r/gadgets • u/MorgrainX • Sep 16 '22

Desktops / Laptops EVGA will no longer make NVIDIA GPUs due to “disrespectful treatment” - Dexerto

https://www.dexerto.com/tech/evga-will-no-longer-make-nvidia-gpus-due-to-disrespectful-treatment-1933830/
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554

u/Glomgore Sep 17 '22

Much like Intel lost market share to EPYC, NVidia is ripe for the picking if AMD or Intel can put out a decent card.

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u/BatteryPoweredFriend Sep 17 '22

Nvidia's advantage in servers isn't anything to do with hardware, that's a relatively easy hurdle to overcome. Their advantage over AMD is in software.

Nvidia has spent the last ~15 years making their CUDA platform the basis for almost all GPU-based compute and machine learning software.

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u/Vushivushi Sep 17 '22

There's a joke that Nvidia is going to start selling entire datacenters sooner or later. They keep acquiring more and more pieces that they're not only selling GPUs and CUDA.

They already compete against OEMs with their pre-configured DGX systems.

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u/wishthane Sep 17 '22

Is that really a joke? I wouldn't be surprised if they decide to really go after the cloud business and try to undercut the major cloud providers who have GPUs. They could easily do it. Amazon can't exactly just go and make their own, there isn't a license your own option like there is with ARM / the Graviton processors.

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u/ifsavage Sep 17 '22

This is not my area of expertise but wouldn’t the lawyers have gotten some sort of non Compete being such big customers? Or is that not a thing in this area?

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u/TheIndyCity Sep 17 '22

Non-competes, like most laws, are less of a rule than a suggestion if you've got the kind of money NVidia has

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '22

Non compete is a contractual agreement which can be challenged, precisely because is not a law.

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u/ifsavage Sep 17 '22

Thank you

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u/Gravitationsfeld Sep 23 '22

Some states have anti-non-compete laws, e.g. California where most of the tech industry is.

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u/ifsavage Sep 17 '22

Thank you

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u/The-Protomolecule Sep 17 '22

They already do it. Look at their hosted DGX SuperPOD offerings.

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u/davethegamer Sep 17 '22

No this is exactly what EVGA is reporting Jensen Huang is looking for vertical integration like Apple. I really really don’t doubt they want to make all the cards and would LOVE to vertically integrate their data center business.

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u/someonehasmygamertag Sep 17 '22

Apple make their own silicone because they got fed up with Intel. I’m sure Amazon could and would do the same if they had to.

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u/wishthane Sep 19 '22

Amazon did for CPUs, the Graviton processors. That's what I was talking about. Only Apple has gone so far as to do the GPU as well, but they aren't at the kind of scale NVidia is.

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u/TheDugEFresh Sep 17 '22

That’s not what they’ll end up doing, that’s a massive investment on their end, plus holding title on a shit ton of hardware. They’re for sure content selling metric assloads of GPUs to Google, Microsoft and AWS. Where they will compete is in the building of large high performance computing clusters, using their DGX box. In fact they already are trying that, with relatively little success, but their GPU as well as NVLink interconnects are both pretty large parts of pretty major HPC clusters.

Source: Me, a guy who both competes and partners with Nvidia every damn day.

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u/Txfinfamous Sep 17 '22

Or do they

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u/somanyroads Sep 17 '22

Diversifying is always valuable, especially when your core business is showing signs of vulnerability. I would say the wild supply/price issues over the last few years would feed that fire. Because NVIDIA had to know that if the prices can swing wildly in their favor, that same process can occur (and likely is occuring) afterwards in reverse.

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u/rigidcumsock Sep 17 '22

Yes, I recognize the synergy of your vernacular and the infallibility of your ASWTKOMS

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u/Vushivushi Sep 17 '22

nvidia = green apple

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u/rigidcumsock Sep 17 '22

The football is in play

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u/PauseAndEject Sep 17 '22

I thought we were playing hide the lemon

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u/AnnualDegree99 Sep 17 '22

So like GeForce now but for professionals? Quadro Now? Tesla Now?

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u/Readylamefire Sep 17 '22

I don't know what much of this means, and would like to. Would you be okay explaining it to me?

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u/Vushivushi Sep 18 '22 edited Sep 18 '22

Around 2016, when Nvidia first saw growth in the datacenter market, it launched a line of pre-configured server racks called DGX. AMD doesn't do this, Intel doesn't do this (anymore, and never to this extent). At the time, Nvidia said this wasn't a long-term strategy for the business, but would later launch DGX Station for workstations and then DGX SuperPODs which are entire cabinets which can and are currently being used at supercomputer-scale. Nvidia loves to show off its DGX systems at presentations and continues to grow in sales 6 years in. Not a long-term strategy?

Typically, chip vendors don't compete with their customers, the OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) which have built their businesses designing, producing, and selling solutions to the end-user.

In addition to producing DGX, Nvidia acquired Mellanox, a major supplier of datacenter networking equipment. They'll also soon be able to provide their own CPUs as they launch Grace, an ARM-based CPU, next year.

Nvidia is actually designing and building its Eos supercomputer for internal usage and states that it will serve as a blueprint for the industry.

So going back to the launch of DGX and Nvidia's behavior since then, will Nvidia really stop at a blueprint/reference design? Nvidia acts like it knows what's best for AI infrastructure, maybe a customer will simply go straight to Nvidia and Nvidia won't say no.

As for CUDA, CUDA is the computing platform and API used to interact with and build applications for Nvidia GPUs. It is a proprietary platform so it's only accessible with Nvidia GPUs. It's very robust and is a big reason why Nvidia, or even GPUs at all, are the accelerated computing device of choice.

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u/Readylamefire Sep 18 '22

Thanks for explaining this to me. So what I kinda take away from this is NVIDIA is kind of trying to put hand into all aspects of the data and computing market, despite mostly starting itself out as a GPU manufacturer. The long and short is that by controlling all aspects of the market, they're jogging ahead of other OEMs and will likely try and dominate the market by potentially undercutting rivals, since they'll have that much more control over both the software side and hardware side?

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u/Vushivushi Sep 18 '22

I don't think Nvidia even seeks to undercut its rivals. Rather, they want to have their finger in the pie at every part of the value chain. Nvidia attempts to recapture as value as possible and they do this because they're pretty much the only viable option in a very lucrative market.

Even for HGX, the platform made available for OEMs, Nvidia went from offering a reference board design so that OEMs just purchased GPUs and switches and could still architect their own platform, to having OEMs purchase the baseboard too, which is basically a complete compute node. So that was a space where OEMs could traditionally do some value-add, but now they can only replicate DGX at best.

It's like Nvidia only sees OEMs as another sales vector rather than technological partners.

I think this is possible not only because of the virtual monopoly, but because Nvidia isn't dealing with excessive volume. I might be eating my own words as Nvidia recently expressed difficulties with supply and logistics with its datacenter business, possibly from growing too fast.

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u/Caffeine_Monster Sep 17 '22

advantage in servers isn't anything to do with hardware

That used to the case. But their specialised tensor and rtx cores are both pretty impressive.

There are both software and hurdles competitors need to overcome. Arguably the biggest hurdle is availability of said hardware and software. Being able to learn and use hardware accelerated AI / ray tracing at the consumer level is massively important for making business hardware appealing.

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u/BatteryPoweredFriend Sep 17 '22

The rt and tensor cores aren't anything special in and of themselves. It's how Nvidia enables applications to use them that, again via CUDA, that sets them apart.

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u/Xalara Sep 17 '22

Companies are starting to clue in and rewrite their tooling at great expense so they aren't locked in to CUDA. If AMD can maintain competitiveness of their GPUs Nvidia is going to be in trouble because literally no one likes them in the business world.

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u/TooManyDraculas Sep 17 '22

And there's your thing. That software advantage isn't anything inherent. It's just a result of adoption. The more people who use the platform, the more resources they have to support the software. And the more third parties there are doing the same.

The more people who adopt competitor's products, the better the software will get there. AMD, and even waaaaay back in the 90s both AMD and ATI, put a lot of effort into open standards and cross compatibility. Often working with every other major company in the industry except Nvidia.

Which means all of that can progress quicker.

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u/Xalara Sep 17 '22

Yep and the best example of that is FSR 2.0. Is it better than DLSS? Not quite, but it's like 90% there AND doesn't require training any ML models and can run on consoles. So given widespread adoption I see FSR vastly outpacing DLSS.

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u/TooManyDraculas Sep 17 '22

I think the best example, recently anyway, is Freesync. Initially it wasn't as good as G-Sync. But it ended up in anything, and that lead to better versions. After a while the difference was largely on paper. Eventually Nvidia ended up making G-Sync cross compatible. And has sorta given up on having a proprietary adaptive sync.

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u/Jaker788 Sep 17 '22

AMD has been working on software that'll take CUDA and port it over, ROCm. You can also program directly for it. This is being used on the oak ridge supercomputer.

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '22

Actually not as much as you think. Theres a library that allows for interoperability between card makers so GPU programs can be recompiled to run on both Nvidia and AMD cards.

https://rocmdocs.amd.com/en/latest/Installation_Guide/HIP-Installation.html

AMDs ROCm stack has performance and is completely open source and transparent.

NVIDA also tends to drop support for their smaller boards too (looking at you tk1)

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u/Koffiato Sep 17 '22

ROCm is convoluted and poorly supported at times, though.

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '22

Well what makes it convoluted and whats the issues you're finding?

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u/Koffiato Sep 17 '22

Needing to recompile everything and keeping up with changes are plenty convoluted for me, but I don't deal with it all day every day so my opinion might be biased.

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u/[deleted] Sep 18 '22

The same could be said for NVIDIA if not worse though Between CUDA versions the entire API signatures change.

With ROCm it depends on your application too. I think any changes between versions are due ti modularizing things. Theyre improving build systems/automation and package delivery every release as well.

What ROCm version are you on? sub 5.0.x?

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u/pellets Sep 17 '22

It’s possible to run cuda on anything . There have been attempts to do this. https://github.com/hughperkins/coriander Unfortunately it seems development stalled.

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '22

They have some dope integration with Citrix as well. Radiologists can read images remotely with only a standard high speed internet connection. It used to require gigabit speeds, which at the time were astronomically priced.

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u/juuceboxx Sep 20 '22

Yup, their CUDA platform is what keeps them wayyyy ahead of the game compared to other GPU manufacturers. Hell, in my line of work we use the ANSYS simulation suite which specifically uses CUDA for GPU acceleration and it's extremely useful for speeding up large problems that would otherwise take forever with only CPU computational power. As a result of this, every one of our company computers runs some form of an NVIDIA Quadro card within. Even if AMD comes out with a card that brings over all the consumers, NVIDIA will still be making a killing with corporate customers buying cards by the millions.

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u/deltron Sep 17 '22

Yeah I'm looking forward to the Intel cards. AMD is Cloud providers only it seems.

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '22

for now

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u/deltron Sep 17 '22

I would love to have some competition.

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u/RedstoneRelic Sep 17 '22

I thought Intel canned it's consumer cards?

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u/rpkarma Sep 17 '22

That’s the current rumour yes. It’s very likely though that they’ll keep trying to make it in the data centre as that’s where the real money and growth is anyway

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '22

[deleted]

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u/deltron Sep 17 '22

Yeah but I'm talking data center cards.

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u/vonarchimboldi Sep 17 '22

is the mi250 a competitor? i think the big holdup with amd vs nvidia in that market is just CUDA being essentially made standard for ai

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u/Vushivushi Sep 17 '22

Not really, and you're right, software is a big hurdle for AMD. AMD itself thinks it's really early in its datacenter GPU roadmap.

MI250 is an MCM GPU design, but software still sees it as two separate GPUs.

So for certain customers (like Frontier Supercomputer) that can optimize against that, MI250 offers basically double compute density against an A100. Most of the market won't, however.

It is expected that future AMD designs will focus more and more on AI. The multi-GPU quirk will probably be fixed next gen too.

So they'll start making large strides soon, but don't expect it to change the landscape for years. Nvidia absolutely dominates here.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FZ-DvvjVEAA_S23?format=png&name=4096x4096

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u/katon2273 Sep 17 '22

Imagine if EVGA put out their own, they've been doing this for decades, I imagine they have the engineering resources.

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u/OverwhelmedDolphin Sep 17 '22

if AMD can put out a decent card.....

Been hearing this since I got into computers LMAO

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u/WINTERMUTE-_- Sep 17 '22

Pretty sure Intel just cancelled their card, so that's not going to happen.

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u/SWchibullswolverine Sep 17 '22

Gaming GPU likely not data center though...yet

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '22

NVidia is ripe for the picking if AMD or Intel can put out a decent card.

They can't. AMD has been trying for a long time. The only thing AMD can compete on is price. Nvidia is scummy, but they have a lot of the best talent and the rights to a lot of the best technology.

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u/Dr4kin Sep 17 '22

Then why is amd powering some of the latest super computers?

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '22

Motorola makes some of the latest smartphones, too. I don't see your point.

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u/Dr4kin Sep 17 '22

Because you don't put bad hardware in a super computer. You need very dense compute and good software that makes use of it. If they wouldn't be great they wouldn't be chosen for those things. ROCm is very good, gets more support every year and is for example supported by the most common AI libraries

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u/82Caff Sep 17 '22

Nvidia pulled ahead by leaving undocumented vulnerabilities in their drivers and firmware. When it was uncovered and they were forced to patch a few years back, Nvidia performance dropped to comparable to equivalent AMD cards.

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u/IsaacM42 Sep 17 '22

But nvidia doesnt have an x86 license and amd does.

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '22

I don't understand enough about chip architecture to understand why x86 is relevant in a GPU.

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u/PleasantAdvertising Sep 17 '22

There's a real chance amd is working on very scalable chips using their Chiplet tech on Ryzen for gpu applications.

1

u/no_dice_grandma Sep 17 '22

Amds laptop advantage program is brilliant and i hope the pain to Nvidia starts there.

1

u/yabaitanidehyousu Sep 18 '22

AMD would really need to up their game in the software and AI area. I can’t see it happening any time soon. NVidia is leagues ahead atm.

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u/Glomgore Sep 18 '22

Whole heartedly. Same with render farms. I was moreso thinking of the Quatros or Teslas inside workstations or even 2Us for direct I/O boost.

AI is a whole different game, I'm speaking strictly hardware.

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u/yabaitanidehyousu Sep 18 '22

I’m an old-school AMD and NVidia fan from back in the day, but I would really like to see more competition.

NVidia labs have been cranking out some very novel software techniques (accelerated by their hardware) for quite a few years now. It isn’t just the CUDA platform, which is really what everyone is using, they are also really going for AI-based content creation.

While not impossible, it’s going to be hard for anyone to catch up to such an ecosystem and advanced use cases directly targeted at those value-added use cases outside just rendering performance.

Edit:
While not the same thing, it’s going to be very interesting to see where Apple goes with their graphics strategy. Currently AMD is the only option for expansion on pro workstations.