[ryanpepper]

In academia it's also because NVidia does a lot of stuff to make your life easy.

For example, NVidia came to our University in the UK and provided training for £20 an academic/PhD student for a 2 day course on how to use CUDA and with performance tips, hands on porting of code, etc. They also give away CUDA cards to academics under a hardware grant scheme, so it's possible to get a free Titan Xp this year for a research group.

There's not really an equivalent for AMD or Intel; a Xeon Phi Knights Landing chip is significantly more expensive than a consumer level GPU, and the same cost as a workstation GPU, and it's a lot harder to get good performance from it. It also doesn't seem like AMD are targeting this market, at least not currently.