
GPU-buying gamers are subsidizing the future of analytics - tmostak
http://www.businessinsider.com/video-games-are-paying-for-artificial-intelligence-2016-5
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benkuykendall
Not a whole lot of content in the article... we all know GPUs are good for
many data processing or machine learning tasks. Clearly gaming was the impetus
to develop high performance GPUs initially, but I wonder if it still holds
true that gamers "subsidize" big data significantly. Are most high-performance
GPUs sold for gaming or for data processing?

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jsnell
I believe HPC still accounts for under 10% of Nvidia's GPU sales, so it is
almost certainly true that there's no way it could be a profitable business if
the R&D couldn't be shared with the gaming and workstation GPUs. On the other
hand, the HPC GPUs are supposed to have by far the best margins of any of
their products. So talking about "subsidizing" seems totally misguided.

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phreeza
Do you have a source for that 10% figure?

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krapht
[http://www.anandtech.com/show/9500/nvidia-
fy-2016-q2-results](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9500/nvidia-
fy-2016-q2-results)

The commentators on HN are vastly overestimating the size of the machine
learning market compared to the size of the gaming market.

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wodenokoto
So if you have two market segments, and one is larger and has existed longer
than the other, then the large one is subsidising the small one?

That seems like an odd definition of subsidy.

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nharada
I'd argue that it'll soon be the other way around. Many of the improvements in
Pascal were driven by scientific computing. It's easy to justify adding new
features (like high speed 16 bit FP) when Facebook or Google is willing to buy
datacenters full of the things.

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krapht
If you're willing to bet actual money on your argument, I'll take the opposite
side easily.

