We Need A Proper AI Inference Benchmark Test
The Next Platform, Monday, March 9th, 2026
Companies are spending enormous sums of money on AI systems, and we are now at a point where there are credible alternatives to Nvidia GPUs as the compute engines within these systems.
Given the amount of money being lavished on these machines and the historically high profits that Nvidia is enjoying - and when I say historical, I mean not for Nvidia, but for the ten or so decades of data processing - competition will just keep coming and eventually there will be several economically viable alternatives.
This competition is healthy, and will help drive the innovation that will keep driving the cost of AI processing - particularly AI inference processing - down and down and down until, at some point in the future, it will normalize at a price that doesn't seem extreme compared to what it has cost in the past decade and what it will cost later this year when new generations of compute engines and networks are brought to bear on large language models.