
Nvidia is now worth more than Intel - neogodless
https://www.techspot.com/news/85932-nvidia-passes-intel-most-valuable-us-chipmaker.html
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ksec
While I think CUDA has very little competition and seems to be de facto
standard in the ML industry, judging from the comment on CUDA 11 post[1]
Nvidia still have some low hanging fruit to fix.

I am still waiting for Nvidia to make their play in CPU Market. May be a move
in ARM Server CPU space. They have AI/ML with GPGPU, High performance
networking with Mellanox. Surely the next logical step should be HPC CPU? Or
at least reselling ARM's N1 blueprint solution.

Nvidia has a Forward Earning Ratio of about 41. Which seems reasonable (
Comparatively Speaking in today's market ).

Meanwhile Intel has limited upside. On the Client Computing Side Around 7% of
revenue will vanished due to Apple switching to their own Silicon. And for the
first time ever they have real competition in Notebook market ( AMD was never
really in the Notebook market segment in its entire history ). In DataCenter
they will be facing threats from Zen 3 and ARM. And I am very skeptical of
their GPU moves. The market is still expanding so there is the possibility for
them to sustain their revenue, I just dont see how they could grow its current
record revenue in the next few years.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23772245](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23772245)

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staycoolboy
It's no secret that NVIDIA is involved with RISC V. And don't forget Intel v
Ampere (the company, not the NVIDIA chip). Intel is facing incredible
competition. Once a crack appears in the server market and Arm rushes in,
Intel will be in a very, very bad situation. Especially with 100,000+
employees compared to NVIDIA's 13,000.

EDIT: Downvotes? Really?

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CountSessine
A typical GPU has a bunch of small microcontrollers on it, usually Cortex-M’s.
Those need to be licensed. I wonder if Nvidia’s interest in RISC-V is just to
replace those microcontrollers?

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klelatti
Indeed, RISC-V has mainly been as replacement for Falcon cores in GPUs so far.

They evaluated vs Cortex A-53 through rather than Cortex-M.

[https://riscv.org/wp-
content/uploads/2016/07/Tue1100_Nvidia_...](https://riscv.org/wp-
content/uploads/2016/07/Tue1100_Nvidia_RISCV_Story_V2.pdf)

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levesque
I think most tech stocks are overpriced right now. The amount of speculation
taking place in the stock market at the moment is just insane. MSFT gained 30%
over 6 months (that's compared to pre COVID levels), what's changed that much?
Microsoft is a mature company, it shouldn't swing this hard. Nvidia almost
doubled compared to pre COVID levels. ???

~~~
Ecstatify
Microsoft are killing it in enterprise. Our company is moving hundreds of
servers to the cloud (Azure). Our company owns it's own datacenter, has a
strategic partnership with another cloud provider (CEO supports the cloud
provider publicly) but we're still moving to Azure. Since the start of the
pandemic we have thousands of users moving from Skype for Business(on premise)
to Microsoft Teams(subscription). Microsoft Teams has more users than Slack
now. Once you're on the Microsoft train it's hard to get off. New Xbox coming
out I believe at the end of the year. I think companies that don't have the
necessary skills(my company) need to move to cloud our they will die, our core
business isn't maintaining servers. Microsoft have really turned it around
with developers, embraced open source, built great developer tools.

~~~
sithlord
to be fair, teams has more users than slack because they effectively give away
teams with o365, and then claim all the people who have o365 use teams. Lots
of companies use o365 (so get counted for teams) then, use slack as there
actual chat app.

With that said, our company recently switched from slack to teams, and its
been a fairly annoying change. Teams is miles behind slack in terms of
usability.

~~~
Ecstatify
Yeah slack is definitely the superior product, I think it was a great strategy
by Microsoft to give the free 1 year subscription. Gives them some time to
catch up to slack.

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chvid
Compare the two:

[https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=NVDA](https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=NVDA)

[https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=INTC](https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=INTC)

On all fundamental indicators - price to earnings, price to forward earnigs,
price to book, dividend yield. NVIDIA is 4 to +10 times as expensive as Intel.

Tells you something about how the market sees Intel's future vs NVIDIA's.

~~~
godzillabrennus
I read that IBM gave its market share to Intel and Microsoft through its
missteps to bring a personal computer to market.

The story of how Intel managed to screw up graphics, mobile, and now it’s
desktop/server chips... that’s almost making IBM management look good at the
moment.

~~~
chvid
Are we anywhere near seeing Microsoft Windows running on ARM? Seems to me that
Microsoft doesn't have the same strong incentive to shift away from x86 as
Apple has.

~~~
headmelted
I think the market is betting more on AMD than Intel serving that market
though.

I could have kicked myself for not buying AMD stock years ago, even joked
about it with some friends at the time but couldn't afford to take the risk.
The reason was (rightly or wrongly) Jim Keller returning to work on Zen.

He's worked on a few different and really exciting things since, but he's at
Intel now. I suspect they'll sort it out and turn things around, but running
their own fabs is their biggest problem now. They aren't competitive with TSMC
and they desperately need to be.

~~~
ethbro
> The reason was (rightly or wrongly) Jim Keller

So are you buying Intel stock now?

~~~
headmelted
Nope. Still can’t afford to take that risk.

Also, the circumstances are much different. AMD was valued at the time as a
company circling the drain - there was a lot of upside potential given the low
starting point.

Intel is still valued very highly currently even after it’s problems in the
last few years.

The thing is - I think they’d need to turn the company around entirely just to
justify their _current_ price, let alone any future returns.

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spicyramen
One of the important things that NVIDIA has done in ML is make sure it is
compatible with TF and Pytorch every new version they guarantee compatibility
and also release their own docker containers. So you don't need to painfully
install NVIDIA, CuDNN,NCCL and CUDA drivers. While AMD is releasing new
hardware they still need to guarantee compatibility which NVIDIA is already
years ahead. AMD barely release some initial support but not production ready

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Keyframe
Deserved. Aside their OSS practices (or lack of), they have laser focus, put
themselves in the dominant position via technology and know-how and drive
direction of their industry by themselves. Rare to see such a dominant force
in hardware anymore.

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flyinglizard
Intel needs a Satya Nadella. Every time you think CEOs are overpaid, think
about what he did to Microsoft (bad CEOs should not be CEOs regardless of
their compensation).

Over the last 10 years, Intel lost mobile (never seriously competed, probably
NIH from the old guard not wanting to embrace ARM SoCs), gave up on modems
(bad management probably, they were into wireless tech early), could not
compete in the GPU space, lost their performance prime to AMD, lost fab edge
to TSMC, lost laptop processors to Apple and maybe cloud to Graviton and co.
Would have lost AI too but they bought Habana so the jury’s out on that one.

That’s gross mismanagement from a company with no excuses. They need a Satya
with a fresh look on what the company is actually adept at. Regroup and
attack.

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aboringusername
To be fair, Intel enjoyed high highs and AMD low lows. It took them a while
but now we actually have competition it turns out Intel are not so good after
all. Funnily enough they moved beyond the Quad Core just as AMD started
offering something decent.

My next processor won't be an Intel, especially with all the speculative
execution crap that went on (and yes, I know it affected AMD too).

Intel's business practices are shitty, and quite frankly, they need to be torn
down a few pegs and bleed a little, either they die out or they come back
stronger.

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tvladeck
I always hate these comparisons because they always compare market
capitalization and not enterprise value. On the latter metric, which is
independent of how a company is financed, Intel is still more valuable. Intel
is still "worth more" than Nvidia.

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gas9S9zw3P9c
Well done! The only company that successfully managed to ride both the
blockchain and AI hype :)

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klelatti
I think that the parallels with the other half of the 'Wintel monopoly' are
interesting.

Nadella had the courage to stop insisting that MS was 'Windows first' all the
time and to recognise that MS had strengths that could be built on with a more
balanced approach to the environment and ecosystems that MS operates in.

Intel still seems to be strongly 'x86 first' but it seems to me that this is
no longer maximising value for shareholders. For example to what exent was the
custom foundry failure due to the politics of x86 first and how valuable would
a viable custom foundry business be today for Intel?

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zippy5
I think the key difference is that Microsoft’s differentiated asset is the
trust and good relationships it has with Enterprises. Their advantage is their
distribution, not their tech.

Intel on the other hand doesn't do it's own distribution and it chips have
lost their Moore's Law advantage. If there is marginal performance change,
technology will become a commodity.

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samfisher83
All the tech stock valuation seem a little insane right now, but a company
like amzn p/e has been a 100+ for a while.

~~~
slantaclaus
As a matter of fact, AMZN's current PE Ratio (147) is equal to its ten year
median value

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RobLach
AMD's market cap ~65B while being the runner up both in the CPU and GPU space,
while a combined Nvidia and Intel is ~500B, sure emphasizes the value of being
on top.

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mikorym
Something interesting to note is that Warren Buffet started out making his
money in something called _value investing_ [1].

The principle is that you use things like assets, employees, IP, sales,
factory output, sales, etc. to calculate your expected share price and if you
check the actual share price and find it to be greatly undervalued, you would
buy up a somewhat significant part of the business. I assume this also allows
you to have some kind of say in the future of the business and I assume that
you would prefer it if the company were not that large yet.

It would be interesting to hear what a young Warren Buffet would have had to
say (since the old one does actually tell us what he has to say).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_investing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_investing)

~~~
mercer
somehow it saddens me that we don't call this kind of thing simply
'investing'.

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adventured
And Tesla is currently worth more than these combined: BMW + GM + Ford +
Mercedes + Hyundai + Nissan + Fiat Chrysler + Honda

You know, just a trillion dollars in sales give or take. I'm sure Tesla will
get there sometime this century.

Intel has $25 billion in operating income the last four quarters (~73%
increase in three years). nVidia has $3.4 billion in operating income the last
four quarters. Yeah but nVidia is growing fast, right? Nope, they're growing
modestly. How long will it take for nVidia to get to $25b in operating income?
15 years if everything goes perfectly?

It's certainly up to the reader to judge whether these spectacular valuations
are due to the stock market bubble, or if... you know... it's different this
time, it's the new economy, cloud!, or whatever bullshit is being spun this
time around.

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libertine
That's why sometimes I wonder if the overlap of "tech" and "stock market" is
bad.

One deals with concrete things, other deals with speculation.

These valuations are references of the stock market - it's almost a measure of
popularity, than anything else. Right?

~~~
catalogia
The overlap of tech and speculation is called "science fiction."

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SimeVidas
I hope they make a fast chip for the net Switch.

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dathinab
I'm actually a bit worried about the next switch's GPU (assuming Nintendo
plans a switch pro/2 as next major upgrade).

The embedded GPU line of Nvidea switched from being focused on entertainment
systems to be focused on "embedded" AI. E.g. cards running the calculations
for self driving cars and robots.

This not only means they have different focus in their software stack but also
that in the hardware they come with tensor units and similar.

Lastly they seem to be more expensive then the previous maxwell based ones
(back when the switch was released). But this is hard to say as the prices I
take for come from they AI boards.

But I don't think Nvidea is interested in making custom chips for Nintendo.
(At most some variations of the Chips they do anyway).

And if the switch needs to switch the GPU this would be a problem for backward
compatibility which I think is a major must-have if they bring out a switch 2
or similar.

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OldHand2018
Maybe we can blame Robinhood traders. But really, who knows? A lot of these
valuations don't make much sense.

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agumonkey
That's a lot of blows for Intel

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sly010
I am looking for a new non-macbook and one of my primary criteria is that is
should have Intel Integrated Graphics as the Linux drivers are open source and
well integrated.

It feels like nvidia as a whole is leaning more towards special applications
and proprietary solutions. They care more about gaming/hpc/machine-
learning/self-driving and they are just not that interested in personal
computers.

If I ever need the horsepower physically present on my desk I can still buy an
external nvidia unit.

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ShamelessC
Why not go for an AMD GPU out of curiosity?

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sly010
Mainly because the laptops I looked at (Dell XPS-es and Thinkpads) come with
either intel or nvidia. It seems AMDs are more present in gaming laptops and I
am looking for a daily driver. Or high-end macbooks but I am trying to get out
of those.

That said, AMD on linux - while works - is still not "obvious" to me [0].
There are multiple graphics stacks with various level of proprietary-ness and
you have to mix and match.

[0] [https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/amdgpu-
insta...](https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/amdgpu-installation)

~~~
fomine3
You can find ThinkPad E14 Gen2 or E495 (older but maybe stable for Linux)

