[dave_sullivan]

I think I agree with everything you just said.

AMD hardware is more or less the same as Nvidia; Nvidia doesn't really have any special sauces or patents that make their cards better than AMD. And you're right: in a lot of benchmarks, AMD is either faster or (at least) better-bang-for-buck than Nvidia.

Yet AMD doesn't have community support in software or cloud adoption or key libraries. The deep learning community has gone for what's easiest to work with and most readily available. Even though you might conceivably get some performance gain from AMD, it's outweighed by the amount of software that's been written in CUDA already, and how quickly that allows you to move.

Nvidia has taken an early lead and jumped on it, while AMD has only fallen further behind. I think one company just fundamentally understands the trend more than the other. But, for what is essentially hardware that answers the question, "how fast can you do matrix multiplication?", library support becomes a key differentiator. And that's where AMD is behind.