AI increase may result in a brand new GPU scarcity, however Nvidia says the present downside is simply packaging
Why it issues: The crypto increase precipitated a extreme spike in PC graphics card costs all through 2020 and 2021, and costs nonetheless aren’t the place many customers would love them. The present AI craze may have an analogous impact as some firms report shortages, however Nvidia says the provision chain is extra advanced than many assume.
Current statements from AI firms point out that the AI increase is rising the demand for GPUs to the purpose the place some report shortages. Nvidia claims its provide chains have not completely failed to satisfy demand however are encountering minor snags, considerably allaying fears.
Microsoft, OpenAI, and different firms point out steps they’ve needed to take to mitigate shortages in Nvidia H100 and A100 enterprise GPUs, that are used for AI workloads. Microsoft is rate-limiting staff and the CEO of Quora says the {hardware} scarcity is hiding the true potential of AI functions. Elon Musk joked that enterprise GPUs are at present harder to amass than medicine.
AMD (in contrast to Qualcomm) is a pleasure to purchase chips from. 7.38 PFLOPS of compute was delivered right now, with exaflops extra to come back.
Good to see them extra lively on the ROCm GitHub, we’re engaged on the layer above @__tinygrad__ pic.twitter.com/5yE11TVA5F
– George Hotz �’ (@realGeorgeHotz) August 1, 2023
Nvidia defined that oftentimes, the manufacturing hangup with GPUs would not contain the primary processing unit however quite another part of the add-in board. Within the present case, the issue is packaging, which the corporate at present handles with TSMC’s 3D stacking chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) know-how. Nvidia guarantees that offer can be a lot stronger within the second half of 2023.
It is unclear how a lot the state of affairs may spill over into the patron GPU market, however the AI increase has already precipitated Nvidia to divert some manufacturing sources from GeForce RTX 4090 graphics playing cards towards H100s. Whereas feedback from AI firms indicate that shifting consideration towards AMD {hardware} would take time, a put up from prolific hacker George Hotz signifies that his firm, comma, is buying Radeon 7900 XTX playing cards for that function.
The Inexperienced Staff is at present dominant in AI, however TechSpot’s evaluation suggests AMD can actually make important strikes within the sector. The corporate’s main benefit in AI is its lead in Home windows PC CPUs that incorporate AI blocs.
Earlier this 12 months, teams that had beforehand used GPUs for mining started makes an attempt to pivot their infrastructure towards AI workloads to recoup investments after the crypto winter. Though the shift might show fruitful for some, it would seemingly be tougher than mining on account of competitors from main gamers like Microsoft, Amazon Net Providers, and OpenAI.
