New details reveal that former NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang used circular financing to fund AI startups and absorb excess TSMC wafers and memory rather than letting GPU prices drop
Fuck AMD too, the gamers fucking saved their asses during the Intel shit, kept them alive, and they give us “we’re data center first now”. Fuck all these giants right up the ass, time to crowd source our own lithos 🤣
Okay, say I agreed to build a GPU company from the ground up, with a Gamer’s first corporate policy - guaranteed by the fact that I’m a 55 year old disabled gamer who’s been playing almost since the very beginning of gaming (yeah, I played the fuck out of pong and the Atari 2600 as a kid and still game almost daily.) My only downside is my health, which isn’t great, but before I was forced to drop out due to health reasons, I almost finished my bachelor’s in video game development online. I lack exactly 3 classes to finish my degree. I also have 2 sons in high school who could eventually take over and would absolutely be in the Gamer’s first mindset. This is all hypothetical, but, would Gamers support a company like that, or raise hell everytime I made a decision gamers couldn’t all agree with, which would be all if them?
Video game development is probably the wrong skill for GPU design - you might be the best racing car driver in the world but that doesn’t mean you know how to design an engine.
If you’ve a few spare billions and a chip design, I’m sure a semiconductor fabricator will start running off the chips for you. The design is tough:
lots of memory cache, which is the same simple thing repeated billions of times
a shader core, which is essentially a simple cpu specialised in floating point, which you will then repeat thousands of times. Needs to be efficient, though, and the smaller you can make it the more you can repeat it
some extremely complicated interconnects and management circuitry, such that all your shader cores can read and write memory fast enough so that they can run at full speed
you’ll also need driver code to enable your new chip, implementing all of the DirectX, OpenGL and Vulkan specs, and tested against decades of games
There was a time when chip design was a one-man job. Alas, that time was the late 70s. And your goal wouldn’t be to reproduce one of the early graphics cards from the late 90s either, much as I did love my Rage Pro 128 at the time. If you want to make something competitive with modern GPUs that can run modern games, you’re going to need a very large team of specialists and a lot of funding cash. Intel have been trying to do this for a decade, and they’re just catching up with NVIDIA and AMD now.
Their point, as I read it, was more that there is no need to know that, as the company would never reach development of a product, being forever stuck trying to get everyone on the same page
Pointless hypothetical unless you have a couple billion left over.
But the answer is there will always be fanboys who will approve of everything and haters who will hate everything you do. And some folks who don’t give much of a shit either way unless you make really good or bad decisions
Fuck AMD too, the gamers fucking saved their asses during the Intel shit, kept them alive, and they give us “we’re data center first now”. Fuck all these giants right up the ass, time to crowd source our own lithos 🤣
Okay, say I agreed to build a GPU company from the ground up, with a Gamer’s first corporate policy - guaranteed by the fact that I’m a 55 year old disabled gamer who’s been playing almost since the very beginning of gaming (yeah, I played the fuck out of pong and the Atari 2600 as a kid and still game almost daily.) My only downside is my health, which isn’t great, but before I was forced to drop out due to health reasons, I almost finished my bachelor’s in video game development online. I lack exactly 3 classes to finish my degree. I also have 2 sons in high school who could eventually take over and would absolutely be in the Gamer’s first mindset. This is all hypothetical, but, would Gamers support a company like that, or raise hell everytime I made a decision gamers couldn’t all agree with, which would be all if them?
Video game development is probably the wrong skill for GPU design - you might be the best racing car driver in the world but that doesn’t mean you know how to design an engine.
If you’ve a few spare billions and a chip design, I’m sure a semiconductor fabricator will start running off the chips for you. The design is tough:
lots of memory cache, which is the same simple thing repeated billions of times
a shader core, which is essentially a simple cpu specialised in floating point, which you will then repeat thousands of times. Needs to be efficient, though, and the smaller you can make it the more you can repeat it
some extremely complicated interconnects and management circuitry, such that all your shader cores can read and write memory fast enough so that they can run at full speed
you’ll also need driver code to enable your new chip, implementing all of the DirectX, OpenGL and Vulkan specs, and tested against decades of games
There was a time when chip design was a one-man job. Alas, that time was the late 70s. And your goal wouldn’t be to reproduce one of the early graphics cards from the late 90s either, much as I did love my Rage Pro 128 at the time. If you want to make something competitive with modern GPUs that can run modern games, you’re going to need a very large team of specialists and a lot of funding cash. Intel have been trying to do this for a decade, and they’re just catching up with NVIDIA and AMD now.
… do you know literally anything about chip fabrication at a mass scale?
Photolithography?
Thermal oxidation?
Vapor deposition?
Megasonics?
Plasma ashing?
Or are these gonna be artisinal, bespoke, lovingly handcrafted GPUs?
Their point, as I read it, was more that there is no need to know that, as the company would never reach development of a product, being forever stuck trying to get everyone on the same page
Pointless hypothetical unless you have a couple billion left over.
But the answer is there will always be fanboys who will approve of everything and haters who will hate everything you do. And some folks who don’t give much of a shit either way unless you make really good or bad decisions