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Whereas in Linuxland, they've got a kernel, a billion side-projects that may or may not be widely used and they all want NVIDIA to conform the THEIR way of doin

Whereas in Linuxland, they've got a kernel, a billion side-projects that may or may not be widely used and they all want NVIDIA to conform the THEIR way of doing things, an angry Finnish gentleman who just shouts and swears at things he doesn't like, and a largely non-gaming and very fragmented user base that could be using any number of desktop environments/kernel versions/drivers etc. There is one big elephant in the room here that you are missing and that is GPU computing. This is probably a big market for them now (Teslas go for a couple of thousand a pop) and the vast majority of it is on Linux. Their ecosystem with CUDA and CuDNN is pretty awesome, on the other hand, their driver has issues. At any rate, it's a market that they cannot afford to lose. As OpenCL support for e.g. machine learning libraries such as Tensorflow is progressing they may not have a lock on the market as they have now.

ktta 9y ago
>As OpenCL support for e.g. machine learning libraries such as Tensorflow is progressing I wonder if the complex OpenCL API throws off many ML developers. Also I think they tend to focus on CUDA because there is much less chance of it breaking between devices. OTOH, each vendor has their own .so for OpenCL and they usually tend to be buggy and stay a point version or two behind. This is the explanation I tell myself when I wonder why the hell Google chose CUDA over OpenCL.
- thawkins 9y ago
  Also, on machines with mixed intel/nvidia setuos, why cant i use the intel solely for display and the nvidia soley for compute,why does the gpu have to be tied into the display system, its a pain in tbe ass. To use cuda you almost must make tbe gpu work as a display system.
  - ktta 9y ago
    You should be able to do that. You can use the Nvidia GPU in a 'headless' mode.
    - tankenmate 9y ago
      The issue is that on many hybrid laptops the nvidia card is wired to the display but the built in intel chipset isn't wired to the display or only wired to the HDMI port.
synicalx 9y ago
Well sure GPU computing is huge, and Nvidia is top of the pack in that as well. But the original post was about desktop computing, hence why I only talked to that.

ktta 9y ago

>As OpenCL support for e.g. machine learning libraries such as Tensorflow is progressing I wonder if the complex OpenCL API throws off many ML developers. Also I think they tend to focus on CUDA because there is much less chance of it breaking between devices. OTOH, each vendor has their own .so for OpenCL and they usually tend to be buggy and stay a point version or two behind. This is the explanation I tell myself when I wonder why the hell Google chose CUDA over OpenCL.

thawkins 9y ago
Also, on machines with mixed intel/nvidia setuos, why cant i use the intel solely for display and the nvidia soley for compute,why does the gpu have to be tied into the display system, its a pain in tbe ass. To use cuda you almost must make tbe gpu work as a display system.
- ktta 9y ago
  You should be able to do that. You can use the Nvidia GPU in a 'headless' mode.
  - tankenmate 9y ago
    The issue is that on many hybrid laptops the nvidia card is wired to the display but the built in intel chipset isn't wired to the display or only wired to the HDMI port.

synicalx 9y ago

Well sure GPU computing is huge, and Nvidia is top of the pack in that as well. But the original post was about desktop computing, hence why I only talked to that.