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Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

If Nvidia was at all in a hurry to lock-out third-parties, then I don't think they would support OpenCL and Vulkan compute, or allow customers to write PTX compilers that interface with Nvidia hardware.

In reality, the demand for highly parallelized compute simply blindsided OEMs. AMD, Intel and Apple were all laser-focused on raster efficiency, none of them have a GPU architecture optimized for GPGPU workloads. AMD and Intel don't have competitive fab access and Apple can't sell datacenter hardware to save their life; Nvidia's monopoly on attractive TSMC hardware isn't going anywhere.

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The profit margins on Macs must be insane because it just doesn’t make sense at all Apple just doesn’t give a fuck about data center workloads when they have some of the best ARM CPUs and whole packages on the market.

If Xserve is any basis of comparison, Apple struggles to sell datacenter hardware in the best of markets. The competition is too hot nowadays, and Apple likely knows the investment wouldn't be worth it. ARM CPUs are available from Ampere and Nvidia now, Apple Silicon would have to differentiate itself more than it does on mobile. After a certain point, it probably does come down to the size of the margins on consumer hardware.

I will never not be forever saddened by the fact that Apple killed their Xserve line shortly before the App store got big. We all ended up having to do dumb things like rack-mount Mac Minis for app CI builds for years and it was such a pain.

there was news they recently bought a lot of nvidia gpus since their progress was too slow to use their own chips even in their own data centers for their own purposes

I don't know how it happened, but Intel completely dropped out of the AI accelerator market.

There are really only three competitors in this market with one also-ran company.

Obviously it's Nvidia, Google and tenstorrent.

The also ran company is AMD, whose products are only bought as a hedge against Nvidia. Even though the hardware is better on paper, the software is so bad that you get worse performance than Nvidia. Hence "also ran".

Tenstorrent isn't there yet, but it's just a matter of time. They are improving with every generation of hardware and their software stack is 100% open source.

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