Google really screwed everyone that used this; it was marketed towards families/small groups, and now everyone is forced into Google Workspace with massive breakage for family-like stuff. Thanks Google.
This is a really great breakdown. With TPUs seemingly more efficient and costing less overall, how does this play for Nvidia? What's to stop them from entering the TPU race with their $5 trillion valuation?
As others mentioned, 5T isn't money available to NVDA. It could leverage that to buy a TPU company in an all stock deal though.
The bigger issue is that entering a 'race' implies a race to the bottom.
I've noted this before, but one of NVDA's biggest risks is that its primary customers are also technical, also make hardware, also have money, and clearly see NVDA's margin (70% gross!!, 50%+ profit) as something they want to eliminate. Google was first to get there (not a surprise), but Meta is also working on its own hardware along with Amazon.
This isn't a doom post for NVDA the company, but its stock price is riding a knifes edge. Any margin or growth contraction will not be a good day for their stock or the S&P.
Making the hardware is actually the easy part. Everyone and their uncle who had some cash have tried by now: Microsoft, Meta, Tesla, Huawei, Amazon, Intel - the list goes on and on. But Nvidia is not a chip company. Huang himself said they are mostly a software company. And that is how they were able to build a gigantic moat. Because noone else has even come close on the software side. Google is the only one who has had some success on this side, because they also spent tons of money and time on software refinement by now, while all the other chips vanished into obscurity.
Are you saying that Google, Meta, Amazon, etc... can't do software? It's the bread and butter of these companies. The CUDA moat is important to hold off the likes of AMD, but hardware like TPUs for internal use or other big software makers is not a big hurdle.
Of course Huang will lean on the software being key because he sees the hardware competition catching up.
Essentially, yes, they haven’t done deep software. Netflix probably comes closest amongst FAANG.
Google, Meta, Amazon do “shallow and broad” software. They are quite fast at capturing new markets swiftly, they frequently repackage OpenSource core and add the large amount of business logic to make it work, but essentially follow the market cycles - they hire and layoff on a few year cycle, and the people who work there typically also will jump around industries due to both transferable skills and relatively competitive competitors.
NVDA is roughly in the same bucket as HFT vendors. They retain talent on a 5-10y timescales. They build software stacks that range from complex kernel drivers and hardware simulators all the way to optimizing compilers and acceleration libraries.
This means they can build more integrated, more optimal and more coherent solutions. Just like Tesla can build a more integrated vehicle than Ford.
I have deep respect for cuda and Nvidia engineering. However, the arguments above seem to totally ignore Google Search indexing and query software stack. They are the king of distributed software and also hardware that scales. That is way TPUs are a thing now and they can compute with Nvidia where AMD failed. Distributed software is the bread and butter of Google with their multi-decade investment from day zero out of necessity. When you have to update an index of an evolving set of billions of documents daily and do that online while keeping subsecond query capability across the globe, that should teach you a few things about deep software stacks.
These companies innovate in all of those areas and direct those resources towards building hyper-scale custom infrastructure, including CPU, TPU, GPU, and custom networking hardware for the largest cloud systems, and conduct research and development on new compilers and operating system components to exploit them.
They're building it for themselves and employ world-class experts across the entire stack.
How can NVIDIA develop "more integrated" solutions when they are primarily building for these companies, as well as many others?
Examples of these companies doing things you mention as being somehow unique to or characteristic of NVIDIA:
You're suggesting Waymo isn't deep software? Or Tensorflow? Or Android? The Go programming language? Or MapReduce, AlphaGo, Kubernetes, the transformer, Chrome/Chromium or Gvisor?
You must have an amazing CV to think these are shallow projects.
No, I just realize these for what they are - reasonable projects at the exploitation (rather than exploration) stage of any industry.
I’d say I have an average CV in the EECS world, but also relatively humble perspective of what is and isn’t bleeding edge. And as the industry expands, the volume „inside” the bleeding edge is exploitation, while the surface is the exploration.
Waymo? Maybe; but that’s acquisition and they haven’t done much deep work since. Tensorflow is a handy and very useful DSL, but one that is shallow (builds heavily on CUDA and TPUs etc); Android is another acquisition, and rather incremental growth since; Go is a nth C-like language (so neither Dennis Richie nor Bjarne Stroustrup level work); MapReduce is a darn common concept in HPC (SGI had libraries for it in the 1990s) and implementation was pretty average. AlphaGo - another acquisition, and not much deep work since; Kubernetes is a layer over Linux Namespaces to solve - well - shallow and broad problems; Chrome/Chromium is the 4th major browser that reached dominance and essentially anyone with a 1B to spare can build one.. gVisor is another thin, shallow layer.
What I mean by deep software, is a product that requires 5-10y of work before it is useful, that touches multiple layers of software stack (ideally all from hardware to application) etc. But these types of jobs are relatively rare in the 2020s software world (pretty common in robotics and new space) - they were common in the 1990s where I got my calibration values ;) Netscape and Palm Pilot was a „whoa”. Chromium and Android are evolutions.
> No, I just realize these for what they are - reasonable projects at the exploitation (rather than exploration) stage of any industry.
I get that bashing on Google is fun, but TensorFlow was the FIRST modern end-user ML library. JAX, an optimizing backend for it, is in its own league even today. The damn thing is almost ten years old already!
Waymo is literally the only truly publicly available robotaxi company. I don't know where you get the idea that it's an acquisition; it's the spun-off incarnation of the Google self-driving car project that for years was the butt of "haha, software engineers think they're real engineers" jokes. Again, more than a decade of development on this.
Kubernetes is a refinement of Borg, which Google was using to do containerized workloads all the way back in 2003! How's that not a deep project?
True, for some definition of first and some definition of modern. I’d say it builds extremely heavily on the works inside XTX (and prior to that, XFactor etc) on general purpose linear algebra tooling, and still doesn’t change the fact that it remains shallow, even including JAX. Google TPUs change this equation a bit, as they are starting to come to fruition; but for them to reach the level of depth of NVDA, or even DEC to SUN, they’d have to actually own it from silicon to apps… and they eventually might. But the bulk of work at Google is narrow end-user projects, and they don’t have (at large) a deep engineering excellence focus.
Waymo is an acquihire from ‘05 DARPA challenges, and I’d say Tesla got there too (but with a much stricter hardware to user stack, which ought to bear fruits)
I’d say Kubernetes would be impressive compared to 1970s mainframes ;) Jokes aside, it’s a neat tool to use crappy PCs as server farms, which was sort of Google’s big insight in 2000s when everyone was buying Sun and dying with it, but that makes it not deep, at least not within Google itself.
But this may change. I think Brin recognizes this during the Code Red, and they start very heavily on building a technical moat since OpenAI was the first credible threat to the user behavior moat.
You think that Tesla, which has not accepted liability for a single driverless ride, has "gotten there?" I'm not even going to look up how many Waymo does in a month, I'm sure it's in the millions now.
Come on, man.
> Google's TPUs change this equation a bit
Google has been using TPUs to serve billions of customers for a decade. They were doing it at that scale before anyone else. They use them for training, too. I don't know why you say they don't own the stack "from silicon to apps" because THEY DO. Their kernels on their silicon to serve their apps. Their supply chain starts at TSMC or some third-party fab, exactly like NVIDIA.
Google's technical moat is a hundred miles deep, regardless of how dysfunctional it might look from the outside.
Yeah I'm not convinced Microsoft can do software anymore. I think they're a shambling mess of a zombie software company with enough market entropy to keep going for a long time.
They did engineer a good browser: original Edge with the Chakra JavaScript Engine. It was faster than Google Chrome and had some unique features: a world-best, butter-smooth and customizable epub reader. I loved it for reading - it beat commercial epub readers - and then Nadella took over and said Microsoft is getting rid of it and Edge will move to Chromium and Microsoft will also get rid of Windows phone. Modern Microsoft will be Cloud/AI and Ads. That was so depressing.
You could say the same thing about all Microsoft products then. How many full time developers does it take to support Windows 11 when Linux is available, SqlServer when Postgres is available, Office when LibreOffice exists?
And so on all under licenses that allows Microsoft do whatever it wants with?
They should be embarrassed to do better, not spin it into a “wise business move” aka transfer that money into executive bonuses.
Microsoft gets a lot of its revenue from the sale of licenses and subscriptions for Windows and Office. An unreliable source that gives fast answers to questions tells me that the segments responsible for those two softwares have revenue of about $13 and about 20 billion per quarter respectively.
In contrast, basically no one derives any significant revenue from the sale of licenses or subscriptions for web browsers. As long as Microsoft can modify Chromium to have Microsoft's branding, to nag the user into using Microsoft Copilot and to direct search queries to Bing instead of Google Search, why should Microsoft care about web browsers?
It gets worse. Any browser Microsoft offers needs to work well on almost any web site. These web sites (of which there are 100s of 1000s) in turn are maintained by developers (hi, web devs!) that tend to be eager to embrace any new technology Google puts into Chrome, with the result that Microsoft must responding by putting the same technological capabilities into its own web browser. Note that the same does not hold for Windows: there is no competitor to Microsoft offering a competitor to Windows that is constantly inducing the maintainers of Windows applications to embrace new technologies, requiring Microsoft to incur the expense of applying engineering pressure to Windows to keep up. This suggests to me that maintaining Windows is actually significantly cheaper than it would be to maintain an independent mainstream browser. An independent mainstream browser is probably the most expensive category of software to create and to maintain excepting only foundational AI models.
"Independent" here means "not a fork of Chromium or Firefox". "Mainstream" means "capable of correctly rendering the vast majority of web sites a typical person might want to visit".
They did incur that cost… for decades. They were in a position where their customers were literally forced to use their product and they still couldn’t create something people wanted to use.
Huang said that many years ago, long before ChatGPT or the current AI hype were a thing. In that interview he said that their costs for software R&D and support are equal or even bigger than their hardware side. They've also been hiring top SWE talent for almost two decades now. None of the other companies have spent even close to this much time and money on GPU software, at least until LLMs became insanely popular. So I'd be surprised to see them catch up anytime soon.
CUDA is not hard to replicate, but the network effects make it very hard to break trough with new product. Just like with everything when network effeft applies.
Meta makes websites and apps. Historically, they haven't succeeded at lower-level development. A somewhat recent example was when they tried to make a custom OS for their VR headsets, completely failed, and had to continue using Android.
You're generalizing a failure at delivering one consumer solution and ignoring the successful infrastructure research and development that occurs behind the scenes.
Meta builds hardware from chip to cluster to datacenter scale, and drives research into simulation at every scale, all the way to CFD simulation of datacenter thermal management.
More than one failure. They had a project to make a custom chip for model training a few years ago, and they scrapped it. Now they have another one, which entered testing in March. I don't think it's going well, because testing should have wrapped up recently, right before the news that they're in serious talks to buy a lot of TPUs from Google. On the other side of the stack, Llama 4 was a disaster and they haven't shipped anything since.
They have the money and talent to do it. As you point out, they do have major successes in areas that take real engineering. But they also have a lot of failures. It will depend how the internal politics play out, I imagine.
Genuine question: given LLMs' inexorable commoditization of software, how soon before NVDA's CUDA moat is breached too? Is CUDA somehow fundamentally different from other kinds of software or firmware?
Nvidia has everything they need to build the most advanced GPU Chip in the world and mass produce it.
Everything.
They can easily just do this for more optimized Chips.
"easily" in sense of that wouldn't require that much investment. Nvidia knows how to invest and has done this for a long time. Their Ominiverse or robots platform isaac are all epxensive. Nvidia has 10x more software engineers than AMD
For sure. But they also have high volumne and know how to do everything.
Also certain companies normally don't like to do things themselves if they don't have to.
Nonetheless nvidia is were it is because it has cude and an ecoysystem. Everyone uses this ecosystem and then you just run that stuff on the bigger version of the same ecosystem.
> What's to stop them from entering the TPU race with their $5 trillion valuation?
Valuation isn’t available money; they'd have to raise more money in the current, probably tighter for them, investment environment to enter the TPU race, since the money they have already raised that that valuation is based on is already needed to provide runway for what they are already doing without putting money into the TPU race
Nvidia is already in the TPU race aren't they? This is exactly what the tensor cores on their current products are supposed to do, but they're just more heterogeneous GPU based architectures and exist with CUDA cores etc. on the same die. I think it should be within their capability to make a device which devotes an even higher ratio of transistors to tensor processing.
1. there had be fixed function hardware for certain graphics stages
2. Programmable massively parallel hardware took over. Nvidia was at the forefront of this.
TPUs seem to me similar to fixed function hardware. For Nvidia it's a step backwards and even though they go into this direction recently I can't see them go all the way.
Otherwise you don't need cuda, but hardware guy's that write verilog or vhdl. They don't have that much of an edge there.
Sorry. I don't trust these guys. Some of my Linux laptops use their wireless hardware and the drivers are so poor that, YEARS later, Wi-Fi still doesn't work right.
I'm not saying it's 100% that way, but a large chunk works like that.
Videoconference, chat, collaborative document editing are pretty much centralized in the hands of private companies, even if open source solutions do exist.
SMS also has crazy weird limitations with messaging across countries due to ISP pricing, even though the messaging apps such as whatsapp have no problem with this.
I actually took this to heart and deployed it natively on multiple VLANs in my home. Then, even with the abundance of address space, Comcast pulled the ability to use IPv6 in this manner and I'm back to to using NAT on all my VLANs except for one. Progress.
> Comcast pulled the ability to use IPv6 in this manner
Can you expand on this?
It's been a while since I've explored IPv6, but I'm on Comcast and I recently switched from OpenWRT to an Ubiquiti router and was surprised that 1) it doesn't enable IPv6 by default and 2) It asks for configuration [2] that I'm not sure how to answer. I thought everything "just worked" with Router Advertisement.
In a nutshell, Comcast used to provide a /60 to residential customers and this could be subnetted into more than one LAN. Nowadays they only provide a single /64 and this can only be used for one subnet.
It sounds like your router can request a larger prefix length than /64 and Comcast will give up to a /60. That requires a router that knows how to do that.
That seems like reasonable approach when most people just need /64, and those who want more have to configure to get it.
Yeah. I'm as frustrated as you are. I had an app in the app store even with all the restrictions around SMS, but there's simply no way to integrate with RCS, so this is basically Google's iMessage.
That's because SMS is a horribly broken, hacky standard, and RCS has to inherit and deal with all the horrifying edge-cases of SMS, MMS, and legacy cruft going back prior to the turn of the millenium.
Then it has to accomodate every other intersted party, many of which hate each other. Apple has always been a bit of an odd duck ("Think Different" has been internalized for some time), but Verizon actively hates OTT messaging as they can't charge for it. Samsung would rather run their own RCS implementation to create and advertise "Samsung RCS", and Google can't push too hard without getting EU attention for antitrust (again).
RCS has been stuck in limbo-hell for years for multiple reasons, none of which are easy.
The specific issue I'm talking about is how Apple for some reason ties the presence of RCS persistently to a contact that requires the user to manually go in and adjust, otherwise the conversation switches back and forth between SMS and RCS as each participant texts back and forth.
This is a problem no other vendors have, and is solely caused by Apple.
Why is that on Apple instead of the hundreds of other manufacturers and Google? If Google wants a better ecosystem, it’s on them since according to them Android was suppose to be the “definition of open”.
Because while Android is "open", Google has no carrot (Verizon can't charge for OTT messaging and has no major incentive to push it), and no stick (pushing too hard will draw regulators' attention again)
RCS has been stuck in limbo-hell for several years, and I expect it to stay that way (to your point, I expect it to stay that way even if Apple chips in)
Strongly disagree on this one. All operating systems require maintenance of some sort, but you singled out Void and I find I'm doing far less maintenance with this one. Even with the venerable Debian, it always required some sort of regular maintenance to work around the bugs of it's legacy packages; Void does not have this glaring issue.
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