Does Nvidia have a monopoly?

[RVRY]

As of Q1 Nvidia holds roughly 95% market share in the machine learning accelerator market, and 88% of the dedicated GPU market globally. ROCM support continues to be very limited effectively making CUDA the only option for many industries.

Does this prove dangerous for the future of these technologies, and should governments step in to put an end to Nvidia's market dominance? 

Sources:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/23/nvidias-a100-is-the-10000-chip-powering-the-race-for-ai-.html#:~:text=Nvidia takes 95% of the,according to New Street Research.&text=The A100 is ideally suited,Bing AI%2C or Stable Diffusion.

https://wccftech.com/q3-2022-discrete-gpu-market-share-report-nvidia-gains-amd-intel-in-single-digit-figures/

[SignatureSigner]

no, you can get amd cards and intel cards.

 

they may have mono but they don't have a monopoly.

 

[porina]

You can be sure AMD and Intel are looking at the AI market and thinking they want a share of that. Nvidia being successful is not illegal, although if they use that position to prevent others then it can become so. Anyone wanting to dethrone nvidia will have to do something better and/or different, like Cerebras Systems wafer scale "chip" that'll chew through some types of work faster than a truckload of GPUs can dream of.

[LAwLz]

It's worth noting that while Nvidia may have 95% of the market share for GPUs used for machine learning in super computers, that's a very narrow and precise marketshare to look at. It's an important one, but if we start looking at consumer devices, or different types of AI workloads, or non-GPU based machine learning chips (like NPUs) then the marketshare looks very different.

 

 

The situation might become an issue, but I don't think the statistics presented here are that good because they might be painting a very incomplete picture of the market.

It might be like saying "AMD has a monopoly on for GPUs if we look at product names that start with the number 7 and comes in black packaging". 

I am not really sure what the solution would be either. 

[emothxughts]

"Monopoly" is arguable, but from personal observation (read: window shopping), more than half of the GPUs sold in my local computer shops are team green, maybe two thirds of them. And no Intel card in sight.

[Moonzy]

I'm sure someone in their office owns the board game, why?

 

and no, that's not how you define monopoly

[manikyath]

nvidia has a monopoly in ai because they're the only big investor. the moment larger ai asics get made, that marketshare will fall quickly.

 

as for the cuda side of things.. that only lasts while cuda is available. if they try to capitalize on that monopoly it'll take at most a year for that to fall apart as the cuda- specific applications feel necessity to port.

 

as for the DEDICATED gpu market... it's like saying apple has a monopoly in premium tablets.

[XNOR]

There may be some hidden competitors in this industry. Microsoft has been quietly working on adding FPGAs to their datacenter CPUs to accelerate search and AI tasks for years now. They're reportedly now moving towards ASICs for these tasks, thanks to their years of experience. Combined with Microsoft's investments in OpenAI, this could mean Microsoft is able to make huge steps in very little time. Other parties like Amazon have also been working on similar technology.

 

These ASICs could very well be more efficient and cheaper than GPU based AI compute. Perhaps Nvidia is able to pivot alongside the shift, but it'll be interesting who comes out on top of this one.

 

https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/news/365535515/New-Microsoft-AI-chip-pressures-Nvidia-and-hardware-market

[igormp]

On 5/26/2023 at 2:22 PM, manikyath said:

nvidia has a monopoly in ai because they're the only big investor. the moment larger ai asics get made, that marketshare will fall quickly.

 

Those already exist, but do not have the same level os software support that Nvidia provides.

Other than that, you can already get instances on GCP with their TPUs, or the Inferentia instances on AWS, and they're both faster and cheaper than getting a GPU instance.

[starsmine]

Im not sure I would even say they have a monopoly for AI
Sure for all the start-ups they have the market, but ROCm has significant market penetration in super computing computing land. 

[igormp]

1 hour ago, starsmine said:

but ROCm has significant market penetration in super computing computing land. 

Do you have a source for that? AFAIK, ROCm is only used for its hip component in order to have software that was previously running on a CUDA-based environment still be able to work without needing a full rewrite.

 

From my own experience ROCm is a pita to work with.

[Gork]

Hmmm. It'd be kind of a close call, for the us SEC, and FTC to bring a monoply case to a court.  A case could be made for antitrust, manipulative  anti-consumer, practices much more easily. The famous MS antitrust, case, and apples many similar suits in the EU. Might have enough ammo to force nvidia to keep making cards, and force them to have a hard cap on prices with out cutting corners out of spite.

I keep asking where the hell is the competition? Matrox limped out of the consumer market decades ago.  intel could go full google and quit before it meeningfully goes competes. I'm kind surprised apple isn't taking offence at the insane bulk rate ngreedia charges and slaped back by making their own gpus. Asus long since forgot how to have balls and make gpus.

Vuhdoo hasn't been alive since the 90s.

3dfx was baughtout, or do I have that wrong? I mostly remember one day just before the dotcom bubble bust they were around. Then they weren't

 

I do agree someone needs to show up and go right for nvidias jugular, 90s style.  That's where a class action lawsuit could have some traction. That if AMD and Nvidia are making it impossible for anyone else to even fart entering the consumer gamer market. Then even the treat of a multi billion dollar fine would wake jensen up. Assuming it got far enough.

 

 

[starsmine]

2 hours ago, igormp said:

Do you have a source for that? AFAIK, ROCm is only used for its hip component in order to have software that was previously running on a CUDA-based environment still be able to work without needing a full rewrite.

 

From my own experience ROCm is a pita to work with.

Im not saying it not a pain in the ass



Just that people are investing into it hard with two out of 3 of the worlds fastest computers.

Its not worth it for start ups. 

[Radium_Angel]

everyone forgets Matrox 

[igormp]

31 minutes ago, starsmine said:

Im not saying it not a pain in the ass



Just that people are investing into it hard with two out of 3 of the worlds fastest computers.

Its not worth it for start ups. 

Just because the hardware makes use of AMD stuff, doesn't mean it's using ROCm. If you look at both Frontier and LUMI docs, they recommend using the Cray compiler stack instead of ROCm, and using ROCm for hip in cases where you are migrating from Summit.

 

People are investing in their own software stack instead of relying on ROCm.

[Donut417]

On 5/26/2023 at 12:13 PM, RVRY said:

Does this prove dangerous for the future of these technologies, and should governments step in to put an end to Nvidia's market dominance? 

From my understanding of how Anti Trust laws work, the company has to display monopolistic behavior. Basically they have to actively be involved in activities to prevent competitors from entering the market. Im sure the regulators are watching them very closely. I mean they did block the ARM purchase because they felt they might become monopolistic with it. Being successful doesn't mean you're necessarily a monopoly. 

[cooky560]

While there are other options available, if one player has more than 50% of the market is could be argued they have a monopoly, that said the PC market includes non enthusiast class systems, which might have no gpu at all, so I doubt that it's a monopoly.

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, cooky560 said:

While there are other options available, if one player has more than 50% of the market is could be argued they have a monopoly, that said the PC market includes non enthusiast class systems, which might have no gpu at all, so I doubt that it's a monopoly.

You will have a hard time finding regulators that would agree that someone with a 50% market share has a monopoly.

We have a term for such a situation and it's "duopoly". If you have a monopoly, you need close to 100% market share. The "mono" in monopoly means single.

[Gork]

3 hours ago, LAwLz said:

You will have a hard time finding regulators that would agree that someone with a 50% market share has a monopoly.

We have a term for such a situation and it's "duopoly". If you have a monopoly, you need close to 100% market share. The "mono" in monopoly means single.

Or you can have something as awful: Oligarchy where  potential competitors agree not to go for eachothers turf: see also the cable cartel. 

[Leychee]

Not anymore, AMD cards are getting very good while being much cheaper than their Nvidia counterpart, and Intel entered the market with some pretty decent cards. I don't think Nvidia can justify their prices anymore, tbh...

[12345678]

On 5/26/2023 at 6:19 PM, SignatureSigner said:

no, you can get amd cards and intel cards.

 

they may have mono but they don't have a monopoly.

 

They sorta are anyway

A better cognition is oligopolies

 

Other indistries such as cars or smartphone manufacturers, are the same 

[RVRY]

22 hours ago, LAwLz said:

You will have a hard time finding regulators that would agree that someone with a 50% market share has a monopoly.

We have a term for such a situation and it's "duopoly". If you have a monopoly, you need close to 100% market share. The "mono" in monopoly means single.

But they don't have a 50% market share. Nvidia themselves claims to have over 80% market share in the dedicated GPU space as of Q4 2023. Other estimates put them at nearly 90%.

The fact that they can justify selling "weak" products like the RTX 40 series and consumers will still buy them over alternatives proves that they are in a position where they have insignificant competition.

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, RVRY said:

But they don't have a 50% market share. Nvidia themselves claims to have over 80% market share in the dedicated GPU space as of Q4 2023. Other estimates put them at nearly 90%.

The fact that they can justify selling "weak" products like the RTX 40 series and consumers will still buy them over alternatives proves that they are in a position where they have insignificant competition.

I wasn't really responding to you in that reply. I was responding to the person who said over 50% market share is a monopoly, which it isn't.

If Nvidia has a monopoly then it's because they have, according to you, 80-90% market share, not because they have "over 50%".

 

But to respond to your post, I don't think you are reading that news article correctly. It is not saying Nvidia has 80-90% market share. It is saying that in a particular quarter, Nvidia was 88% of the GPUs sold. That's a very different number from the overall market share.

 

The Steam hardware survey puts Nvidia at 76% market share. Don't get me wrong, that's A LOT, but a far cry from 90%.