Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by amadeuspagel 920 days ago
> That is a lot more programmers than Nvidia can afford to employ.

How many programmers one can employ is determined by profits, and Nvidia has monopoly profits thanks to CUDA, while "the entire industry" can at best hope to create some commiditized alternative to CUDA. Companies with real market power can beat entire industries of commodity manufacturers, Apple is the prime example.

3 comments

AMD and Intel together have more revenue than Nvidia, even without considering any other player in the industry or any community contributions they get from being open source.
it's not about revenue, it's about investment. It is closely related to future profit. Not so much to current revenue ...
Profit is revenue minus costs. Investment is costs. If you're reinvesting everything you take in your current-year profit would be zero because you're making large investments in the future.
How many programmers do you really need though to catch up to what CUDA has already? The path has been laid. There's no need for experimentation. Just copy what NVIDIA did. No?