Intel should have appointed people form the HN comment section as their CEO, as they clearly know more about running a giant chip design and fabrication company than the guy who worked there for 10+ years.
It is something that is easy to miss if you are just looking at typical business strategy and finances. A high memory consumer GPU would undercut their server GPUs, which are presumably higher margin intended golden geese. It's easy to see them chasing server markets and "gamers" being an afterthought.
However there is huge demand right now for a modern, even a crappy modern, GPU with gobs of memory. Make the card and the open source AI tooling for it will start sprouting in days after it's release.
It's an extremely powerful position to have every at-home AI geek's setup to be bound to using intel cards and intel focused tooling. Nvidia and AMD won't do it because they want to protect their server cards.
So, incredibly small market share while your competitors already have the first-mover advantage and nailed down the ecosystem? With no data backing it up, I think, graphics cards for local LLM needs is not really on demand. Even for gaming it’s probably more attractive, but then again, that’s not even where the real money is.
Exactly. This x100. It was easy for Nvidia to succed in the LLM market by winging it, in the days when there was no LLM market, so they had the greenfield and first mover advantages.
But today, when Nvidia dominates the mature LLM market, Intel winging it the same way Nvidia did, won't provide nearly the same success as Nvidia had.
Ferruccio Lamborghini also built a successful sports car company by building tractors and cars in his garage. Today you won't be able to create a Lamborghini competitor with something you can build in your garage. The market has changed unrecognizably in the mean time.
The people learning how to do local LLMs will be the people directing build out of on-prem transformers for small-midsize companies. The size of the market is irrelevant here, it's who is in that market and the power they will have that is extremely relevant.
AMD has tried this for many of its technologies and I don't think it is working. Granted, they suck at open sourcing, but a shitload of it was open sourced. See TinyGrad voyage into the Red Box driver (streams on youtube).
It's either old slow Tesla cards with 48GB or $2000 nvidia cards with 24GB.
I think you're overestimating what people can and will do.
Nvidia didn't succeed because it just launchend cards and let people write CUDA for them. Nvidia is where it is because it has an army of researchers and SW engineers developing the full stack from research papers, to frameworks, to proofs of concepts, showing customers the value of paying for their pricey HW + SW, most of it proprietary, not community developed.
"People" alone won't be able to get even 10% there. And that's ignoring the fact that Nvidia HW is not FOSS so they'd be working blind.
The current local model/open source model community is literally an army of SWE's and researchers. They already make tons of tooling too.
We can't see the future, but neither can CEOs, no matter how well paid and respected they are.
After all the current CEO is being ousted, so obviously he didn't do the right things despite being a CEO.
I have my thoughts on the matter and cautiously welcomed their move to GPUs ( though admittedly on the basis that we -- consumers -- need more than amd/nvidia duopoly in that space; so I am not exactly unbiased ).
That's just speculation. There's no guarantee that would have happened. Nobody has a crystal ball to guarantee that as the outcome.
It's like saying if someone would have killed Hitler as a baby, that would have prevented WW2.
What do you think has happened so far?
Your mental model of the world may help me understanding the point you are trying to make.
That's just speculations from people online. I don't see any wisdom in that like you do, all I see is just a guessing game from people who think they know an industry when they don't (armchair experts to put it politely).
What made Nvidia dominant was not weak GPUs with a lot of RAM. The puzzle of their success had way more pieces that made the whole package appealing over many years, and a great timing of the market also helped. Intel making underperforming GPUs with a lot of RAM would not guarantee the same outcome at a later time in the market with an already entrenched Nvidia and a completely different landscape.
But since they obviously apply just as well to Intel itself, it is a poor reason to dismiss other’s ideas.
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> What made Nvidia dominant was not weak GPUs with a lot of RAM.
Intel doesn’t have the luxury of repeating NVidia’s path in GPUs. NVidia didn’t have to compete with an already existing NVidia-like incumbent.
That requires no speculation.
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Competing with an incumbent via an underserved low end, then moving up market, is called disruption.
It is a very effective strategy since (1) underserved markets may be small but are are immediately profitable, and (2) subsequent upward growth is very hard for the incumbent to defend against. The incumbent would have to lower their margins, and hammer their own market value.
And it would fit with Intel’s need to grow their foundry business from the low end up too.
They should take every low-end underserved market they can find. Those are good cards to play for ambitious startups and comebacks.
And the insane demand for both GPUs and chip making is increasing the number of such markets.
True, it is just speculation. 'Any' seems to be a strong qualifier. One of the reasons I troll landscape of HN is that some of the thoughts and recommendations expressed here ended up being useful in my life. One still has to apply reason and common sense, but I would not dream of saying it has no ( any ) wisdom.
<< What made Nvidia dominant was not weak GPUs with a lot of RAM.
I assume you mean: 'not in isolation'. If so, that statement is true. AMD cards at the very least had parity with nvidia, so it clearly wasn't just a question of ram.
<< The puzzle of their success had way more pieces that made the whole package appealing over many years, and a great timing of the market also helped.
I will be honest. I am biased against nvidia so take the next paragraph for the hate speech that it is.
Nvidia got lucky. CUDA was a big bet that paid off first on crypto and now on ai. Now, we can argue how much of that bet was luck meets preparation, because the bet itself was admittedly a well educated guess.
To your point, without those two waves, nvidia would still likely be battling amd in incremental improvements so the great market timing accounts for majority of its success. I will go as far as to say that we would likely not see a rush to buy 'a100s' and 'AI accellerators' with exception of very niche applications.
<< Intel making underperforming GPUs with a lot of RAM would not guarantee the same outcome at a later time in the market with an already entrenched Nvidia and a completely different landscape.
Underperforming may be the key word here and it is a very broad brush. In what sense are they underperforming and which segment are they intended for? As for ram, it would be kinda silly in current environment to put a new card out with 8gb; I think we can agree on that at least.
<< I'm saying nobody can guarantee the claim of the GP I've replied to,
True, but it is true for just about every aspect of life so as statements go, so it is virtually meaningless as an argument. Best one can do is argue possibilities based on what we do know about the world and the models it tends to follow.
The market for that is just not that large, it wouldn't move the needle on Intels revenue, but then again it could get the enthusiasts onboard and get Intels CUDA alternative moving.
But then you move up, and the incumbents have to choose to keep ceding more of their lower end or lower their margins. And it is very hard and costly for a company succeeding at the high end to do the later.
That would have been a fantastic sign Intel was getting more nimble and strategic.
And been a good fit with a come back in the low end of fabs too.
Some are probably multi millionaires smurfing (and I dont mean cryptobros).
Do you even have a Putnam award?