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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

If they weren't why would Nvidia keep making them? They do seem like an increasingly niche product, but apparently not enough that Nvidia is willing to just exit the market and focus on the datacenters.

They aren't just for gaming, there's also high-end workstations, but that's probably even more niche.

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Have you seen the latest generation of Nvidia gaming cards? They are increasingly looking like an after thought.

I'm honestly curious why they keep making them. As far as I can tell, NVIDIA can sell literally as many datacenter AI chips as they can produce, and that would probably continue to be true even if they significantly increased prices. And even without increasing prices, the datacenter products are considerably higher margin than the consumer GPUs. Every consumer GPU they sell is lost revenue in comparison to using that fab capacity for a datacenter product.

The only reason I can imagine for them leaving the money on the table is that they think that the AI boom won't last that much longer and they don't want to kill their reputation in the consumer market. But even in that case, I'm not sure it really makes that much sense.

Maybe if consumer GPUs were literally just datacenter silicon that didn't make the grade or something, it would make sense but I don't think that's the case.

This is classic short term thinking. Whether or not AI is a bubble like the dot com bubble remains to be seen. But gamers have been buying Nvidia since before the dot com bubble and it is a market demand that has existed for a long time and will continue indefinitely. It doesn't make sense to cede this market to AMD.

I purposefully compare AI boom with the dot com bubble because we all knew how important the internet became eventually, but investments in it were way ahead of its time.

I pretty explicitly mentioned that possibility. I'm just a bit skeptical that, even if they completely abandoned the consumer GPU market, that they wouldn't be able to get back into it in 5 years or so when/if the bubble bursts. The longer they are out, the harder it would be to get back in with non-trivial market share (since the longer they are out the more their brand would have eroded), but also, the longer they are out, the more money they would have left on the table by staying in for so long.

They pretty much are doing the bare minimum in the gaming space already.

It is a false dichotomy. They can spend the bare minimum to stay in the game card market while fabing AI cards. At this point that is just an insurance premium.

How would one learn to be a marketable AI dev/researcher if not playing with the ecosystem/tooling on a consumer hardware? If nobody is exploring AI at home, the influx of fresh minds ceases, the development of the field slows down or stops entirely, market gets disillusioned and the field eventually disappears.

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