| Your impression is wrong, there is a metric ton of enterprise and consumer software that uses CUDA and runs only on windows. There are also whole "data sciences" divisions in bluechip companies that are running windows. Case in point i work for a huge financial company we have CUDA powered excel add-ins/macros... And no I'm not joking https://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2010/presentations/S12... And engineering, sciences and medical consumer applications are also quite often than not Windows only or Windows first. Then you have all the less-enterprisy stuff video and photo editing, filters, chess programs w/e... And lastly the biggest point is that Windows and consumer grade hardware is where most developers and students live, good luck running ROCm on your laptop, and no I really mean it it's officially not supported and in reality even if you manage to get a moderately compatible chip you'll encounter more bugs than on Klendathu. Don't underestimate the importance of software that runs everywhere and just works.
Node.JS didn't became popular because JavaScript on the backend was something that was desperately needed, it became popular because you had a plethora of front-end developers that had little to no knowledge of server-side languages and frameworks. Unlike what HN and recruiters would like you to believe most developers can't learn 10 languages and frameworks, and definitely not well sure some can but the vast majority of developers don't spend 9 hours working and 9 hours hacking, for every dev with a github account that needs it's own storage rack there are 10,000 that just do 9 to 5 and check out. If on one hand you have a solution that forces you to pick from a narrow list of linux kernels and supported distros and an extremely narrow list of GPUs and still encounter bugs on every corner so you can maybe produce something that if it runs would only run on the same system as yours vs on the other hand a solution that would run on any OS that supports an NVIDIA GPU you'll pick the latter unless you are really really bored. And that is before you entertain the marketability and job prospects of learning CUDA vs ROCm, one allows you to get a job at any place that ships something that runs on a GPU it doesn't matter if it's something that occupies 1000 racks and might become sentient or something that filters excel spreadsheets faster the other one doesn't. |
Thank you for sharing the link and correcting my information bias. It sounds like the "workstation," compute world is a forest of deep niches.
You make a lot of good points about the staying power of Windows. I am excited about all the moves towards a complete Linux desktop, but am not imagining that it will be mainstream.