This narrative has been pushed for several years now with the likes of Habana, Cerebras, SambaNova, Graphcore, Tesla Dojo, etc.
And yet none of them seem to have made any dent in Nvidia’s dominance. None of them have any real presence on industry-standard MLPerf benchmarks (not even TPU releases all benchmarks and they started the damn benchmark).
The truth is that making an AI chip isn’t as simple as putting a bunch of matmuls together in a custom ASIC and pointing a driver at it; there’s hard work and optimization the entire stack down, many of which aren’t even focused on the math part.
So while I don’t doubt that some competitors (AMD?) will gain decent market share eventually, Nvidia’s probably not going to be displaced so easily.
And yet none of them seem to have made any dent in Nvidia’s dominance. None of them have any real presence on industry-standard MLPerf benchmarks (not even TPU releases all benchmarks and they started the damn benchmark).
The truth is that making an AI chip isn’t as simple as putting a bunch of matmuls together in a custom ASIC and pointing a driver at it; there’s hard work and optimization the entire stack down, many of which aren’t even focused on the math part.
So while I don’t doubt that some competitors (AMD?) will gain decent market share eventually, Nvidia’s probably not going to be displaced so easily.