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>NVIDIA is so far ahead in terms of GPGPU it's worth the vendor lock-in. I am dubious. But I'll admit that this isn't a field I'm experienced with. It looks l

>NVIDIA is so far ahead in terms of GPGPU it's worth the vendor lock-in. I am dubious. But I'll admit that this isn't a field I'm experienced with. It looks like AMD GPUs are in one of the top500 clusters, compared to 7 with nvidia GPUs, so that lends some strength to your statement. But I'd rather write for an open architecture and move my code to whatever happens to be the fastest running it then write for a particular vendor and hope they keep up. Betamax was (slightly) superior to VHS, and it didn't work out so well. I guess I don't really understand how vendor lock-in would ever be acceptable in a market that exploded due entirely to the commoditization of the personal computer. Okay, CUDA is more pleasant to code in now now, but what happens if AMD's GPUs start trouncing nvidia's? Or what if Intel figures out how to make Larrabee competitive? What if Oracle buys nvidia and starts charging extra for drivers that support CUDA?

frisco 16y ago
This is much more clear than that. The entire community is rallying around CUDA & NVIDIA. Never once have I been talking to someone about GPU computing (and I work with it) and has someone mentioned AMD chips. NVIDIA holds the GPU Technology Conference each year that everyone goes to, and all the GPU books are being written about CUDA. Every Mac has a CUDA-capable GPU inside. NVIDIA has been collaborating with universities to get them devices so students can use them. AWS offers Fermi (NVIDIA's next-gen architecture) GPUs are a service. Autodesk and mental images have teamed up with NVIDIA to do CUDA-specific acceleration of their products. In the past 2 years of working on GPGPU, I've heard ATI mentioned four or five times, and then only by lay press.
- tylerritchie 16y ago
  That's definitely interesting, I'm certainly curious to see how that plays out down the line.

frisco 16y ago

This is much more clear than that. The entire community is rallying around CUDA & NVIDIA. Never once have I been talking to someone about GPU computing (and I work with it) and has someone mentioned AMD chips. NVIDIA holds the GPU Technology Conference each year that everyone goes to, and all the GPU books are being written about CUDA. Every Mac has a CUDA-capable GPU inside. NVIDIA has been collaborating with universities to get them devices so students can use them. AWS offers Fermi (NVIDIA's next-gen architecture) GPUs are a service. Autodesk and mental images have teamed up with NVIDIA to do CUDA-specific acceleration of their products. In the past 2 years of working on GPGPU, I've heard ATI mentioned four or five times, and then only by lay press.

tylerritchie 16y ago
That's definitely interesting, I'm certainly curious to see how that plays out down the line.