regardless, in general, there is little demand for GPUs for mining any longer after ETH switched to PoS.

[coffeebeqn]

Nvidia is specifically not on the LLM train - almost all possible forms of AI can use parallel compute chips to great effect. Their own AI products like DLSS have nothing to do with LLMs

[seanhunter]

DLSS sure, but they have products targeted squarely at model training eg the H100. https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/data-center/dgx-h100/?ncid=pa-s...

[whatwhaaaaat]

I do not believe this is correct. Sure you can run llama or something locally on a cpu or your Apple arm but it’s not even close to the speed of running on a Nvidia card.

Do you think nvidias trillion dollar valuation is because entire governments are buying Nvidia cards to run stable diffusion?!

[tayo42]

Don't calls increase potential gains through leverage? With the usual high risk downside of the option ending up worthless.