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> This is a textbook situation that would be perfect for a competitor to come in and undercut. Is it? A competitor can enter the market and undercut by produci
by andrewjl 3y ago
> This is a textbook situation that would be perfect for a competitor to come in and undercut.
Is it? A competitor can enter the market and undercut by producing a cheaper and otherwise undifferentiated commodity-type product. Nvidia's focus is adding moats that prevent competing on pure specs such as CUDA, design, and so on.
- zirgs 3y agoNvidia started working on CUDA back in the mid-2000s. Nobody else cared about GPU compute back then.
- andrewjl 3y agoI didn't know CUDA was in development for that long, thanks! I'm curious if there were serious attempts to create something similar over the years and how far they managed to progress. I've never used OpenCL but from looking at it from afar its adoption always seemed limited. Irrespectively though I don't see how a competitor can replicate the context and tacit knowledge associated building something like CUDA for close to 20 years without putting in a similar amount of time.
- zirgs 3y agoThe first version of CUDA was released in 2007 so I would not be surprised if they started working on it in the 90s. These things take time. Nvidia also made sure that CUDA runs on gaming GPUs and supports Windows. This is why its tools are so good. You don't need to buy a datacenter GPU, no need to mess with Linux. Just buy any gaming GPU, install CUDA SDK and you're good to go. AMD wasn't like that. Their alternative - ROCM didn't even work on gaming GPUs. Their datacenter GPUs didn't even support Windows. Basically the opposite approach of NVIDIA. Now AMD is rushing to add Windows and consumer GPU support to ROCM, but it's a bit too little too late.