Oxide and Friends 6/24/2024 -- Is NVIDIA like Sun from the Dot Com Bubble?

Every so often we like to give our Oxide and Friends hot takes (or as Adam puts it "Bryan getting trolled on Twitter"). This time, a viral tweet suggests that NVIDIA is on the same trajectory as Sun Microsystems on its ascent during the Dot Com Bubble. From two alumni of Sun's rise and fall: maaaaybe not.
Context: mastodon.socia...
Notes: github.com/oxi...

[@arubaga]

“Sun & vi Dia” makes a Sunday. 😅

[@takumicrary4396]

4:15 LMFAO

[@THB192]

I feel like you always have to take Acquired's assessments of technical leads companies have with some pretty big grains of salt. This is almost certainly a consequence of having to go in and research these company histories in a relatively limited timeframe, and maybe not having the time to go as deep on their competitors and the market surrounding them. I was listening to their Nintendo episode today and noticed exaggerated (albeit less extreme) claims about their technical lead on their competitors as well.

[@ahl0003]

I loved those Nintendo episodes. What claims were exaggerated?

[@THB192]

@@ahl0003 While Nintendo delivered the most overall capable console on the market with the NES, at an aggressively low price point and with the best games on the market (to say nothing of the revolutionary controller design), the console wasn't as innovative or as far ahead as described in the podcast, hardware-wise. The concept of dedicated graphics and sound hardware for games with features like hardware sprites and scrolling was well-established by this point, and you could buy game graphics and sound chips off the shelf from TI or General Instruments-Not as good as the ones in the NES, but mostly serviceable. The big players were also designing their own chips that were even more capable (Atari's graphics chips and Commodore's sound chips were in some respects even better than Nintendo's, although I'd say Nintendo either matches or edges them out on the whole). Technology-wise, I think other companies could have put out consoles that could have gone head to head with the NES, if they didn't have other issues. Of course, it wouldn't matter if they did, because none of them had the games and Nintendo did.