How long before the M-word starts being thrown around? In all seriousness, is it possible, likely or inevitable that Nvidia be 'broken up' due to effective monopoly?
I'm just curious, I'm ignorant about how these things go or went in the past, just young enough to not have paid attention when this was about to happen to Microsoft, and don't really have a predisposed position.
Edit: a quick wikipedia search tells me that MS was just barely spared breaking up, and had to settle with a few concessions regarding non-MS software. I can't draw a parallel from this to Nvidia, though
It's not clear to me how you would even go about a break up of Nvidia. They're almost unique in their success. With any other large company - Microsoft, Apple, Meta all have distinct segments of their business. Meta actually spent a huge amount of effort trying to embed their separate products in each other to avoid exactly that threat. With Nvidia, what would you even separate? They don't do the fabrication, all they do is designs and then variations on those designs for market segments. Are you going to break up their design team? I don't think it makes sense.
88% is definitely strong evidence for a monopoly position. But having a monopoly isn't illegal, only abusing a monopoly is illegal.
For example, it would be legal for AMD to sign deals with game makers to make games AMD-exclusive. But if Nvidia did that, anti-trust would likely act to prevent that.
> How long before the M-word starts being thrown around?
The US government at least mentioned "antitrust" 2 days ago, which could count depending on one's interpretation of various stages of these investigations. More discussion from more informed and opinionated people in the following thread:
"U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI" (nytimes.com)
Well when the competition decides their strategy should be to sell 105% of the raster performance for 95% of the cost while having none of the software features that consumers want, no wonder Nvidia is dominating. Some features like DLSS are simply more important than raw raster performance and customers will buy those with such features.
Yeah I’ve switched to AMD card as well, its price to performance justifies it. I would have to save for a LOT longer if I wanted to buy a new Nvidia card.
They realized that people wait for AMD to compete and drop prices just so that they can buy Nvidia at reduced prices. AMD doesn't actually gain any new market share because people simply like Nvidia that much more.
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[ 7.2 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadI'm just curious, I'm ignorant about how these things go or went in the past, just young enough to not have paid attention when this was about to happen to Microsoft, and don't really have a predisposed position.
Edit: a quick wikipedia search tells me that MS was just barely spared breaking up, and had to settle with a few concessions regarding non-MS software. I can't draw a parallel from this to Nvidia, though
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
For example, it would be legal for AMD to sign deals with game makers to make games AMD-exclusive. But if Nvidia did that, anti-trust would likely act to prevent that.
The US government at least mentioned "antitrust" 2 days ago, which could count depending on one's interpretation of various stages of these investigations. More discussion from more informed and opinionated people in the following thread:
"U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI" (nytimes.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40593275
I think it's just desktop computers where it's 88%.
Pretty sure if you account for gaming consoles then it's a lot different.
Intel will likely catch up in time and they are very good at competing so this will change but not for a long time.