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by anon2914 hours ago |
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upvoteby foobiekr1 hours ago|
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Nvidia's moat is the IBM, Microsoft moat:

I am about to spend $20M, if I buy anything other than Nvidia, and things go wrong, I am going to get blamed, and if things go right I will get no credit. This is why AMD is making no progress outside of very narrow cases and supercomputing.

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upvoteby FuriouslyAdrift4 hours ago|
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AMD Instinct is their direct competitor for compute and they are better per dollar, better per watt, and out competing on raw performance.

Only thing holding them back is fab capacity which nVidia keeps buying in bulk to keep them small.

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upvoteby HDThoreaun4 hours ago|
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AMD is held back by their interconnect and firmware disadvantage compared to nvidia. They’ve been trying really hard to create their own cuda, but rocM and HIP still aren’t very popular especially for research.
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upvoteby pocksuppet3 hours ago|
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And their repeated refusal to either implement CUDA or reimplement everyone's CUDA libraries on their own platform. They say that AMD never misses a chance to miss a chance.
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upvoteby anon2914 hours ago|
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Have you ever actually had anyone work with these chips? Developer ux on amd is terrible.
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upvoteby FuriouslyAdrift2 hours ago|
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Yes. We have a quad MI300A server and run several inference models on it. For $107k it has saved us so much money on tokens already and it's a heck of a lot faster than cloud services.
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upvoteby lelanthran2 hours ago|
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> Have you ever actually had anyone work with these chips? Developer ux on amd is terrible.

Just how much of dev ux do you need? A foundational library, of course, but as the AI companies keep saying, their models can vibe-code what's needed for those chips anyway.

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upvoteby nradov4 hours ago|
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I thought that Nvidia's moat was more in CUDA? Hardware is hard but we've already seen other companies like Google design neural processors with compute efficiency close to Nvidia.
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upvoteby dsl4 hours ago|
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General compute is also the worst solution to the problem.

Nvidia's entire business is dependent on Google not being able to make TPUs fast enough.

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upvoteby foobiekr1 hours ago|
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Google would have to start selling them (the real ones, complete with interconnect) to third parties. If google does that, though, Nvidia is done.

Unlike AMD, Google can actually ship software. AMD has never shipped good software other than drivers (maybe) in the entire history of the company, including both ATi's history and true AMD. They have always relied on Intel to provide the software.

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upvoteby therobots9274 hours ago|
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Oh great, good to know the shovel seller has the market cornered.

Now back to the conversation, do any of the gold miners have a moat? Or is this a race to the bottom?

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