[pie420]

if the line gets long enough, it allows other companies to compete with Nvidia and creates a healthier, more competitive market, in the same way AMD has made intel a more honest, fairer, less price-gouging company. Competition is the entire thesis of american capitalism

[talldayo]

> Competition is the entire thesis of american capitalism

Then why aren't people competing with Nvidia? Why is OpenCL on life support and unsupported on major operating systems? Why are we doing this song-and-dance routine refusing to adopt certain GPU APIs but embracing closed ones instead?

I'd like to believe that a tipping point will be reached, but if not now then when? People have talked about upending Nvidia's GPGPU compute empire for years, but besides application-specific replacements and proofs-of-concept, we don't have a real CUDA-killer. Apple does not ship one, Google does not ship one, Microsoft does not ship one and AMD doesn't either.

So... when? If we continue along the current path, I suspect Nvidia will continue to find markets where CUDA is demanded and OEMS will continue to chase them down with half-measure solutions. Unless OpenCL is revived or someone commits to a proprietary CUDA-like platform, I suspect we'll be spinning our wheels and digging ourselves deeper.

[thorncorona]

> Then why aren't people competing with Nvidia? Why is OpenCL on life support and unsupported on major operating systems? Why are we doing this song-and-dance routine refusing to adopt certain GPU APIs but embracing closed ones instead?

Because Nvidia invested 20 years into its API platform, and this advantage is slowly getting realized.

[talldayo]

Well therein lies my confusion; why did their competitors get 10 years into making a competing API, and then give up?

If the reason that OpenCL died is because Apple decided that they'd rather draw blood than work with the community, then yeah, this is a well-deserved failure on their part. Even Nvidia was willing to contribute to OpenCL; the only thing stopping us from living in a CUDA-agnostic world is the pointless and childish aggression between device manufacturers.

It feels less like we're slowly realizing things, and more like the persistent failure of Nvidia's competitors is forcing them back to the negotiations table. It's pathetic that American businesses are this willing to throw each other under the bus before they consider working together for the common good.

[ralph84]

Because Nvidia is run by a founder who has been playing the long game for the entire history of the company. Its competitors are run by non-founders who aren’t interested in the long game they’re interested in next quarter’s earnings.

[prng2021]

Nvidia’s founder isn’t a fortune teller. He didn’t create his company to become the world leader in running AI workloads. CUDA has been around for a long time and it didn’t give them any significant advantage over AMD. If generative AI hadn’t exploded very recently, NVIDIA and AMD would just be battling it out with their GPUs for gaming as before.

[kaliqt]

Founder-led companies always beat non-founder-led companies, on average.