Nvidia's first desktop PC chip lands this month — Asus leads with Ascend GX10 Grace Blackwell desktop platform

baboma said:

>the GPU portion of these chips is quite weak, by comparison with their dGPU products.

As with QC Snapdragon X, I expect AI will be the emphasis for Nvidia, not gaming, not when most PC games will only run via software translation. Ergo, GPU perf is not important. Gaming may become more important later, but not for the initial launch.

In one of their early announcements, around the partnership, MediaTek confirmed plans to extend the platform to gaming desktop/mini-PCs. At that time (circa 2022, IIRC), AI PCs weren't even a "thing".

baboma said:

AI PCs will be where growth will come from, not gaming PCs.

It's possible they could pivot to AI, but then it doesn't really seem like the "AI PC" has done particularly well, when consumers are given a choice between similar specs where one is an AI PC and the other is not. Given that, I think trying to launch a truly mass market product, where the only real selling point is AI, is rather dubious.

baboma said:

Snapdragon X flopped because it mistimed the market,

It flopped because Qualcomm initially priced it too high and believed they had an unassailable lead on efficiency that didn't really pan out. I'm glad Qualcomm is back in the CPU game, but their fatal flaw is that they believe too much of their own hype.

I think Mediatek is more accustomed to being a "value" alternative, but their partnership with Nvidia seems partly motivated to break out of this niche. If they can price it aggressively, I think they can probably make some inroads, but they should really try to "wow" people on the value for money of at least the lower product tiers.

baboma said:

Nvidia will use the same strategy as QC. It'll launch first in premium tiers. The Nvidia brand (like Qualcomm) is associated with leading-edge performance, not "value." It won't compete on price, cf its dGPU pricing.

Then it will flop like Qualcomm. Outside of the niches already being served by GB10, I think there won't be enough interest in a premium priced solution that's still slower than their dGPUs.

baboma said:

Edge AI market is set to substantially increase.

...said the same people who over-predicted demand for "AI PCs".

I think it's more a matter of "build it and they will come", where "they" is the software developers. Once most PCs have some AI capability, more apps will start to take advantage of it. Not the reverse, which MS seems to be hoping for.

baboma said:

Offloading some compute load onto AI PCs would save it money.

The tradeoff is the size of the models and not everybody has the connectivity or data plans needed to download them, at least not like "whenever".

baboma said:

AI needs to come to the OS level before people are motivated to go buy new PCs.

Do not want.

baboma said:

AI is already a mass market product. Case in point: ChatGPT.

But it doesn't run locally. Make it run locally, without big tradeoffs, and with significant benefits to the user vs. using the cloud service, and then we'll talk.

baboma said:

Windows will have to offer more than a chatbot. Off the cuff, image generation is an easy pick. There may be others. AI tutor for , tax-prep guide, etc.

These are already things people can do in the cloud and not enough people spend enough time doing to justify a new PC.

baboma said:

It's overpriced because the value proposition isn't there.

I suspect Qualcomm believes the main value proposition is their brand name. Second to that: battery life and 5G connectivity. In the US, few people rely on 5G for data and the battery life wasn't that much greater than their peers.

I think something in Qualcomm's culture won't allow them ever to try capturing a market simply by making a cheaper alternative. They seem to have the mindset of a premium brand, like Hermès or Ferrari, because their actions tend to look like preventing brand erosion at all costs.

baboma said:

Remember what you yourself said, when you think you are smarter than the industry, think again.

That was in regards to the the economics, performance, and efficiency of different lithography and silicon engineering approaches. These are quantifiable and analyzed by many experts and architects.

What we're talking about, here, is more along the lines of some marketing dweeb's "gut feel", as evidenced by how badly and frequently they've gotten it wrong. If it were such a clear-cut numerical case as the lithography and silicon engineering questions, then they might've had the odd misstep or execution error, but their strategy would not be so easily called into question.

I'll thank you not to take further statements of mine out of context.

baboma said:

For a business, competing on price is the absolute last resort,

I know they don't like to compete on price, but there are many successful examples where it's worked. Not least of all, the x86 PC, itself - the very thing they're trying to replace! It displaced far better computing solutions, some of which were already entrenched in businesses, by commodifying and undercutting everything else, on price. Then, successfully moved up the value chain, until a point about a decade ago where x86 held complete dominance over the server and cloud markets.

So, it's definitely possible to start with cheaper solution and work upwards. The nice thing about this strategy is that you build your installed base quickly, and that attracts software developers. That can address not only the questionable value proposition of AI, but also whether there are enough games & other apps that run natively.

We already have great chips from Qualcomm, what we need is proliferation. I've had all great ARM Windows notebooks at launch and they were all a disaster. x86 still rules iT lands. Nvidia, Microsoft or Google need to invest a lot more to developers and 3rd parties to make ARM widely used.