Great question, and perhaps at the point where decisions were being made, it'd be hard to argue a different path internally (hindsight being 20/20).
However, it seems clear that the business built both insane prices and the crypto lockup of devices (whether explicitly, or implicitly) into their forecasts for the business. They didn't have a good pulse on the actual demand/usage of their product, and when that usage pattern would shift.
The path they're taking right now, specifically regarding pricing towards & serving higher-end enthusiasts with newer products, makes sense while the used inventory gets cycled around the lower end of the market.
From a product perspective, I don't have any useful opinions to share because I'm not in hardware, and I don't have the information set they're operating from internally. But, they should have hoovered up as much cheap capital as they could while their stock price was high and the going was good to make the next period of heavy investments (to be fair, shares outstanding did grow, just not by a ton, %-wise, and they have a fair bit of cash on the balance sheet)
> The path they're taking right now, specifically regarding pricing towards & serving higher-end enthusiasts with newer products, makes sense while the used inventory gets cycled around the lower end of the market.
This approach might take a beating if AMD is willing for a price war. And AMD can because of their chiplet approach being cheaper.
I will buy nVidia purely because of dabbling interests in ML images... so a price war might not be so effective thanks to a technical moat.
people absolutely SCREAMED a year ago when there was a rumor going around that NVIDIA was pulling back on new chip starts, it was going all around that it was a plan to "spike prices during the holidays".
In the end 2021Q4 shipments were actually up according to JPR, of course. But people were mad, and I still see that MLID article brought up as proof that NVIDIA was deliberately trying to "worsen the shortage" and "spike prices during the holidays".
Now, what MLID may not really know, is that wafer starts typically take about 6 months, so if he's hearing about reduced starts in October, it's probably more like NVIDIA is pulling back on expected Q1/Q2 production... which indeed did come down a bit.
But as to the public reaction... people were fucking mad about any sign of pulling back on production. People are just unreasonably mad about anything involving NVIDIA in general, every single little news item is instantly spun into its worst possible case and contextualized as a moustache-twirling plan to screw everyone over.
Like, would it have really been a bad thing to pull back on chip starts a year ago? That actually looks pretty sensible to me, and gamers will generally also suffer from the delay of next-gen products while the stockpile burns through anyway.
It's nowhere near the "sure miners may be annoying, but deal with it for 6 months and then we all get cheap GPUs and everyone holds hands and sings" that LTT and some other techtubers presented it as. Like, yeah, if you want a cheap 30-series card at the end of its generation/lifecycle great, but, you'll be waiting for 4050/4060/4070 for a while. Even AMD pushed back their midrange chips and is launching high-end-only to allow the miner inventory to sell through.
And people hate that now that they've realized the consequence, but they were cheering a year ago and demanding the removal of the miner lock / etc. More cards for the miners! Wait, no, not like that!
It's just so tiresome on any article involving NVIDIA, even here you've got the "haha linus said FUCK NVIDIA, that makes me Laugh Out Loud right guys!?" and the same tired "turn everything into a conspiracy" bullshit, constantly.
And that's just the hardware drama. The software hate against Nvidia is partially unwarranted too - Nvidia's Wayland issues mostly boil down to GNOME's refusal to embrace EGLStreams, which got whipped up into a narrative that Nvidia was actively working to sabotage the Linux community. The reality is that desktop Linux isn't a market (I say this as an Nvidia/Linux user), and they have no obligation to cater to the <.5% of the desktop community begging for changes. Honestly, they'd get more respect for adding a kernel-mode driver to modern MacOS.
In the end, Nvidia is still a business. Putting any money towards supporting desktop Linux isn't going to have an adverse effect on their overall sales. We're just lucky that they patch in DLSS/ray tracing support to Linux games and software like Blender.
Nvidia doesn't need to offer full linux support, only the bare minimum to make the lives of those making their job a bit easier.
Also, let's not kid ourselves, Nvidia has a lot to gain in the datacenter/AI business with proper linux support.
Let's also bear in mind that Linus Torvalds said this: "they are the exception, not the rule". If that doesn't speak volumes, I don't know what does.
> Nvidia has a lot to gain in the datacenter/AI business with proper linux support
They do, which is why they support CUDA and Docker. They have nothing to gain from supporting Wayland besides appeasing a bruised-and-battered bunch of people that don't really care anyways. Nvidia seems to be admitting as much by open-sourcing their drivers and letting us play with their Legos, since we're so smart.
I have no particular animosity towards Nvidia, and while I'm critical of the ignorance/mistakes made regarding crypto, I think they're doing incredible work and running an insanely difficult business as best they can.
It's easy to forget that the world isn't as simple as we imagine it to be, and that gnostic conspiracies are attractively intuitive.
