[ketzo]

Well, what are they gonna do about it?

Nvidia has the most desirable chips in the world, and their insane prices reflect that. Every hyperscaler is already massively incentivized to build their own chips, find some way to take Nvidia down a peg in the value chain.

Everyone in the world who can is already coming for Nvidia’s turf. No reason they can’t repay the favor.

And beyond just margin-taking, Nvidia’s true moat is the CUDA ecosystem. Given that, it’s hugely beneficial to them to make it as easy as possible for every developer in the world to build stuff on top of Nvidia chips — so they never even think about looking elsewhere.

[Xevion]

While I don't dispute that they're objectively the most desirable at the current moment - I do think your comment implies that they deserve it, or that people WANT Nvidia to be the best.

It almost sounds like you're cheering on Nvidia, framing it as "everyone else trying to reduce the value of Nvidia", meanwhile they have a long, long history of closed-source drivers, proprietary & patented cost-inflated technology that would be identical if not inferior to alternatives - if it weren't for their market share and vendor lock-in strategies.

"Well, what are they gonna do about it?" When dealing with a bully, you go find friends. They're going to fund other chip manufacturers and push for diversity, fund better drivers and compatibility. That's the best possible future anyone could hope for.

[Dr4kn]

I don't think this problem is going to be solved by hyper scalers offering their own accelerators. They probably offer better price to performance, but try to lock you into their ecosystem.

With the Nvidia solution you have at least another option. Vendor agnostic, but Nvidia lock in.

If most ML startups, one hyper scaler and at best also AMD, would go with one common backend, then it might get enough traction to become *the* standard.

[almostgotcaught]

> that would be identical if not inferior to alternatives - if it weren't for their market share and vendor lock-in strategies.

1. "Identical if not for market share" is a complete contradiction when what we're talking about is the network effect of CUDA

2. What vendor lock in? What are you talking about? They have a software and compiler stack that works with their chips. How is that lock in, that's literally just their product offering. In fact the truth is you can compile CUDA for AMD (using hipify) and guess what - the result sucks because AMD isn't a comparable alternative!

[Ygg2]

> In fact the truth is you can compile CUDA for AMD (using hipify)

You can compile x64 to ARM and performance tanks. Does this means ARM isn't a comparable alternative to x64?

It just means their software works badly with said architecture. Could be that AMD acceleration is horrible (but then the FSR would be worse) or it could be that it's just different, or the translation layer is bad.

[almostgotcaught]

> or the translation layer is bad

There's no translation layer - you don't understand how/what hipify and CUDA are. CUDA is a C/C++ extension and it connotes APIs. 90% of CUDA kernel code (ie the stuff that actually runs on the SMs) does compile for AMD without any changes (intrinsics diff). hipify goes the extra step of remaining APIs to their HIP variants.

Again, all of this is to say there's no vendor lockin like clueless whiny people complain and just a superior product.

[Ygg2]

The point was, I don't expect it to work or work smoothly. CUDA was made for Nvidia, same for ROCm on AMD. Comparing CUDA on AMD or ROCm isn't a fair

If Nvidia is better at AI tasks and is superior. Great. Maybe they can finally leave GPU field.

[almostgotcaught]

> CUDA was made for Nvidia, same for ROCm on AMD

I'm gonna say it again, loud and clear: you don't have any understanding of what you're saying and 90% of the kernel code is exactly the same, transferrable, compilable ie it's just cpp.

[jsosshbfn]

Yea but you're comparing a mid-level api to an architecture. It's just a category error. It's like saying C is just a PDP frontend.

[_zoltan_]

Ugh, that's such a bad take. why wouldn't you cheer for NVIDIA? They had the discipline, the courage and the long term vision that nobody else did for the last 20 years.

Closed source?? Who cares? It's their own products. Vendor lock in? It's their own chips man. You wouldn't expect Nvidia to develop software for AMD chips would you? That would be insane. I would not do that.

Their tech is superior to everybody else's and Jensen keeps pulling rabbits out of a hat. I hope they keep going strong for the next decade.

[Ygg2]

> why wouldn't you cheer for NVIDIA?

Because they are an amoral mass that seeks to make profit and has turned GPU market into a cluster fuck?

> Their tech is superior to everybody

Their only saving grace is CUDA, and DLSS, their hardware has been overvalued for quite some time.

[ksec]

>their hardware has been overvalued for quite some time.

It is often such a strange thing to see this on HN. From Software developers.

Their Hardware's value is derived from their Software. And Software for GPU is insanely hard. Both the driver and CUDA.

As Jensen once said, their Goal is to make the TCO ( Total Cost of Ownership ) so good, that even if their competitor were selling at cost of giving their GPU away from free they still would not be able to compete with them.

There will also come a point, may be in the next 2-3 years where the volume and margin of those GPU are so good they will be the second in line to take all the Fab capacity for larger die size on leading node. i.e They will always be one node ahead of their competitors. And when that happens both hardware and software will be ahead of everyone else.

[Ygg2]

> From Software developers.

As a developer, I have managed to stay outside their (nVidia and Apple both) moats. And what I've seen, as a consumer, has left me wanting. Granted m* battery life is impressive, but I'm not that much of a laptop person.

But I'd love for someone to enlighten me how a 16GB RAM upgrade with $200 dollar tag is any way normal.

> Their Hardware's value is derived from their Software

Their value is derived from their lock-in. If you bought into it, then yeah, it's going to be difficult to switch. OTOH, if you didn't, then there is almost no value.

> As Jensen once said

As Todd Howard once said - Sixteen times the detail![0]

Anecdotes aside, how is that working for nVidia? Oh, they just blackmailed GPU reviewers[1] and their GPU drivers randomly flicker, and cause kernel reboots[2]? Yeah. I definitely feel the TCO getting good, maybe even burnt. Much like their 12VHPWR connections.

But maybe they will fare much better on B2B, I couldn't tell you or care much about it. I honestly wish them a very SGI-experience. And seeing how they weathered the last craze (see cryptocurrency), I wouldn't bet my livelihood on it.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3rXKCT_STM

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiekGcwaIho

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTXoUsdSAnA

[_zoltan_]

it's funny that you're talking about their consumer fiascos in a thread that discussed enterprise hardware. completely unrelated.

[winterbloom]

Couldn't you replace Nvidia with apple here

They have a nice software stack but the hardware is overvalued

[Ygg2]

Mostly. I'm not an Apple fan either.

To be fair to Apple their hardware was always overpriced. Their deal is hardware + software combo.

[mustyoshi]

Arguably, CUDA is the current best in class software for it's market.

[amarcheschi]

We can also not cheer about apple imho

I mean, we could probably not cheer about big techs that routinely do shady things - or straight illegal things - for their own profit knowing they won't face consequences - or very light ones

[chii]

> Nvidia’s true moat is the CUDA ecosystem.

it is true, but also not. nvidia is certainly producing a chip that nobody else can replicate (unless they're the likes of google, and even they are not interested in doing so).

The CUDA moat is the same type of moat as intel's x86 instruction set. Plenty of existing programs/software stack have been written against it, and the cost to migrate away is high. These LLM pipelines are similar, and even more costly to migrate away.

But because LLM is still immature right now (it's only been approx. 3 yrs!), there's still room to move the instruction set. And middleware libraries can help (pytorch, for example, has more than just the CUDA backend, even if they're a bit less mature).

The real moat that nvidia has is their hardware capability, and CUDA is the disguised moat.

[david-gpu]

> The real moat that nvidia has is their hardware capability, and CUDA is the disguised moat.

There is an inmense amount of work behind the cuDNN libraries that outsiders keep ignoring.

These sort of high performance kernels are co-developed in very close collaboration with the hardware architects designing the chip. Speaking of the hardware in isolation of the high performance libraries reveals a deep misunderstanding of how the system was built. This is true of any mature vendor, not just Nvidia.

[rvnx]

Google is doing the TPUs, isn’t it exactly for that ?

[chii]

iirc, google's stuff is only for google, and they're not selling it as as something that others can buy.

I suppose this can change.

[tester756]

>it is true, but also not. nvidia is certainly producing a chip that nobody else can replicate

AMD, Intel?

[_zoltan_]

NVLink says hello. Then rack scale NVLink says hello...

Nobody can touch it. Then that's just the hardware. The software is so much better on Nvidia. The width and breadth of their offering is great and nobody is even close.

[tester756]

UALink?

>Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) is an open specification for a die-to-die interconnect and serial bus between AI accelerators. It is co-developed by Alibaba, AMD, Apple, Astera Labs,[1] AWS, Cisco, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, Meta, Microsoft and Synopsys.[2]

[Maxious]

The first UALink hardware is at least a year away if not 2 https://www.nextplatform.com/2025/04/08/ualink-fires-first-g...

[_zoltan_]

slideware

[rwmj]

[Genuine question!] Does NVidia have patents etc on CUDA that prevent a competitor from reverse engineering and producing a compatible clone, or is it just that competitors are incompetent (hey AMD)? Or is it that the task is enormous and rapidly changing, like you have to be bug-for-bug compatible with a large, ill-documented API (the Microsoft Windows moat)?

[paulryanrogers]

Competitors have tried. It's just chasing a moving target, so you're guaranteed to be behind and always playing catch-up.

[imtringued]

Tenstorrent is doing pretty well software wise.

[imtringued]

Google has already mostly exited the CUDA and Nvidia ecosystem. They only offer it for their customers at this point.

[mattlondon]

Ask Google: TPUs.

[roenxi]

> Well, what are they gonna do about it?

Ironically, the most effective thing they can do is probably haul up the AMD rep and yell at them.