[morphle]

There certainly is a reason and indeed you don't see it because Apple downplays these things in their PR.

It might be the same reason that is behind NVDIA's CUDA moat. CUDA lock-in prevented competitors like AMD and Intel to convince programmers and their customers to switch away from CUDA. So there was no software ported to their competitive GPU's. So you get anti-trust lawsuits [1].

I think you should put yourself in Apples management mindset and then reason. I suspect they think they will not sell more iPhones or Macs if they let third party developers access the low level APIs and write faster software.

They might reason that if no one knows the instruction sets hackers will write less code to break security. Security by obscurity.

They certainly think that blocking competitors from reverse engineering the low power Apple Silicon and blocking them from using TSMC manufacturing capacity will keep them the most profitable company for another decade.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40593576

[_zoltan_]

CUDA didn't prevent anything at least not in the way you believe.

Intel and AMD had no competitive offer, period. They still don't.

NVIDIA is simply offering an ecosystem that is battle tested and is ready out of the box. Look at the recent semianalysis test to see how not ready AMD is, who would be the only company to have a real shot at this. Their HW on paper is better or equal, yet their software ecosystem is nowhere ready.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Look at the recent semianalysis test to see how not ready AMD is, who would be the only company to have a real shot at this. Their HW on paper is better or equal, yet their software ecosystem is nowhere ready.

Reading that was kind of odd. It seems like their conclusion was that on paper AMD should be significantly less expensive and significantly faster, whereas in practice they're significantly less expensive and slightly slower because of unoptimized software, which actually seems like it'd still be a pretty good deal. Especially if the problem is the software, because then the hardware could get better with a software update after you buy it.

They also spend a lot of time complaining about how much trouble it is to install the experimental releases with some improvements that aren't in the stable branch yet, but then the performance difference was only big in a few cases and in general the experimental version was only a couple of percent faster, which either way should end up in the stable release in the near future.

And they do a lot of benchmarks on interconnect bandwidth which, fair enough, Nvidia currently has some hardware advantage. But that also mainly matters to the small handful of companies doing training for huge frontier models and not to the far larger number of people doing inference or training smaller models.

It feels like they were more frustrated because they were using the hardware as the problems were being solved rather than after, even though the software is making progress and many of the issues have already been resolved or are about to be.

[zaroth]

They literally spent months trying to work out the bugs. It’s an absolute admonishment of AMD’s software stack.

Just look at their market value and it says everything you need to know about how much “better” AMD is than NVIDIA.

[AnthonyMouse]

> They literally spent months trying to work out the bugs.

That's kind of the point. They spent months working out bugs that are now worked out. Which sucks when you're the one to do it, so they're kind of bitter about it, but is pretty great for everyone who comes after them and the fixes have already made it into the drivers.

> Just look at their market value and it says everything you need to know about how much “better” AMD is than NVIDIA.

"The company makes more money" has a nasty tendency to be inversely correlated with value for money to the customer. Comparing the "market cap" of Oracle vs. pick your favorite open source database is not a great way to decide which one to use.

[dylan604]

At this point, Apple is absolutely not afraid of an anti-trust lawsuit. To them, it is part of the cost of doing business

[morphle]

I concur, they are virtually untouchable in this respect. No one else will throw a trillion or more into developing lower power faster silicon.