NVIDIA Vs. The Media ft. GamersNexus

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Coolzone Media.

Hello, and welcome to Better Offline.

I'm your host, Ed Zitron, and this week we're joined again by the wonderful Steve Burke of GamersNexis.

How are you doing, Steve?

Doing well.

How about you?

Doing great.

So you were just at Computex, right?

Yes.

Yeah, we were over there for a couple weeks.

So for the listeners who don't know, because it's a fair amount who don't know every conference.

So what is Computex and what makes it so important?

Computex is the, I would say, I think it's the largest

computer hardware and computer technology trade show.

So that's hosted in Taipei every year.

And

it's like a much better CES.

People may know CES.

And is it more focused on enterprise stuff or consumer stuff?

This year, weirdly,

AI commandeered the entire main hall.

So

there were a lot of pissed off consumer hardware manufacturers who were sort of evicted and driven out of the main hall and put into the lesser one with consumer hardware.

What were they even showing with the AI stuff as well?

I mean, one company had an AI computer case.

Oh, how did that, what's the AI doing there?

Absolutely no idea.

Sick.

It's so cool that this is absorbed.

It's also kind of brutal that that's literally absorbing space.

Yes.

Did you see anything cool there, though?

Anything you're excited about?

Yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff.

I mean, there was some immersion cooling, which is always nice to see, like, where they actually literally immerse the system, system, you know, and in fluid for cooling.

There was a thermo siphon from Noctua, which is just a really cool use of uh, it's another cooling technology.

Um, lots of computer case and cooling solution development.

And then on the GPU side, I mean, NVIDIA sort of buried its 5060 launch and then AMD more formally announced the information for its 9060 XT.

And both of those are sort of the slightly more affordable consumer class GPUs.

Yeah, so NVIDIA also was doing some funny business with you recently.

You did that wonderful video.

So walk us through what happened there because they tried to big dog you, so to speak.

Yeah, so I mean, the problem we had with them and we talked about was

for several months, there had been this, I felt sort of pressure from NVIDIA with where

so NVIDIA for contacts for people, NVIDIA sends out GPU review samples.

We and other reviewers are not entitled to them.

That's fine.

We can buy them ourselves as well.

But they send out samples for product reviews.

And in the past, NVIDIA has been in hot water for

asking another outlet called Hard Run Box to, I believe the quote was or the paraphrase was, change your editorial direction.

Yeah.

And so that was several years ago.

And what did they ask them to do back then?

Back then, it was seeking more coverage of real-time ray tracing in video games, which at the time was more or less only found in any kind of meaningful performance on NVIDIA hardware.

But also, and the reason

at least we weren't ready to fully do testing for real-time ray tracing yet

was because it just it wasn't ready yet.

I mean, there weren't that many games with it.

You couldn't really test it because you couldn't use it.

Yeah, I mean, they launched, and if I remember correctly, there were actually zero games that supported this technology.

And the only thing available were sort of tech demos.

And so, anyway, that was what they wanted.

Then,

they kind of went away, didn't that's at least as far as we know publicly, didn't try to push reviewers in a particular direction with their narrative or their editorial style.

Uh, and then over the last several months, we were getting this pressure of

basically, so we do a bunch of interviews with engineers and technical people at

And I felt they were starting to use that as a lever to be like, oh, it sure seems like you like talking to the thermal engineers.

It'd be a shame if something happened to them.

And you did that very long one over with NVIDIA, right?

You went and kind of looked at how the thermal stuff worked.

Yeah, yeah, we did.

I mean, they're great educational content.

The engineers are awesome.

And I've spent years working with mostly people who

are in different departments or don't work there anymore to

get NVIDIA on the same page.

I'm like, look, we're not looking for a marketing puff piece.

We're looking for actual engineers who just want to talk about the stuff they make and people can learn about it.

But it's not like, obviously, yes, it can support the product

by nature of if it's good and the engineers explain it well, then people will like it.

But the objective is not just like, come on our show and use us as a platform to sell things.

We want engineers, not marketers.

Yeah.

And so that was great.

And

the,

like I said, lever that it became was they wanted more and video wanted more coverage of this thing called MFG, which is multi-frame generation,

which is

something that Jensen Juan, the CEO, talks about on stage as being part of their technology suite that is, big surprise, AI accelerated

that effectively multiplies the frame rate

to be used as a smoothing technology.

So it's

this different to like DLSS and things like that?

Or is that?

It is part of the DLSS or the Deep Learned Super Sampling technology suite.

So it's sort of, it's, it's almost like a subset of DLSS.

Right.

And so it basically just looks better at higher resolution.

It fills in the frames, I'm guessing.

Just trying to simplify.

Yeah.

So yes, the simplest version of it is MFG sort of interpolates frames.

So

it's able to add add in or insert additional, effectively artificial or generated frames, if you're trying to be charitable with it, that are not literally built by the game engine.

And so the GPU is working with its own software to construct these frames and construct pixels based on what it thinks is going to happen next.

And we've actually tested it, and there's situations where it's not bad.

There's situations where it's awful, like with any technology.

But what it does is

on a chart, chart, if you just look at the number that comes out, the so-called frame rate or the amount of frames in a given period of time,

that looks higher with this technology.

But it's not measuring the same thing as something without this technology.

So it's effectively, you know, you're comparing apples and oranges if you try to put real frames that are rendered in the traditional way up against these generated AI frames that are effectively guessing at what they should look like.

And do they look bad as well?

They can.

They can look really bad.

I mean, we've done some testing where in some of the games, it's just

like text, for example, will get completely garbled.

Text on screen, yeah,

interface issues.

It'll draw the interface in the wrong area.

You could have really bad things.

It seems insanely bad for like any RPG of any kind or any kind of like Twitch.

feels like anything you'd be doing ever would be ruined by that?

Yeah, so there's scenarios where it works okay, but the RPG example you brought up.

So Final Fantasy was one of the games we tested where there's just areas, I mean, it's just, I personally would turn it off, it looks worse, and I'd rather have a lower quote-unquote frame rate than have this

sort of potential blurry mess every now and then.

So strange.

Low quality is well, just a very strange thing to push out the door.

Yeah, and the, you know, I

think

sort of finish the

editorial narrative, they know, I mean, it's fine, but I'll finish that first, and I'll come back to your comment you just made because that's also interesting.

But on the editorial side, they wanted more coverage of MFG, and we disagreed from an objective standpoint.

You know, I kind of made the case to them several times over several calls, over several months, of

why we think it just doesn't belong on the same charts as normal benchmarking, normal objective testing.

And so there was, yeah, there's just a disagreement, which is fine.

The problem came in when I felt repeatedly on various calls with the NVIDIA people that they were almost sort of holding hostage the idea of working with

engineers again where it's well the way we're able to make this happen is by you covering things like MFG, you know, sort of that type of conversation.

Yeah.

So, and they mentioned something about like budgets

in the video, I remember.

Yeah.

I mean, there was like discussion of

one of the times specifically the statement was that this is how we can secure budget for these types of things.

And like, to be clear for listeners, we don't take money for interviews.

Yeah.

And in fact, I've paid now over five figures to visit visit NVIDIA on numerous occasions for said interviews personally.

Like, I've paid for that.

And I can say this from the PR side, and note working, not work with NVIDIA or anyone associated, firewall, that it's like no one talks about budgets.

No one is like, oh, I can't visit a journalist due to budget.

And certainly not NVIDIA, a company that had $39 billion, I believe, in revenue just in the data center portion last quarter.

I mean, kind of farcical.

Multi-trillion dollar market cap.

I think if I try try to take Devil's Advocate,

maybe

there's some internal budgeting, whatever, like the marketing department needs to budget time from the engineering department or something.

But we're talking like a couple hours of time max normally, you know,

especially when I'm traveling to them.

So it just seemed like, I don't know,

I didn't buy it.

And also,

that was only one of the

numerous

calls,

you know, like that.

The defensible reason for them changed, it felt like each time where it's like, oh, let's try this angle, let's try this angle.

So, did they end up blocking you?

Are they just, how did that situation resolve itself?

I have not spoken with anyone there since we posted our video talking about it.

And part of the challenge with posting that video is,

you know, it's like

the first couple times this came up, I

assumed that it was just sort of,

okay,

maybe the guy phrased it wrong.

You know, I've worked with these people for a while and maybe it just came out wrong.

After a couple of times, I did call one of my reps after the meeting where they kind of pushed this,

you know, you testing this technology that you think is not appropriate to share on charts with competitors.

That's how we get you these interviews.

I called a rep.

and said,

you know, hey,

if you guys say this to people, this is going to be taken the wrong way.

And like, I'm still assuming it's not meant this way,

you know, but really trying to honest that.

But if I hear this again, right, like it's, I'm going to have to start assuming that it's the way it sounds.

And it did come up again.

And part of the challenge with making the video we made was, you know, we want to blow the whistle on it in case other people are facing that pressure.

And also in case consumers are watching or reading content, which may be influenced without their knowledge.

The problem is, I think Nvidia may now be in a situation where let's just assume everybody makes up and it's fine at some point.

I don't know that they will ever be able to put an engineer on camera anytime in the near future with anybody without the audience questioning it and for good reason because

that was what we felt was being used as the lever against us.

And so it's just kind of, I don't know, we tried to, you know, I explained to them several times why this is a problem and why the phrasing is a problem.

And the more you hear it, the more it's like, okay, I mean, at some point,

like, I think you're saying what it sounds like you're saying, and I'm going to stop.

It's good that you did it, though, because it's

GN's got over a million subscribers.

So, who knows what they're doing to much smaller outlets as well?

Yeah, I mean, and that's what I'm really concerned about:

I've had conversations with NVIDIA in the past that we'll probably get into in a future video, but

about their strategy for newer creators.

And I don't like what I've heard.

I mean, it sounds very much like we're going to sort of try and shape these newer creators.

And, you know, I think the problem is, as especially old guard media, as in people like OGs before us, retire or move to other industries.

there's openings to change how media interfaces with these companies in general because you've got newer people who don't have the historical background with these companies to know what to expect.

And so it's easier to kind of slowly creep that goalpost where it's less independence and it's more marketing arm of the companies.

And that's what I'm really worried about is if they get in any of these companies with newer creators early and

are able to

change the expectancy of the relationship.

So change it from independent reviewer analyzing large companies' device into more of a, hey, we're all friends, we're all working together to try and benefit the consumer.

When if you're talking about a multi-trillion dollar company, their motives are far different from like the guy in his bedroom who's trying to do hardware reviews.

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It's just so weird as well because they're already so successful.

Is this historic?

It sounds like historically NVIDIA has been a bit draconian, like this, though not necessarily pressuring in this way.

I mean, I certainly think NVIDIA is one of the most vindictive companies in the space.

The stories we've heard and told in some instances of their partners, not reviewers, but actual business partners like board vendors, people who make the video cards that NVIDIA GPUs go on, those stories would seem to indicate a sort of vindictiveness.

Can you give an example?

Yeah, allocation.

So, GPU allocation is

the concept of how many of a high-demand GPU can you as a partner get to then attach to a product to then sell to a consumer.

And there's a limited amount of these because they're going to sell 100% of them.

And

allocation is typically measured by percent.

So company A might get 25%.

Company B might get 5% of the GPU supply, whatever that is.

And that allocation, we've been told in the past, has been used also as sort of a lever.

And so, an example would be back in the EVGA days, which EVGA sort of famously

was.

And that was a graphics card company.

Correct.

Yeah.

They were NVIDIA's number one partner.

And they were so NVIDIA favored that they only made NVIDIA video cards.

They did not work with any competitors.

Right.

And they famously cut that relationship publicly.

And we ran a story about that.

But one of the things that they were unhappy about was NVIDIA slowly tightening the screws, which

is a direct quote from an NVIDIA DM I spoke to on.

Jesus.

Slowly tightening the tightening of screws is the quote, but on

what the partners were allowed to do with their products.

And slowly over time, they're losing some of this creative freedom.

When you say they lose creative freedom, like what are they being constrained to to do?

One that's public is we did an interview with a famous overclocker who used to

work for EBGA.

Kingpin is his username, and his name is on video cards that are world famous.

We did a video with him, and he talked about how he wanted to add two power connectors to a card to basically make it more fun to overclock with for consumers.

And so

it'd be able to pull more power, and it would also be able to do so safer because the current power connector has this issue of burning and catching on fire sometimes.

And so he wanted to do two of them to kind of resolve some of that.

And in the public discussion we had with Kinpin in the video, he said,

paraphrasing, but the conversation was, he said they wouldn't allow it or they restricted it or something like that.

And I said, who is they?

And he said, they.

There was only one they.

there could be.

Yeah, who could it be?

Yeah.

Um, but there's plenty of examples like that where the another one would be uh

a couple generations ago, the cheaper cards, like the 200, 300 models,

they were those models were difficult for the partners to actually make and still make any money.

And so there were times where we were told about how this MSRP level video card, meaning the number that NVIDIA says is the MSRP, that would only exist for a fixed period of time

because it was simply impossible to afford to make it.

But NVIDIA really wanted them to exist at this certain MSRP.

It allows them to advertise a lower price.

And so they're pushed to make these cards that allows them to potentially get things like more access to allocation or, you know, whatever.

privilege they may get so on a much larger level what do you think is going on with nvidia as a company right now?

I'm not asking for stock analysis, like that totally not that, but just as a company that both makes consumer graphics cards and underpins whatever the AI thing is,

what do you think is going on there right now?

I think

there's definitely a focus on AI to try and get money.

I mean, there's a Jensen Juan was in an interview,

I don't know, last year, sometime, I think, or early this year, and made a comment about how

they

use AI to write their own driver software now or their own software or something like that.

And this is their number one focus.

It's what they're making the most, I guess, investor money on.

So they're focused on it.

The concern I have is

it's one thing to sort of let the consumer hardware side

dwindle or get less competitive effort.

It's another thing to, in my opinion, sort of drag the entire industry down with it as they shift focus to the higher revenue AI side.

Right.

When you say drag them down, how do you mean?

I mean things like trying to,

in my opinion, control the media narrative and shape it.

Like that, that to me goes beyond, okay, we don't care much about consumer.

we're going to focus on making money with ai that gets into we are going to actively damage the credibility of independent media and also potentially harm consumers who are influenced by that media which has been shaped with a certain you know corporate narrative to push and that's my concern uh so that's that's the that's where i draw the distinction between As we said in our video, if you want to just focus on AI and if they want to just sell all the GPUs GPUs to big enterprise companies, go for it.

But you know, don't screw all the rest of us over at the same time.

And do you think that they're abandoning consumer, or is it just they are they are focusing on the shiny object of the day?

I

don't know Jensen Juan personally.

My read on him, though,

I feel like it's unlikely he would want to abandon something he already has.

Right.

Even if it's only out of maybe sort of pride.

And so I don't think they'll abandon it.

I do think they're focusing on AI.

It's just that,

I don't know, I mean, they have like 92% market share and consumer GPUs now, according to John Petty Research.

So it's just like they can, it's a monopoly.

I mean, that's like, it's just like, this is what monopolies look like.

Well, that's, it feels, I would say there was an opportunity for someone to come in, but based on everything you've shown with like amd recently even on the low end it just it doesn't feel it almost feels like consumer graphics are being

not treated with the respect they deserve despite pc gaming being a huge industry and so on and so forth yeah it's a massive industry and prosumer too i mean even just non-ai use cases include people who edit videos or make movies or do 3d animations

Yeah, I think Intel is a good barometer here because Intel decided to get into consumer GPU and they're new to it.

And

they've had a hell of a time.

They're doing much better now with this current generation.

But

one of the quotes from an Intel person I spoke with previously to us was for their last generation was we should be wrapping these with money when we sell them because they were just

basically subsidizing the build out of this new division, this GPU division, by undercutting prices from competitors to just try and get their foot in the door with what at the time was a lesser product.

And so, yeah, I think they're a good barometer because

if you want to be,

I mean, first of all, to have a fab, a fabrication facility costs these days potentially tens of billions of dollars and years to build.

So, a new vendor would have to be fabulous, like Nvidia and like AMD, unlike Intel.

And

to be fabulous and make a

sorry about this.

This is just for the listeners.

What is a fab in this case?

Yeah, so a fab, a fabrication plant is basically a factory for silicon.

It's a highly controlled clean room environment.

And that means that there's basically absolutely no dust ingress.

The small pieces of

skin or whatever, you know, just working in an environment, that's all either captured or controlled.

And that's because a single particle of dust on a wafer can destroy at least part of that silicon supply.

Cool.

Sorry.

Yeah.

And so a new vendor would have to be

probably fabulous, unless they're already huge, like Intel.

And that means they need to go get supply from most likely TSMC, possibly from Intel.

Maybe, I mean, in the past, Samsung has been used.

There's really not a lot of options here.

And everybody wants their silicon.

So to even get allocation of these silicon wafers would be difficult.

It's just all of the chips are stacked against someone who wants to do this.

And they would, I think the only way you get in is if you're an existing multi-billion dollar company or have

obscene amounts of investment.

Well, that fucking sucks.

Yeah.

Actually, that's a good question, though.

So this is for the old timers listening.

I remember having a 3DFX, it was a Voodoo 5500, picture of a Halo on the box, actually.

Don't know what happened there.

What happened to all the smaller manufacturers?

Did they just get kind of absorbed or did they just fall apart?

Yeah, they got bought or

yeah, I think 3DFX, if I remember correctly, was bought by NVIDIA.

And I just checked that.

But

some of the others, I mean, there's like Via,

Cyrix and some of these CPU companies.

Yeah, 3DFX bought by NVIDIA.

SGI was another.

So they, they.

Oh, yeah, I forgot about SGI.

Yeah.

So SGI is interesting because they sort of pursued heavily, I guess,

at the time, what enterprise would have been, or at least workstation hardware.

And they were really invested in Workstation.

The story I got from someone, I wasn't covering things back then, but was that

SGI was less interested in consumer and didn't really think consumers could afford video cards, which at the time was sort of true.

And that's when NVIDIA came in and

started really kicking ass in the early days.

But a lot of them just, they either got bought or they sort of exited that space.

So changing tactics slightly, how do you feel about AI in general?

I know that I'm not expecting like an industry in that.

I'm just from your perspective, at least from what you've told me and watching your videos, it feels like AI is something now being stapled onto the side of literally everything within your world.

Do you think there's like, do you use it?

Do you have any thoughts on it?

There's uses.

I mean,

one thing

I'm actually worried about long term with the AI use cases.

And the biggest thing I'm worried about is

on the media side, we obviously get a lot of comments.

I probably read or at least skim tens of thousands of comments a year.

And

I'm seeing more and more AI comments and not just the really obvious YouTube spam bots, but somewhere

you read it and you're like, ah,

that could be real.

And I don't want to,

yeah, I don't want to remove it if it's a valid real comment.

But then a few comments down the thread, there'll be this discussion amongst what are obvious sort of bots

about, say, some new crypto BS or whatever.

And so I'm actually worried about sort of like that internet theory, I guess, the concept of you're the only human in the room and you might not even know it.

That's concerning to me.

There's a loneliness factor there I'm worried about.

But the big one is just how easily people are manipulated by comments that sort of appear to have the prevailing opinion just in general, even from real comments.

You then take that and you apply it to potential AI that becomes very convincing in the future.

And

you then think one step further of who owns these LLMs and the companies that sell so-called AI products.

And all of them are these multi-billion dollar companies that, if they want to, could tune it to filter the responses in ways that are beneficial to them.

And that, to me, is sort of the dystopian old man yells at clouds, you know, like concern I have.

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Too many?

Sounds like you need close all tabs from KQED, where I, Morgan Sung, Doom Scroll so you don't have to.

Every week, we scour the internet to bring you deep dives that explain how the digital world connects connects and divides us all.

Everyone's cooped up in their house.

I will talk to this robot.

If you're a truly engaged activist, the government already has data on you.

Driverless cars are going to mess up in ways that humans wouldn't.

Listen to Close All Tabs, wherever you get your podcasts.

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PayPal Open is the platform designed to help you grow into yours with business loans so you can expand and access to hundreds of millions of PayPal customers worldwide.

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But it feels like a more practical one because everyone freaks out about AGI, which is fictional, and all of these other things.

But yeah, the idea that comments would be filled with people who were just subtly being nudged in different directions, and when you talk about corporate narratives as well, who knows that?

And I don't usually with LLMs in particular, I try not to lean into anything too conspirator, but like this is a simple one that you're kind of seeing signs of, even on Blue Sky.

I will occasionally get a comment from someone, it'll take me half a second, second, and go, What's wrong with you?

This doesn't feel like a human being saying this.

No one speaks like this, but you sound human adjacent.

Right.

And I'm, and at your scale, I imagine that becomes a lot harder to moderate/slash process.

Yeah, and and it really is just I mean I'm highly my job is to be skeptical and you try to do that in a healthy way.

You know, it's easy to go way overboard.

Um but this is something where I just

I think there's so much opportunity to be abused.

And I was actually looking at um there's that meta story about meta and Facebook uh pirating all of these books or taking books from pirated materials and integrating them.

And there's a lawsuit over it.

One of the things I was thinking of, though, and actually speaking to a copyright attorney about was

it really feels like right now

the

companies that are willing to break the most laws, especially intellectual property laws, and steal the most stuff will make so much money that it's like, you know what?

Let's just, we'll just deal with the consequences in five years when it gets through the court.

And we'll be so far out ahead of anyone who didn't lie, cheat, and steal, you know, to get here that it won't matter, which is just how the big corporations broadly

behave.

But applying that to a new area like AI,

I don't know.

I'm really concerned about it.

I think there's absolutely good use cases.

And

I mean, as an example, internally, we've used it to concept things.

So like I, I'll have an idea in my head for art, like for a product, and I can see it, but I'm a terrible artist.

And so there's a use case there where I'll sit down with my artist and try to explain it as best I can.

And he'll take a go at it.

And if I'm like, nah, it doesn't really like look how it looks in my head.

That's when I might try to pull some mid-journey thing.

Like, okay, here's like broadly, like the style artistically I'm trying to get, you know, and then he can take that and actually make something.

So, but just to be clear, you would never use any of that stuff in the real, it is literally just a concept tool.

Correct.

Just making sure the listeners have a good view on this.

Yeah, correct.

The artist, so Andrew, he's been working with me forever.

He makes it all from scratch, like in Blender, normally, and actually flattens it into a 2D image for the shirts and things.

Cool.

So yeah, it is purely used if in the first conversation he can't like quite figure out what I'm trying to explain as a non-artist.

you know, it's like, okay, let me go, let me try and figure out, like, I don't, I don't know art words, you know, I don't know, I don't know how to

style it.

Yeah, how do you deal with the ethical side of that?

Because it's just

it is still working on copyright material, but I guess if you're not putting it out there, it's just like, this shit sucks.

Even like looking at it feels bad.

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's hard because it's the first step for us was always like a Google search to see what's out there already.

And so we'll do a Google search if I'm trying to explain something I want.

And normally that's pretty successful, but like now it's the same.

It's like you're getting all this AI art surfacing.

And so at some point, it's sort of like the downloading and uploading and downloading and uploading a PNG multiple times.

It feels like it's just getting like

the quality is getting lost somewhere in that chain.

It is funny.

We're also like three years into it.

And the best we've got as far as like from you, arguably one of the most like, I don't mean this, I mean this actually is in a good way.

Like, you would be excited about something cool in tech coming out.

Yeah.

Like, if something cool happened, and the coolest we've got is, yeah, sometimes I can't work out what I'm thinking, so I just make one image, and hopefully, my artist gets it.

Yeah, it's just like that.

We're three years in, and that's the best we've got.

Yeah, and I think we early, early on with GPT,

when we ran one of the first news stories that we ran about it, and I was trying to understand like, what is this thing?

I remember feeding it a spreadsheet I had made with our own data and asking it to analyze the results.

And it was just like,

and keep in mind this was early, but it had hallucinated so much

that I was just, I was disillusioned.

It was like, okay, this is just, it literally just made everything up.

And that was kind of how I was at the beginning as well, because I loved dude dad's McGizmos.

I was kind of like, okay, everyone's talking about this.

And so I tried to do all of the things they talked about.

Oh, it could automate your work.

I'm a spreadsheet heavy guy.

And this crap can't even do that.

The funniest one for me was that, have you ever Manus?

Manus, you heard of this one?

No.

They claim to be an AI agent company.

Okay.

And I asked it, can you go and find all of the links that mentioned me for the last two years?

Probably over 100 of them.

And it takes 11 minutes or so.

And it's writing Python for every single step and it comes back with 11 links or like nine links and I go hey you missed some and it comes back with nine more after like another 10 minutes and this is this was about a month ago it's just what it feels like they're pushing them up a hill

it's but back to nvidia for a second because this will be the last nvidia one i think You have done a really good job of kind of tracking NVIDIA as they've jumped towards these movements, but they've done this, but they did.

How big was their move towards crypto?

That's actually something I've had trouble encapsulating before.

Did they really shift the company that aggressively in that direction?

That's a good question.

So, from my

NVIDIA's relationship with crypto is weird.

I remember at one point there was some kind of earnings call or something where it was during one of the

GPU mining sort of apocalypses where consumers couldn't get cards because they're all being bought by crypto mining.

And

I remember doing a report on in hardware news on the earnings where it seemed like the amount of revenue for mining was sort of obfuscated.

And it was a challenge where the devices are shared with gaming.

And so, okay, I could see how it would be difficult to decouple these

in a revenue chart if you sell gaming devices and they're used for multiple things.

Right.

So, you know, it's like, I kind of get it.

But at the same time, they weren't like hiding from making sales to crypto mining.

And then later on, Nvidia released these LHR low hash rate cards.

I think it was the 30 series.

And

that was done to try and get more card, well, they say, to try and get more cards to gamers.

Now, there were bypasses for that, which is a separate story.

And it was done at a time when the 30 series,

it was really unfortunate covering it because

the hardware was pretty good.

The prices at the beginning were good, but there's no supply

to meet the demand, which is partly because of COVID shutdowns where people were building new computers for home and also partly because of mining.

And so they tried a few things like these low hash rate cards to reduce the viability for mining operations.

But yeah, I mean, it definitely, they've kind of, that pendulum has swung back and forth, I think, at NVIDIA, where it's like, okay, we sell a lot of these and make a lot of money to people who are really pissed off, you know, and we can't get them to consumer users who might actually be repeat customers in the future.

And so, let's try and restrict it.

So, it's definitely, I don't know, I mean, it's not unexpected behavior, I guess, for a big corporation where it's just

where's the money.

And if the pendulum swings back the other way, you know, we need to try and minimize how much both of these

potential client groups hate us for catering to the other one.

So,

final GPU-related question, actually.

And forgive me if you don't know the answer for this exactly, but assuming the AI bubble bursts, and you don't have to commit to whether you think that will happen or not, what else can these big enterprise-level GPUs actually be used for?

They could be used for a lot.

I mean, like, some of the

we're talking to

a professor at a university for an upcoming piece, and

they have some very serious machine learning research use cases.

And I've looked into some of the other ones.

And as you might expect, there's really promising use cases in medical and pattern recognition and

like so-called AI being able to

do early identification of potentially cancerous masses and people that, you know, it's one of those, like, if you treat it like a tool rather than like the answer, then

I suppose in this example,

as someone who knows nothing about, you know, the medical world, but I suppose a skilled doctor might be able to use it

to

help the process.

I think the concern I would have as

a skeptic would be,

okay, but can we keep that doctor in the mindset of I'm using this to help catch my mistakes or help see things I can't rather than, you know, I'm overworked and I need to lean on this to do my job.

That would be the concern.

I'm just, my whole thing is just if they, and I believe they have, this is my personal opinion, I think they've massively overbuilt and oversold these cards.

And I, it's, sorry, cards is inappropriate to refer to like the enterprise ones, racks, I suppose.

But it's what do they do next is going to be the question eventually.

And I mean, there's just very clearly not going to be enough use cases for them.

But I think that's going to be really interesting.

And now I've got two fun questions for you.

First of all, did you hear about this $3,600 keyboard?

I did not.

The Norbauer Seneca.

Okay, so I'm going to send you this later.

So Nathan Edwards over at The Verge reviewed this $3,600 keyboard, which I need to send you because I...

I assume you would.

Norbauer Seneca.

I see the review.

Luxury keyboard.

It's insane.

Listeners, I will drop with everything we've been talking about.

I'll have links in there.

But this thing,

it's like precision honed and if he gets it wrong he has to start again with it takes him like a full day to do like the things that absorb impact

so cool this is this reminds me of uh

the

I don't know probably almost 20 years ago now there was the super expensive I think it was like an Optimus keyboard or something

like the the opt or the dust keyboard where it had the little screens on each key yeah it was screens for every key and back then you know that was that was before we were putting screens on on everything uh-huh i i want that's the thing i love that this exists because if you look at the verge story which i'll link it's just a guy who literally sits in his garage and just builds these things like an artesian i wish we had more weird shit like this this is what i miss about the tech industry yeah the the weird stuff and the cool stuff and things where that's what i like seeing at computex but it's okay i could this isn't a product yet but i could see it becoming a product or there's pieces of this that could become a, you know, an affordable product.

That's the stuff I like.

Yeah, did you see anything really bizarre like that there?

Yeah, I mean, the,

well, actually, most recently, this wasn't Computex, but the most sort of bizarre, cool thing that I saw and worked with that I was really happy about was the

pre-built PC.

made by a small company called Cherry Tree.

They make modded computer cases.

And it's just a computer inside of the husk husk of a video card.

Okay, that's cool.

I love that.

That reminds me of the Corsair 1000 D case, which I actually have at home, where they have, you can fit

micro ATX and a regular sized motherboard in there.

I love that stuff.

Like, it's, that's why I, I, that's the thing I love about tech, the weirdly, really dumb kind of niche stuff.

And actually, with that in mind, what are you actually excited for as we wrap up?

Like, what are the things coming out soon that you're kind of pumped up to see?

Um, I mean, the cases in Kool-Aid are really interesting to me.

I just think in the

computer, actually, CPUs have gotten interesting too.

So on the silicon side,

AMD has done really well to actually get into gear competitively over the last several years.

And

these, they call them X3D CPUs, which have a bunch of extra cash on them.

They've been really good for gaming.

And that's a, I mean, seeing.

What does the extra cache allow?

Yeah.

So

because you can fit more stuff

local to the CPU, like

you can store more of what the CPU needs to process within the CPU silicon itself, it doesn't have to go out to system memory.

So the way it normally works is like if you're playing a game and you need some kind of file for

drawing something in the game or whatever, I mean, it'll go into memory of some kind.

So it might be GPU memory, might might be system memory.

But if we take the system memory example, something goes into system memory.

You need that file.

There'll be a transaction where you can imagine these bits going down a bus to the memory and coming all the way back to the CPU.

And that's a long

highway to go down.

Whereas with extra cash, you can store more local to the CPU.

It can transact via basically like a shortcut.

And that allows, in the real world, significantly higher performance in in gaming or in cash-heavy applications.

So the new AMD ones are

the new, like the 9800X3D, for example.

So those, I'm really excited about that, how that's gone, because that actually, you may like this, but that was actually a sort of a Skunk Works project where this team of engineers in AMD, and we ran a story on this too, but they decided, let's just try this idea.

And they experimented with it.

They got it working and they brought it through management and said, hey, this looks viable.

And, you know, then they were able to actually make a product that it came from

an abnormal path of an underground sort of, you know, Skunk Works effort in the engineering department to actually being the leading gaming product for CPUs on the market.

We will have that link in the episode notes as well.

And we can wrap on the product, the AMD Skunk Works product you mentioned in a recent video that I'd not AMD made a mountain bike at one point.

Just want to watch.

Yeah.

So, yeah, that was not a good moment for AMD.

Fortunately, it didn't particularly damage their CPU or GPU credibility because it was so.

I can't imagine so.

But why?

Why did they do what?

It was during the COVID bike shortages.

I don't know if you remember, but like all kinds of bicycles were difficult to get.

And yeah, so they made these $300 so-called mountain bikes.

I think they're like Kent Walmart bike rebrands, basically.

Nice.

So they went real cheap.

Yeah.

And yeah, it was advertised, you know, for mountain biking and off-road trails and whatever.

And so we took it down a trail.

And I actually had trouble getting out of the parking lot.

That's how messed up the bike was.

We had to take it to a shop before I rode it for a safety check because

they used V-brakes and they were going through the spokes.

So they definitely would have stopped me.

Jensen Wong sitting there being like, we could have had a fucking mountain bike, man.

How do we get rid of them?

If we make a bike, we can get rid of them.

Yeah, they're just like

$20 billion shoved into mountain bike research.

That would be so good.

Steve, it's always such a pleasure having you on here.

Where can people find you?

On GamersNexis on YouTube.

Thank you so much for being here.

I'm, of course, Ed Zittron.

You've been listening to Better Offline.

Have a great week, everyone.

Steve, thanks for coming on.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening to Better Offline.

The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski.

You can check out more of his music and audio projects at matosowski.com.

M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot com.

You can email me at easy at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter.

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