Eastern ON | JRosenberger - 2/22/2024 10:39
Nvidia has been around a long time - their main line of work, at least in the beginning was graphics processing hardware for computers and gaming systems (GPUs). One of the big breaks came about the year 2000 when Microsoft decided to get into the game console business and Nvidia supplied the GPUs for the original Xbox hardware. The GPUs on these game consoles were not separate cards like PC hardware to be installed in the PCIe slot - but smaller chips about the size of a CPU. The original Xbox was not the commercial success Microsoft had hoped but the hardware blew away the competetion in terms of performance and capability (PS2, Sega Dreamcast, and Nintendo Gamecube were competetors at the time).
I don't understand the AI hype. Nvidia has some very capable hardware that accelerates machine 'learning' and 'artificial intelligence' - but exactly what is driving the stock performance is a mystery to me.
AMD and Intel would be some of the competetors in the same space as Nvidia.
You got most of it. They became a mojor player in computer graphics cards when the competition was weak. The big break I don't think anyone mentioned here yet was BitCoin. To mine and run transactions on bitcoin you could alter Nvidia'ss PC graphics cards to do the math for you. Prices went crazy and it was hard to get cards when bitcoin prices went high. Was worse during covid. They now pretty much slap whatever price tag they want on their high end video cards now $+1000.
Now they have cards geared for AI. However, instead of just letting consumers run the hardware this time though they are providing the service. They will run the AI "simulations" for companies. You can see alot of their new income is from datacenter services. There is competition with AMD and Intel but they aren't caught up yet.
So either the competition catches up and everyone does it, or people start doing scary stuff with AI and we get laws against it, or Nvidia keeps rocketing ahead. |
Nivida
