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Comment by flipgimble | Hacker News Reader

It's important to remember that you can always make it look like you are ahead of Moore's Law curve if you are willing to spend more for silicon and the energy to power it.

This appears to be a GPU design for those applications where extreme (by mobile and desktop standards) power consumption and cost can be justified. Correspondingly NVIDIA has been trying to move into the data center for deep learning and rendering. They pushed out a lot of good research on how to do the computationally expensive parts of rendering on the server, and leave the client to do the last interactive part locally.

The market allows for this silicon giant because of the current Deep Learning and VR hype. If there were to be another AI and VR winter I'd expect NVIDIA's marketing to re-focus on power efficiency and architecture tweaks once again.

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VR hype has very little to do with NVIDIA selling these cards. The primary market they are targeting with the new Quadros is offline rendering which is a pretty big market for high end CPUs and which hasn't used GPUs as heavily as you might expect until now because GPUs have not been very efficient at ray tracing extremely large scenes. I was at the presentation today and I don't even remember them mentioning VR. The emphasis was all on these new GPUs accelerating high end offline rendering for movies, TV, architecture, advertising, etc.

100%. I do a lot of renders for our marketing from time to time. Because its currently done on a CPU, anything even a little complex takes many hours to get retina renders out without fuzz.

> The market allows for this silicon giant because of the current Deep Learning and VR hype.

One of three things is true:

1) Nvidia has misstepped and no one will buy large, expensive chips

2) Companies are buying large, expensive chips because they're purchasing based on hype rather than use

3) Companies are buying large, expensive chips because even at their prices, their performance delivers greater business value

I'd argue that improvements in ML techniques have tipped us into (3). Intel and Microsoft's fortunes weren't built on being faster: they were built on allowing businesses to do new categories of work on computers.

Amdahl is the new Moore

Don't forget 4) Companies are buying large, expensive chips because they are being used and delivering value, but hype has occluded other more cost effective solutions. See the articles about, 'you don't need deep learning' (or was that big data?)

You gotta trace the money, though. I don't think ML is all hype, but if you only look one level deep you can get some silly conclusions. For example, just because Nvidia can sell these things does not mean the purchaser will ultimately recoup their value, but even if they do the clients of that business might not recoup their costs. At the end of the day, a lot of people are investing huge amounts of money into ML, but it is hugely possible that this is in part due to expectations that won't actually be met in the end.

What they were emphasising today was replacing a $2 million CPU based render farm used for offline rendering with their new hardware at 25% the cost and 10% the power usage for the same or better results. To the extent those numbers are realistic (and it seems like they are) it's going to be a pretty straightforward value proposition for companies that have render farms. This was SIGGRAPH so ML wasn't the main emphasis.

Yep, fair points. I was mostly replying regarding ML hype. Clearly, the value for renderfarms is proven at this point.

There is still the implementation, debugging and testing/validation cost.

Or... What if we do not care if the first, second or third order of customers recoup anything.

What if only what is important is that by these being available, and the first several adoption catagories identify new categories/opportunities of work that will allow for the next leap in whichever direction can only manifest on the carcasses of these early adoptions...

I expect there's certainly a lot of that.

But entry data analysts are ~USD$60k / yr?

At that price, substituting hardware for even low-hanging, first-order prediction models starts to look attractive.

NVidia has increased power efficiency and cost efficiency every generation. Sometimes they haven't increased as much as we would like, but in the absence of serious competition this is what we get.

The chip shown today (GT102?) is much larger than GP102 but smaller than GV100, so it's not clear to me what it should be compared against.

Better than intel desktop/laptop cpus which have not increased core counts in literally a decade.

The market need is not yet clear, at this point. However, the need for CPUs which are individually more powerful and which use up less power has been proven.

They're just focusing on where the money is now.

> If there were to be another AI and VR winter I'd expect NVIDIA's marketing to re-focus on power efficiency and architecture tweaks once again.

Others have already pointed out that Nvidia has been improving efficiency at a pretty steady pace (and they are way ahead of AMD in the respect.)

But Volta was much more than just an just an architectural tweak compared to Pascal.

We don’t know the details yet about Turing, but Jen-Hsun said on stage today that it can execute floating point and integer ops in parallel, which suggests that it’s also based on the Volta architecture.

> power efficiency

I don't know about their marketing, but Volta has pretty impressive perf/watt. Loads of the systems in the Green500 have NVIDIA GPUs.

I totally agree with your core point. We definitely needs to be more responsible with how we design next generation computing chips. We need to think about power consumption especially in current world where climate change, power/resource shortages are looming large at horizon.

But that’s exactly Nvidia has been doing over the last 9 years???

Even for the same process, they’ve improved efficiency for the same workloads.

And indeed NVidia placed a big emphasis on how much more power efficient this chip is for its intended workloads than an equivalent CPU based render farm, using less than 10% of the power.

There was thing called VR hype, it is no longer the case any more. The new hype is crypto.

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