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by PostOnce 100 days ago
A consumer computer company is not going to push people towards building a miniature HPC cluster. Closest we'll ever get to that is multiple GPUs for video games.*

*Nvidia is no longer a primarily consumer company, so all the other GPU stuff is no counterpoint

4 comments

One could argue that if you are buying 512gb RAM machines you are not a typical consumer.
But you're also in the tiny minority of Apple customers, because most people who need 512GB of RAM are not looking at Apple products.
what else!?
> A consumer computer company

Apple isn't a just a consumer computer company. Both iPhones and Macs have very large business markets. In fact, I'd argue that the primary reason Apple hasn't locked down MacOS as much as iOS is that it'd absolutely kill the demand from software developers.

Apple isn’t really a consumer company. It does both consumer and enterprise stuff. Just look at all the fleet management stuff it does for ios and mac os.

And besides that, high end macbook prod and studios are workstation-class computers, not consumer-level computers.

It’s definitely a consumer company when you compare it to Microsoft.
The comparison is completely irrelevant.
The second I saw llms run on gpus i started trying to predict the last year that nvidia produces a consumer GPU product.
I am doing the reverse, and trying to predict the last year that LLMs use NVIDIA GPUs. It's just an accident of history that video game cards are useful for LLMs, and there is absolutely nothing that NVIDIA is doing from a design standpoint that the big hyperscalers can't do on their own, cutting NVIDIA out, and doing a better job of it as they know their own unique needs. The only advantage NVIDIA has is supply chain relationships and it takes time to establish those, but once that's done, we'll see all the big companies rolling their own silicon and no longer relying on NVIDIA.
That does make sense and I'm also certain will happen. I'm just saying that at this point NVIDIA is all in on "AI" so it has no choice. It will abandon its original customer base and product.

I don't think there will ever be a hard announcement. Just one day people will start asking when the next GPU line is coming out and it will never come. They won't even plan it they simply won't have the skills to do GPU design anymore.