I wonder what the thinking inside NVIDIA is at the moment. They have countless examples to learn from here, about the danger of not being willing to cannibalize your high end products. But, of course, there’s a reason that there are lots of examples of this sort of failure.
There’s plenty of competition that would be happy to attack them from below, though…
I also wonder what this moment will mean for chip design going forward. The fact that we are so constrained on the GPU side along with the success of unified memory with apple silicon does make me wonder what chips in 3-5 years will look like.
Those that can will incorporate memory into their designs, and the Chinese will be a bigger part of the memory market worldwide going into the future, that alone will drive more tech companies to look at memory/ssd design differently than what they did before. Market conditions have changed you either change/adapt with it or you die.
I think memory and ssd design will end up being incorporated into the overall design of the SOC chip. And several companies that can probably will sponsor a existing company or build a foundry going forward. Once again, change or die.
Unified Memory simply isn't viable at the scale that a full Nvidia cluster operates at, and it would hamstring the parallelism that gives these clusters an edge. The current solution of Mellanox-style interconnect is probably still going to be the status quo in 5 or 10 years.
Make money while there's money to be made then pivot to the next scheme?
Gaming > Bitcoin > LLMs > Robotics
Jensen's job is to just be one step ahead of the market dynamics to keep the investor dollars flowing.
That might seem like obvious pivots in hindsight , but there’s no way to make such easy predictions going forward.
“Jensen’s job is to just be one step ahead of the market” — how is that a “just”? That’s arguably one of the most difficult things to do reliably (judging by how much payout it can give you). Feels like saying he’s making “just” billions of dollars.
He's effectively setting the pace of the trends. Objectively, Bitcoin was a grift and money laundering scheme. LLM valuations vs what they've made so far is probably also quite a bit more towards the grift side (yes, I use them and yes they do good work in good hands). Robotics will probably be valued similarly, despite not actually having anywhere near the needed ROIs to make sense. The only time where revenue was actually grounded behind a sensible industry was gaming. But it doesn't matter because Jensen sells the shovels and, in the background, tells people where to dig. Dude's basically a genius at making money.