It’s a good thing that Chinese companies have zero expertise in leveraging consumer demand for lower-end tech to develop know-how and catch up with the state of the art from Western-aligned companies and then economies of scale to surpass them in distribution.

Yeah PRC probably going to dump 1T into indigenize semi efforts by end of decade, but IMO good chance they're going to treat strategic semi as commodity utility business than make NASDAQ lines go up model. When western semi has 1st tier suppliers taking 30% margin, asml taking 50%, tsmc taking 50%, nvidia taking lol 70%, there's alot of fat on the pyramid to trim. PRC doing cost plus 10-20% will basically be able to brrrt chips stupid cheap if they have mature domestic tool scaling, enough to wipe litho+yield inefficiencies.

Western semi still "safe" since west+co aren't going to source from PRC leading edge due to national security, but pretty soon they're either going to need to compress margins to compete which means cutting costs, which means cutting R&D because shareholder going to get theirs or western semi business model going to run on permenant subsidies. Which is what will probably happen considering their performance is why stonk lines go up right now. That 1T PRC spend and choose to simply discount for utility chips is going to wipe multipel trillion of western semi market cap and all the economic implications that entails so it might not even be bad idea.

You don't need CUDA for gaming but software is still just as big of a moat. Gaming GPU drivers are complex and have tons of game-specific patches.

With their new Radeon/RDNA architecture it took AMD years to overcome their reputation for having shitty drivers on their consumer GPUs (and that reputation was indeed deserved early on). And I bet if you go read GPU discussion online today you'll still find people who avoid AMD because of drivers.

That won't stop them, but it's a big barrier to entry.

Oh and that's just to get the drivers to work. Not including company-specific features that need to be integrated by the game devs into their game codebase, like DLSS / FrameGen and FSR. And in the past there was other Nvidia/AMD-specific stuff like PhysX, hair rendering, etc.

The general trend of the industry is to move computational resources from the hands of users into data centers, so that they can control what can be done and how much they'll charge for computational services. In the medium term, a lot of what we take for granted nowadays will only be accessible from cloud providers and companies will pay more and more in subscriptions for these services.

There are the More Threads GPUs.

They're kinda rubbish, but as a starting point / MVP for a parallel gaming hardware ecosystem its 100% viable.

At this point I’d straight up buy their PC components, because fuck Nvidia for doing that. Same goes for other manufacturers throwing the consumer segment into the dirt because of their greed.

I already got an Intel Arc to support more market competition (A580 was rough, B580 is a decent daily driver) and if the prices weren’t absolutely insane would have gotten the 245K (better than my 5800X, but not for the price).

It makes me feel so gross that these companies are leaving gamers behind. The whole idea of a GPU was from gaming and games. And the whole AI evolution was subsequently born over the fact that gamers/software engineers could toy around with incredibly powerful CUDA without having to shoehorn a weird graphics Api in the middle to do mathematics.

They did the same thing with the COVID crypto era boom. There really is no honor for these companies and I will be buying the first Chinese made silicone out of absolute spite and anger

scale down or not, we will see consumer GPU from China in the future. might be a copy or rip of existing GPUs, but it will happen. 3 of my GPU rigs are chinese MB built for the chinese market, ripoff of dual x99. They work, they are cheap, I got them for under $100 a piece. So maybe 5 years from now, we get cheap GPUs, and maybe they will be equivalent to 5090s, but who cares if the price is right?

It's just a matter of time until they show up on AliExpress - you can already order LoongArch systems (3A6000) and have them shipped to your doorstep.

This is nothing but good for normal people in the west. Chinese competition is needed to remove some of the rent seeking from the system.

Is AMD abandoning consumer market though? They seem to be much less in demand by AI industry.

Nvidia folding would be the best day of my life.

There's still AMD and Intel doing dGPUs

Would be interesting if the US decides to ban or heavily tariff these chips and if the consequence will be significanly cheaper data center access through chinese-owned sites/platforms

> scaling down their consumer GPU production [0]

>> Due to Memory Shortages

I don't think Nvidia wants to give up on consumer. They're a gateway into the overall AI ecosystem.

Having feet planted there also make sure they can play the local game when that begins to blow up. Nvidia wants a robotics play, too.

This is a pragmatic choice. And most of the money is in commercial.

If that happens, hardware trust becomes non-verifiable.

We will also see talent pipeline erosion.

Just further Western industrial policy failure.