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> but that alone does not suffice a monopoly You're right. CUDA is what does.
by girvo 3y ago
> but that alone does not suffice a monopoly
You're right.
CUDA is what does.
- nl 3y agoAMD has know about CUDA for decades. Everyone has been begging AMD to put resources into AI since 2014. AMD doesn't care and it's difficult to blame that on NVIDIA.
- girvo 3y agoI don’t blame Nvidia. I think caring about blame when discussing this topic is missing the forest for the trees anyway. The bigger problem is that Nvidia can and will abuse their monopoly power. Whether it’s Nvidias fault or not, once upon a time governments would step in when that happened. Thing is, I don’t think that solution even exists for something as high tech as GPGPU stacks and vertical integration. I don’t see a solution at all really, which worries me a little in the medium-long term.
- smoldesu 3y agoHow? CUDA is a software API, any sufficiently motivated competitor could even legally re-impliment it for their hardware if they wanted to.
- dragonwriter 3y agoContrary to the dogma of certain politico-economic camps, a monopoly (the actual presence of market power and absence of substitution effect marking an absence of actual competition in some space) can exist without competition being illegal. So, “Any…competitor could even legally re-implement [CUDA] for their hardware” is not a counter-argument to CUDA being the basis for an actual existing monopoly. It might be an argument that, to the extent that that is the sole basis for the monopoly, the monopoly is unlikely to be a long-term stable condition, but its not a counterargument to it existing.
- smoldesu 3y agoThen let's not mince words. This behavior is not illegally anticompetitive. Nvidia's advantage is fair, and they only monopolize GPU compute APIs because their competitors literally abandoned their own solutions.
- dragonwriter 3y ago. This behavior is not illegally anticompetitive. No one said it was. Having a monopoly isn’t illegal in the US at all (leveraging it in certain ways is.) The claim was that (1) NVidia has a monopoly, and (2) the effect of that monopoly has been consumer devices getting worse for this use in specific, well-defined ways. Legality of NVidia’s actions and fairness of how their market position arose are not particularly relevant.