And Intel has been making GPUs the whole time, just not discrete ones. I get they aren't great GPUs and their drivers are also not great, but seriously - they had to have learned SOMETHING from all that, right? I have no idea how they allocated funding, but from everything I've seen with GPUs, it really feels like the driver team should receive the majority of the money to get a solid product out the door.
Next GPU releases: 2022 edition
- Thread starter pauli
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AI isn't even close to a bubble. The only "bubble" is everyone racing to get their own chatbots out there. We haven't even seen the real push yet. It's still essentially brand new. Practically every company on the planet is currently looking or going to be looking at how it can be implemented into their business structure. I don't know if you've ever been part of implementing a major new piece of system software or system software upgrade at a large business, but it's a months/years long process.
NVDA is going to be printing money for a good while. The only concern there is the China/Taiwan thing and the fact that Nvidia has to rely on a 3rd party to make their chips. Intel regaining parity as a semiconductor fab has a lot more riding on it than just Intel's business model. Nvidia eventually being able to fab at Intel is as much a national security issue as it is anything.
The fact that everyone is racing to get their own chatbots and many AI startups less than a year old are valued at billions is how you know it's a bubble. An investor once told me that the way he knew that a correction was inevitable was when there was a period where all stocks were increasing in value and it looked almost impossible to lose money on an investment. It happened with dotcom, it happened with crypto currency, it happened with small launch, it will happen with AI.
It's still early in the AI bubble but many of these startups will fail. Which one's will be the next Google and which will be Pets.com is anyone's guess. Nvidia is riding the wave to record profits and will likely survive when the bubble bursts but will see a huge drop in their stock and profits like Cisco and Sun during the dotcom bubble.
Not really that hard to tell. OpenAI has massive, deeply integrated partnerships with Apple and Microsoft (among others). They are pretty much the Google of AI.
The bubble isn't an AI bubble, it's a LLM bubble. Nvidia is far more like Cisco or Sun since their products have plenty of uses other than LLMs. In contrast, LLMs are all OpenAI has, so when the LLM bubble pops, OpenAI might survive but they'll be massively reduced even with all their connections.
You'll see a lot of consolidation im sure, and there will be some that crash and burn, but I think you're over-estimating how much of the AI investment money out there is riding on the success of ChatGPT clones, or how much of a demand there is for it that isn't immediately apparent. Every major enterprise software company out there is trying to figure out how to implement it. You'll have some of the really big ones try to do it themselves, and have others partner with your OpenAI/Anthropics of the world. There will be endless niches and different companies that specialize in different types of implementation for every possible business case you can think of, and even more that you haven't.
In any case, Nvidia is in a good spot regardless of what happens. In terms of a dot-com bubble anlogy, they're more like an internet ISP in that scenario. Regardless of what the AI landscape looks like 5 years from now, you can guarantee that the demand for AI accelerators is going to keep climbing. Just look stuff that we already know is in the pipeline, like Sora, stuff like that is going to cause demand for hardware to explode, even from where it is right now, and Nvidia has such a lead on everyone on top of the fact that they almost never misfire, that I just don't see how they're not going to be printing cash as long as there's someone to fab their GPU's.
Also, as far as a bitcoin comparison, we're at the stage where Bitcoin hit 30 dollars and everyone started buying up AMD GPU's.
It's not even an LLM bubble. I really think everyone is underestimating how little penetration the technology has compared to how it will look 5 years from now. If there's a bubble, it's a "ChatGPT clone" bubble.
I'm rarely interested in such things as GPUs well down the performance curve, but this blub at TPU caught my eye and it's supremely cute:
Sakura Blizzard ITX size 4070 GPU
It'll be better when 4090 processing power fits in that small a case, but even at 4070 levels it's a very nifty size. Almost makes me want to put together a cherry blossom themed ITX build.
Sakura Blizzard ITX size 4070 GPU
It'll be better when 4090 processing power fits in that small a case, but even at 4070 levels it's a very nifty size. Almost makes me want to put together a cherry blossom themed ITX build.
In the latest edition of "integrated graphics is catching up to discrete GPUs!!!1!!one", AMDs 890M integrated graphics (16CUs of RDNA 3.5" on LPDDR5X) is within 5% of mobile Geforce 3050. Which is nice enough on a 54W TDP for the entire SOC (3050 has 50W TDP for the GPU only), but we have seen this story play out so many times by now. Intel was showing their Crystalwell design (their eDRAM cache on Broadwell CPUs, 5th gen Core) beating Cape Verde (Radeon 7770) 10 years ago, yet here we are.
It seems to me that marketing departments of both the OEMs and AMD itself don't know how to position such fast-ish iGPUs. I saw a list of a dozen or so Strix Point laptop models, and all but one came with a discrete GPU. The vendors are hell-bent on pricing these devices up, up, up, and are totally missing the point that a chip like Strix Point is meant to deliver midrange performance at lower price than last year's midrange.
If you include a discrete GPU in a laptop, you can either omit the respectable iGPU and save that cost. Or you can include a very tiny and slow one as a power saving strategy to dynamically shut down the gamery dGPU.
Asus Zenbook & Vivobook, MSI Summit & Prestige...plenty of choice if you want APU-only.
Strix point is high end so the laptops are either paired with a beefy nVidia GPU (4070 or higher) or are slim design with OLED screens. No one is going to put Strix Point in a mid-range laptop for now.
Strix point is high end so the laptops are either paired with a beefy nVidia GPU (4070 or higher) or are slim design with OLED screens. No one is going to put Strix Point in a mid-range laptop for now.
Hardware Unboxed put up their regular GPU pricing video a couple days ago:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnjO1spYcxg
They have a couple tidbits about upcoming GPUs from discussions they had at Computex:
Their general feeling is that if you were looking at higher end parts like the 4080, 4090, 7900 XT and 7900 XTX, just wait. This is presuming those buyers buy high end GPUs fairly often, so they already have something like a 3080 or 3090. nVidia will be the only player in this space for next generation parts.
Midrange, they think there will be sales during "Black Friday" so that retailers can clear out inventory for the refreshes coming in 2025. RDNA4 sounds like it will be the first release in this performance tier.
Mainstream, it's just not good, and it's unlikely to change for at least a year.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnjO1spYcxg
They have a couple tidbits about upcoming GPUs from discussions they had at Computex:
- nVidia looks like they may launch the 5080 first, and towards the end of this year, with the 5090 following at the start of 2025.
- AMD will apparently launch RDNA4 at CES 2025.
- They're not sure what Intel will be doing, but there's no rumors of a high end card. I don't think even Intel knows what Intel plans to do.
Their general feeling is that if you were looking at higher end parts like the 4080, 4090, 7900 XT and 7900 XTX, just wait. This is presuming those buyers buy high end GPUs fairly often, so they already have something like a 3080 or 3090. nVidia will be the only player in this space for next generation parts.
Midrange, they think there will be sales during "Black Friday" so that retailers can clear out inventory for the refreshes coming in 2025. RDNA4 sounds like it will be the first release in this performance tier.
Mainstream, it's just not good, and it's unlikely to change for at least a year.
Hopeful for meaningful discounts as this generation heads towards sunset, but I'm not holding my breath... The manufacturers are already selling below MSRP and would need kick-backs on inventory to cover a much more meaningful discount. nVidia may provide something but AMD is probably more likely to make meaningful cuts.
Are the days of $200 GPUs basically over at this point? It's not the market I'm interested in, but it's obviously MUCH bigger than the high end market. The 4060 is $300, and the 7600 is $270. Intel's lowest-end Arc card is only $100, but I'm guessing nobody is buying those.
APUs continue to get more powerful, but those do come at a price premium, so it seems likely that will be the choice - buy a high-end APU for a hundred or so dollars more than a comparable CPU, or go discrete and put that hundred toward the add-in GPU that's going to cost at least $150 more for the whole system.
APUs continue to get more powerful, but those do come at a price premium, so it seems likely that will be the choice - buy a high-end APU for a hundred or so dollars more than a comparable CPU, or go discrete and put that hundred toward the add-in GPU that's going to cost at least $150 more for the whole system.
The newest version of the 3050 (based on GA107) is below $200. In practice 6600 is also there, though officially the only cards that low from AMD is the Navi 24 siblings (6300, 6400, 6500XT).
I too remember the days of Radeon 580s available for $200
Pretty much. Part of that is just inflation, but another big part is that GPUs are just a bigger chunk of the "stuff" inside a PC compared to previously. You used to have to have a lot more discrete parts and they cost a lot more. These days a gaming PC just needs a motherboard, CPU, RAM, SSD, and GPU and all of those except the motherboard and GPU cost a lot less than they used to. Everything else is built-in.
That's true, so that might be the third possibility - the ~$200 price point will be the last-gen cards re-released in the middle of the current gen cycle.