6 ms·
>Who is going to take the risk of deplying 10,000 AMD GPUs or 10,000 random startup silicon chips? That’s almost a $300 million investment. Ironically, Jensen
by slushh 3y ago
>Who is going to take the risk of deplying 10,000 AMD GPUs or 10,000 random startup silicon chips? That’s almost a $300 million investment.
Ironically, Jensen Huang did something like this many years ago. In an interview for his alma mater, he tells the story about how he had bet the existence of Nvidia on the successful usage of a new circuit simulation computer from a random startup that allowed Nvidia to complete the design of their chip.
- urthor 3y agoHonestly, that's a really excellent point. Successful startups are successful because they do exactly that. Successfully.
- klelatti 3y agoRisk / reward though. What's the reward? Are the alternatives better than Nvidia? Doesn't seem so and the risks are significant. On the other hand if you can't get H100s then nothing to lose!
- toasted-subs 3y agoSuccessful startups cater to specific customers and provider one on one care that isn't typically possible with larger companies.
- anewhnaccount2 3y ago> >Who is going to take the risk of deplying 10,000 AMD GPUs or 10,000 random startup silicon chips? That’s almost a $300 million investment. Lumi: https://www.lumi-supercomputer.eu/lumis-full-system-architecture-revealed/ https://www.lumi-supercomputer.eu/lumis-full-system-architec...
- toasted-subs 3y agoAMD GPUs are relatively well tested. Anybody who's looked at nvidia's architecture could tell you it's not perfect for every application. Similarly AMD's isn't either. If you know what your application would be and have the $300 million custom chips may be way more wise. Something you'd only get if you make things in-house/at startups.
- Athas 3y agoFor which applications are AMD GPUs more suited? Last I looked at the available chips, AMD sometimes had higher FLOPS or memory throughput (and generally lower cost), but I don't recall any qualitative advantages. In contrast, just to pick something I care about, NVIDIAs memory and synchronisation model allows operations like prefix sums to be significantly more efficient.
- anewhnaccount2 3y agoThey may have had an edge on 64-bit performance, which is pretty much useless for deep learning, but can be useful e.g. physics simulations or other natural science applications.
- robertlagrant 3y ago> but I don't recall any qualitative advantages Like... how you feel when you use them? (-:
- Athas 3y agoOh definitely, there's a reason my home GPU is an AMD! The fact that driver troubles are (sort of) a thing of the past is a great win.
- nabla9 3y agoHewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is not a random startup.
- TechnicolorByte 3y agoAMD has won many contracts for supercomputers no doubt due to their lower pricing. But there’s a good reason why no one is buying them in droves for AI workloads. Also: > For visualization workloads LUMI has 64 Nvidia A40 GPUs.
- latchkey 3y agoThe reason is simple... AMD has been focused on the gaming market and got caught with their pants down when this AI thing happened. They know it now and you can bet they will do whatever it takes to catch back up. The upcoming MI300 is nothing to sneeze at.
- ggreg84 3y agoLUMI as an "AI customer" has a: - low-budget: tax payer supercomputer for tax payer phd students - high-risk tolerance: tolerate AI cluster arriving 5 years late (Intel and Aurora), lack of AI SW stack, etc. - High FP64 FLOPs constraint: nobody doing AI cares about FP64 Private companies whose survival depend on very expensive engineers (10x EU phd student salary) quickly generating value from AI in a very competitive market are completely different kind of "AI customers".
- anewhnaccount2 3y agoAbsolutely. We could definitely chalk this up to being the "exception that proves the rule".
- varispeed 3y agoDo these chips actually cost this much or they just carry very high markup? I can't imagine the GPU would cost more than $100 at scale, unless they have extremely poor yields.
- formerly_proven 3y agonVidia might be in a special situation here, so maybe they do sell at list price, but normally all of this stuff comes at deep, deep discounts.
- TechBro8615 3y agoDo you recall the name of the startup?
- slushh 3y agoIt could be something like i-codes. It's mentioned about 2 minutes into this video [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJTp-3rtkYQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJTp-3rtkYQ
- slushh 3y agoThe company was named ikos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_emulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_emulation