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I’d say their recent releases were quite mixed.

The Battlemage GPUs have decent performance at an attractive price for many consumers. But at the same time the CPU overhead problems are a big issue at exactly that price point.

Arrow Lake had some great efficiency gains, but that was because previously it was terrible. Now it’s better, but still not even close to the likes of Apple. Great improvements on the efficiency cores and with that in some productivity tasks, but not much on the performance cores and latency seems to be a big issue. So that’s pretty mixed, especially when comparing it to AMD’s offerings.

Lunar Lake seems imo is a very interesting product, but also apparently a one off. So seems like they won’t “keep doing that”.

Sadly i’m not too knowledgeable in the probably more important data center space. Granite/Sierra Forest seem like quite decent products, so hopefully they’ll continue to keep improving there. Gaudi 3 i really don’t know much about, but i don’t think they sold much of those. And they just canceled their Falcon shores release and the next Jaguar Shores is probably in 2026, so nothing new in this year?

If we are talking the manufacturing side, rather than design/software i am very curious to see how SIMC develops. You are absolutely right that there is a big advantage for the second mover, since they can avoid dead ends and already know on an abstract level what is working. And diminishing returns also help make gaps be slightly less relevant.

However i think we can’t just apply the same timeline to them and say “they have 7nm now” and it took others x years to progress from there to 5nm or 3nm, because these steps include the major shift from DUV to EUV, which was in the making for a very long time. And that’s a whole different beast compared to DUV, where they are also probably still relying on ASML machines for the smallest nodes (although i think producing those domestically is much more feasible). Eventually they’ll get there, but i think this isn’t trivial and will take more than 2 years for sure.

On the design side vs Nvidia the hyperscalers like Alibaba/Tencent/Baidu or maybe even a smaller newcomer might be able to create something competitive for their specific usecases (like the Google TPUs). But Nvidia isn’t standing still either, so i think getting close to parity will be extremely hard there aswell.

Of course, the price gap will shrink at the same rate as ROCm matures and customers feel its safe to use AMD hardware for training.

Well to what degree ROCm matures and closes the gap is probably the question. Like i said, i agree that their hardware seems quite capable in many ways, although my knowledge here is quite limited. But AMD so far hasn’t really shown that they can compete with Nvidia on the software side.

As far as Intel goes, being slow in my reply helps my point. Just today Intel canceled their next-generation GPU Falcon Shore, making it an internal development step only. As much as i am rooting for them, it will need a major shift in culture and talent for them to right the ship. Gaudi 3 wasn’t successful (i think they didn’t even meet their target of $500mio sales) and now they probably don’t have any release in 2025, assuming Jaguar Lake is 2026 since Falcon Shore was slated for end of this year. In my books that is the definition of being behind more than 1 year, considering they are not even close to parity right now.

Yeah. I don’t believe market value is a great indicator in this case. In general, I would say that capital markets are rational at a macro level, but not micro. This is all speculation/gambling.

I have to concede that point to some degree, since i guess i hold similar views with Tesla’s value vs the rest of the automotive Industry. But i still think that the basic hirarchy holds true with nvidia being significantly ahead of the pack.

My guess is that AMD and Intel are at most 1 year behind Nvidia when it comes to tech stack. “China”, maybe 2 years, probably less.

Imo you are too optimistic with those estimations, particularly with Intel and China, although i am not an expert in the field.

As i see it AMD seems to have a quite decent product with their instinct cards in the server market on the hardware side, but they wish they’d have something even close to CUDA and its mindshare. Which would take years to replicate. Intel wish they were only a year behind Nvidia. And i’d like to comment on China, but tbh i have little to no knowledge of their state in GPU development. If they are “2 years, probably less” behind as you say, then they should have something like the rtx 4090, which was released end of 2022. But do they have something that even rivals the 2000 or 3000 series cards?

However, if you can make chips with 80% performance at 10% price, its a win. People can continue to tell themselves that big tech always will buy the latest and greatest whatever the cost. It does not make it true.

But the issue is they all make their chips at the same manufacturer, TSMC, even Intel in the case of their GPUs. So they can’t really differentiate much on manufacturing costs and are also competing on the same limited supply. So no one can offer 80% of performance at 10% price, or even close to it. Additionally everything around the GPU (datacenters, rack space, power useage during operation etc.) also costs, so it is only part of the overall package cost and you also want to optimize for your limited space. As i understand it datacenter building and power delivery for them is actually another limiting factor right now for the hyperscalers.

Google, Meta and Amazon already make their own chips. That’s probably true for DeepSeek as well.

Google yes with their TPUs, but the others all use Nvidia or AMD chips to train. Amazon has their Graviton CPUs, which are quite competitive, but i don’t think they have anything on the GPU side. DeepSeek is way to small and new for custom chips, they evolved out of a hedge fund and just use nvidia GPUs as more or less everyone else.

Looking at the market cap of Nvidia vs their competitors the market belives it is, considering they just lost more than AMD/Intel and the likes are worth combined and still are valued at $2.9 billion.

And with technology i mean both the performance of their hardware and the software stack they’ve created, which is a big part of their dominance.

It’s a reaction to thinking China has better AI

I don’t think this is the primary reason behind Nvidia’s drop. Because as long as they got a massive technological lead it doesn’t matter as much to them who has the best model, as long as these companies use their GPUs to train them.

The real change is that the compute resources (which is Nvidia’s product) needed to create a great model suddenly fell of a cliff. Whereas until now the name of the game was that more is better and scale is everything.

China vs the West (or upstart vs big players) matters to those who are investing in creating those models. So for example Meta, who presumably spends a ton of money on high paying engineers and data centers, and somehow got upstaged by someone else with a fraction of their resources.

Existing one or on a topic of my choice?

If I had to teach an existing one it would probably be sport, since as a reasonably fit person with a decent understanding on how to train in a healthy way it would probably be the one where I could come closest to providing a similar level to a real teacher. Otherwise maybe sociology? Think I could do a decent job there aswell.

If I could make my own it would probably be personal finance. Because I think here in Germany education on this topic is basically non existent. And there is so much money wasted on bad financial products and wrong decisions, that giving everyone some basic lessons would have a huge positive effect.

In favour of better competition I would actually argue the exact opposite at this point.

On the design side in the x86 space it’s a duopoly with AMD so even though Intel still has good market share due to their past, a weaker Intel means more power for AMD. And we shouldn’t fool ourselves that they wouldn’t use it for their own gains just like Intel did in the past.

In a broader sense for server chips in general having those engineers at Qualcomm rather than Intel might help might help arm adoption. But that space at least already has some more players than x86. With hyperscalers like Amazon developing their own CPUs, Ampere, or Nvidia planning to enter the space.

And most importantly as long as design and fab aren’t separated at Intel having one do worse also affects the other side. And the competition is already thin in that space as is, with much much higher barriers to entry for any new competition compared to chip design.

I never really understood the purpose of the XPS line anyway.

The issue here is that you are comparing it to their business lineup, while it was a consumer product.

Dell XPS (“Extreme Performance System”) is a line of consumer-oriented laptop and desktop computers manufactured by Dell since 1993.

• Wikipedia

My understanding is that it was their premium consumer line sitting above the more entry level Inspiron line.

Imo this kind of shows the basic problem with the xps line. As I understand it it was basically the premium consumer line, not something meant for business use. Meaning it had the nice specs on paper, but not the durability you’d need in a setting with extensive use and where downtime means serious money. But as you demonstrate this distinction was too blurry.

Yeah this doesn’t make much sense to me either. I doubt “AI smartphones” will increase the total number of devices a person owns, whereas the the recent boom in datacenters directly leads to more devices sold. And the chips used there are also vastly more valuable.

AI might lead to each device needing slightly more/larger/more powerful chips, which means a bit more money per unit, but nothing earth shattering. Unless they drastically add new capabilities the average person won’t change their budget that much.

I also doubt change will happen at such a rapid rate that people feel the need to instantly abandon perfectly fine and recently bought phones for “AI smartphones”. Sure there will be some early adopters as with every innovation, but i imagine the majority will just stick with their regular update cycle and eventually end up with one through that way. Which doesn’t lead to faster churn rate or more devices sold.

In return, if i get my wish and phones finally become fully capable desktop replacements (maybe with a docking station for home use), then it could even decrease the number of devices a person owns.

Yeah. The whole move imo was already a play for short term profits over long term considerations regardless of the outcome. I guess after the sale to nvidia fell through Softbank wanted to make some fast money?

For what it’s worth they are seemingly seeking a retrial source.

And on a side note i am quite fascinated how fast those Delaware courts are handlying big cases like these. Something i also noticed during the twitter sale.