NVIDIA MGX is real; The other titles written by a hallucinatory AI?
Welcome to a strange new world, at least according to headlines cropping up everywhere that NVIDIA is the first chipmaker to be valued at a trillion dollars. Ignore the fact that the sharp rise in the stock price of GPU companies is being driven by the current AI craze and analyze the rest. NVIDIA has no fabs, their chips are currently manufactured by TSMC and have been manufactured by several other companies over the years, so calling NVIDIA a chip maker is a bizarre statement. As for NVIDIA’s trillion dollar value, that’s only accurate when specifically talking about market capitalization, something that bears no relation to reality.
What reflects reality is that NVIDIA made $7.19 billion in total revenue this quarter, while Intel earned $11.7 billion, reflecting a horrible quarter for Intel and a better-than-expected quarter for NVIDIA. There’s no way for NVIDIA to ramp up its production to get anywhere near what the market cap suggests, they don’t have the people, and most importantly, TSMC doesn’t have the space on its production lines to make that many chips for NVIDA .
The new NVIDIA MGX open server specification on the other hand it is very real and may be very popular in the near future. Current server chassis designs were designed many years ago and were made for chips that are larger and less power hungry than today’s silicon. The design also couldn’t account for HPC cards, since they didn’t exist. NVIDIA has come forward with a solution, a modular rack server design specifically designed to handle large amounts of HPC hardware. The modular design will make it much less expensive to build while offering a wide variety of designs to fit the specific hardware that will need to be cooled and powered.
Whereas ASRock Rack, ASUS, GIGABYTE, Pegatron, QCT and Supermicro all signed with NVIDIA MGX and will produce chassis for customers later this year. It will be nice to see some new designs racked up in the server room, the old designs are getting very dated.
