Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Taipei: Cloudy, With A Chance Of Steve”.
Expenses for computex paid for in part by ASRock, have you considered them for your next build motherboards, graphics cards, even small form factor Bare Bones machines that we’ve reviewed like the desk meet as rock motherboards, the ASRock steel Legend value Champions. I’Ve got some pretty good stuff, be sure to check out ASRock for your next build. Look who I ran into in Taipei. Hello, listen! We’Re going to start a new organization! Uh yeah Wendell puts this idea to me uh six hours ago, yeah. I think and I’m on board, we want to be the change that we want to see yeah. Yes, you want to see that’s right, yeah.
We were talking about standards and proprietary standards and our problem with like, for example, the Corsair height Lanley, uh cluster. I don’t know if you’re allowed to spread your channel of RGB LEDs and everything else yeah, I don’t care, it’s a mess, it’s kind of a show. So our idea is to at least document this kind of stuff.
So if you have an RGB controller or you have a Corsair header or you have uh something that you need to interface with that there’s documentation, so that makes the Linux people happy. That makes the the people that have Hardware that is maybe older than manufacturers want to support happiness uh. I think you’re shooting a little too high. If you want Linux people to be happy, computex is over now and um.
It was really. It was better seeing everybody and just hanging out and um. I think the last computex was like three buildings plus there’s also stuff in the 101 yeah, none of that this year it was on two floors of one building plus another building. I didn’t go over to the other building.
Yeah there were Keynotes, that’s where Jensen was we uh? We covered that from the room, so we could stay more than throwing distance away from him, something something restraining order the chair’s thrown at me for uh yeah. We were a little critical of the of the keynote. I don’t know if you, if did you, watch that one okay, don’t bother yeah yeah yeah, so standards, yeah standards standards would be good, uh. Well, that was actually the kind of the big thing I mean.
The elephant in the room is armed, but it’s not just nvidia’s arm CPU, but it’s also ampere. I feel like that. Nvidia stole a little bit of amperous, thunder and ampere. I think has done a little bit more of the work uh.
Maybe so it’s just like wait. Jensen’S gon na get all the glory for arm, but ampere’s been here doing all this other stuff. Well, that’s why they were trying to buy arm right. The Grace Hopper stuff yeah yeah, which that that concerns me, like the consolidation of Bauer yeah, because it’s a little different than medium-sized game Studio, Buys small game Studio whatever yeah but like it is impossible for any new company to start competing with Nvidia Intel AMD. Because of not just licensing, but you need like billions of dollars Fab, no an arm has had a lot of wins, uh like with graviton on Amazon, and so it’s going to be a long time before you see arm. I think work viably for laptops and desktops and that kind of stuff, but for servers uh arm, could be a real threat, certainly to Intel and maybe less so to AMD, because Intel’s kind of been on The Struggle Bus, sorry Intel someone totally wants that uh Intel.
Actually, I don’t know, I think it was David Cantor. If you know him, I think he made a comment to me once about Intel needs to be more afraid of arm than of AMD yeah in many capacities. Yeah and I don’t really follow the server Market much, but I mean it sounds like that’s kind of what you’re saying yeah it’s it’s just arm is able to iterate enough that eventually you’re going to be hitting silicon limits and physics limits, and that kind of thing It’S not really, you know the meme is like. Oh x86 is really complicated, but under the hood, x86 isn’t as much of a thing and this the news this show was hey arm is going to eliminate 32-bit, it’s basically going to be all 64-bit, and then we got exactly the same news out of Intel.
Just a week before that, it’s like hey we’re gon na pull all the 32-bit stuff out of the micro code, because it’s going to make things simpler and it’s like well these. These sound, like the same things to me so take consoles. For example, you look at consoles and those would be the ideal platform for arm, because game developers could do their own thing and they could optimize the video hardware and blah blah blah. But you know both video game console companies are kind of moving in a different direction, both but all three. Until we really get all the dots being connected for those kind of entertainment devices and laptops. You know, apple is Apple, but oh, they launched the M1 and the M1 was really faster than everything else they had, but they did the M2 and it was an incremental Improvement and then it looks like the M3 is going to be an incremental Improvement. It’S not those like from the gain from not M1 to M1 was huge, but we have not seen those kinds of gains. We haven’t even seen the kinds of gains that AMD has been doing with their zencore and like the Zen process, anywhere else yeah I mean like first first then I think everyone expected to be huge because you can’t divide by zero and uh AMD the gains for, Like f3d were much better than I think I expected initially, but in terms of just like gen on gen, it’s it’s gon na slow down, obviously yeah and yeah.
It seemed to me, like uh. Elisa Sue was also putting a lot of designs on AI, but they weren’t really here at computex, and so maybe there’s an upcoming event for AI and high performance compute and everything else that they just weren’t weren’t, quite ready for for computex. But maybe they knew what was coming with Nvidia and it’s like okay.
Well, we’ll wait for that to die down and then we’ll we’ll come with something I don’t know. Do you do you, so this isn’t really into standards anything but really into Nvidia. Do you feel like nvidia’s current trajectory is uh moving away from or in any way abandoning the gaming Market? Do you think they’re? Okay? So what’s your count on that yeah? I think I’m interviewing you on your own channel.
Sorry, I didn’t intend to do that. That’S what happens when I hold the microphone? No, it’s good. I I uh we can discuss it. I can ask you the same. It’S the same question, because their way for allocation is basically fixed. Yeah.
It’S in the shareholders interest everybody else’s best interest. The only reason really to go with the gaming stuff is to enable people that want to experiment with the home AI stack so that they get trapped in the Cuda ecosystem, and so maybe that’s why we see 40 90s as opposed to 40 60 TI’s right, I Mean I think when we were watching it, I would assume that they’ll continue to to ship gaming gpus, just because it’s a big Market, you can’t really walk away from it. What I don’t know is if they care that people are upset, there’s nothing affordable, yeah and it seems that they used to, but maybe with the reduced Reliance on gaming, they no longer yeah have to care. Well, I need to make sure that I really fully understand what Jensen was saying: they’re going to do with the Grace Hopper platform, but it seemed like a lot of the enterprise software licensing fees. Wendell.Exe has stopped responding as far as like the Enterprise licensing fees. Go.
It seemed like Jensen was saying: hey if you’ve got an existing platform, we’re going to stop charging you yearly. If you move to the Grace Hopper platform and that’s huge there’s a ton of companies out there that will jettison their existing x86 infrastructure, plus their their older generation Nvidia and immediately adopt Grace Hopper, which could be how he gets a bunch of Rapid adoption. And then, once you’re on that treadmill, that’s another loss of market for x86.
In general, you said something about not betting against Lisa Sue yeah. So it’s it’s really just okay! Lisa Sue is coming for AI. Do you want to bet against Lisa Sue? I mean she came for Intel and it worked, I mean so I think enzoil’s in a much better spot than they used to be on 13th gen they’re more competitive, now much more interesting from a price perspective where it seems like AMD, got up.
Maybe a little cocky with the pricing, I don’t know where they didn’t really, they kind of left the low end market like Nvidia, is doing now on gpus, and may I don’t know you you’ve observed the industry long enough. Is this natural ebb and flow where, when one of them gets power position, suddenly they can charge more and then it comes down, or is this like different? I uh. I don’t know that in that AMD has built up the war chest to make the moves that they would really.
If they’re going to make bet, the company moves they’re going to have to bet everything in order to do that, to pull out some wins and Ai, and they may not be ready to go that all in, but they’ve certainly gone all in on the super compute And the super compute people are happy, and so the last big missing piece is the software ecosystem and that’s what I’ve been following as closely as I can for the last year and AMD really is spending a lot more money than people realize in the software ecosystem. So where, where does AMD, if it wants to build a war chest to compete in AI, where does it dedicate its resources to to? Because it needs to compete somewhere, it can to build up money. So where does it do that? Right now? That’S still epic, and I think that maybe AMD even expected, Sapphire Rapids to be better than it was because it is.
It seems like it’s very difficult, even in these uncertain Economic Times, to get your hands on on Epic Hardware like especially the highest end stuff. So Jensen was saying that Intel’s Fab looks good and maybe they could have gpus made there instead of tsmc but really Jensen. I think that that’s probably a negotiation tactic.
Even if the wafer was hot garbage from Intel, he would say that just go back to tsmc and say I don’t know, because he literally did that with Samsung and tsmc said all right go to Samsung, and then we had some not great gpus Wendell, I’m gon Na hand the mic back to you, oh yeah, that’s fine! Thanks! Thanks for hanging out, I mean where do you see all this going? I think uh. I think for the next few years, it’ll feel like status quo, but expensive, and after that I wouldn’t I without sufficient competitive pressure from Intel and AMD. I do think Nvidia is going to be like who cares about the Loa like yeah pull all the cards up higher price, rename them whatever they’re gon na buy them anyway.
Do you think people understand that, like the 40 90 at two thousand dollars is basically low? End to throw away money when we’re talking about Ai gpus, No yeah, I don’t think so. That really I mean, don’t you think that’s the case. I do think that’s the case.
I I know for we don’t do AI but uh for anything. That’S like any kind of rendering any Cuda based anything like that. I mean we use 40 90s.
I bought a laptop with a 40 90 in it and it is impressively good for the price of your business. If you can make money with the thing like Nvidia, isn’t a really strong business to business position, and I think that’s why they, I don’t think they’re forgetting low end consumer. I think they just don’t care. Well, I think that’s enough rambling from us any parting.
Words of wisdom from Taipei, it’s great to be back. It is great to be back, I think, despite some yeah, I do have some words of wisdom. I guess, despite the negativity surrounding the new gpus leading into the show, I’m actually really excited overall, for where the industry is there’s a lot of really cool stuff in parts of the industry. Like cases coolers power supplies that aren’t gpsing CPUs and it’s easy to forget those components because they’re not as flashy but they’re, really important and it all works together. So uh, I think, despite some of the pessimism with the cards uh genuinely like we’re at least trending, in a better Direction than 2021 yeah yeah, it seems like overall, I would agree with that, and it probably is good, ultimately for Hardware enthusiasts and people that just Want to Tinker with technology and maybe make that a part of your career path. Yeah, I was expecting to say overall we’re doomed. It seems more like a Wendell thing to say no you’re completely wrong. There’S a dystopian hellscape and we’re all doomed.
I do worry. I worry a lot, but it’s probably fine all right. It’S probably fine, we’ll catch you in the next one. .