ML was big before LLMs and nVidia was already making a killing from selling expensive GPUs that would never draw a single polygon ca 2015. They've been hobbling FP64 (double precision) support in cheaper "consumer" GPUs, to prevent their use in most data centers, for a long time too.
Looking into this a bit, it seems that nVidia was still making most of its money from "gaming" as recently as early 2022. I'd suspect that, if crypto mining could be separated out, the transition point actually happened a couple of years earlier, but nevertheless the datacenter segment didn't become dominant until about 2-2.5 years ago. It existed well before then, but wasn't that big.
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ML was big before LLMs and nVidia was already making a killing from selling expensive GPUs that would never draw a single polygon ca 2015. They've been hobbling FP64 (double precision) support in cheaper "consumer" GPUs, to prevent their use in most data centers, for a long time too.
Looking into this a bit, it seems that nVidia was still making most of its money from "gaming" as recently as early 2022. I'd suspect that, if crypto mining could be separated out, the transition point actually happened a couple of years earlier, but nevertheless the datacenter segment didn't become dominant until about 2-2.5 years ago. It existed well before then, but wasn't that big.