I’ve found that a lot of my friends who are into pc gaming still haven’t grokked that ever since the crypto boom, much less the ai boom, that they are the old toys that no one wants to play with anymore.
I had a friend who legitimately could not understand why Nvidia didn’t care about their reputation in the gaming market souring even after I showed him the numbers on how much nvidia is selling to corporations now.
I don’t know if it was an inability to deal with the numbers or if it’s just culture shock at going from being a valued client to as you said “baggage”, but it was a surprising number of people in that camp
Well this all did happen in the blink of an eye. 2022, Gaming was one of the only things booming after a global shutdown. 2023, investors all at once jumped ship to chase AI. That can be rather shocking even for tech, since people don't tend to upgrade their GPU's every year.
As a parallel, imagine hearing that the IPhone 13 was the biggest selling device in history. Then suddenly the IPhone 14 is $4000 and mostly sold to enterprise. It doesn't make any logical sense without following the money. Even then it may not make much sense.
I mean, for a long time the situation was reversed.
Huge gaming demand and easy retail availability of nvidia's cards was providing economies of scale. If a few professors were buying the GeForce 8800 to look at this new 'CUDA' thing that was mostly a marketing thing.
Around the same time there were also one or two Playstation 3 clusters - but a year or two later Sony removed support for that. HPC being inconsequential, and a distraction from their core business, presumably.
It's only in recent years the stuff that used to be marketing decoration has become reality.
Too true, but at the same time... gamers didn't disappear. The market is still there.
Sooner or later, someone else will fill the need. That may be AMD, it could be Intel if they just focus for more than a year, or it'll be some cheap Chinese GPU from a company you've never heard of. (Likely named by mashing the keyboard while capslock is on.)
It's like how the mainframe market is bigger than it has ever been, despite being an irrelevant rounding error in the minds of the "Wintel" server providers, cloud vendors, etc...