David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…This is probably the weakest one, even though I’m sure you could make some argument that they have process power. It’s just that all the other powers are so much more valuable. It’s always so tricky to tease out. I think the argument here would just be Nvidia’s culture and their six month shipping cycle that, clearly they had in the past and they didn’t have for a while and now they have again, I don’t know. I think you can make an argument here. Is it feasible? Let’s do a thought exercise. Could any of their competitors really in any domain move to a six month ship cycle? That’d be really hard. Could an Apple-sized company do two WWDCs a year? No. The question is, does that actually matter? There are so many people that are using A100s right now. In fact, most workloads can be run on A100s, unless you’re doing model training of GPT-4. I just don’t know that it actually matters that much or as much as other factors. I’ll give you an example. AMD does have 3D packaging on one of their latest GPUs. It’s a more sophisticated way of doing real copper to real copper, direct connection without a silicon interposer. I’m getting into a little bit of the details, but basically it’s more sophisticated than the process that the H100 2.5D is using to make sure that memory is extremely close to compute. Does that matter? Not really. What matters is everything else that we’ve been talking about. Nobody’s going to make a purchase decision on this thing because it’s a little bit of a better mousetrap.…

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