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People complain about Nvidia being anticompetitive with CUDA, but I don't really see it. They saw a gap in the standards for on-GPU compute and put tons of effo
by hot_gril 3y ago
People complain about Nvidia being anticompetitive with CUDA, but I don't really see it. They saw a gap in the standards for on-GPU compute and put tons of effort into a proprietary alternative. They tied CUDA to their own hardware, which sorta makes technical sense given the optimizations involved, but it's their choice anyway. They still support the open standards, but many prefer CUDA and will pay the Nvidia premium for it because it's actually nicer. They also don't have CPU marketshare to tie things to.
Good for them. We can hope the open side catches up either by improving their standards, or adding more layers like this article describes.
- zirgs 3y agoCUDA was released in 2007 and the development of it started even earlier - possibly even in the 90s. Back then nobody else cared about GPU compute. OpenCL came out 2 years after that.
- killerstorm 3y agoNot true. People got interested in general-purpose GPU compute (GPGPU) in early 2000s when video cards with programmable shaders became available. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_graphics_processing_units#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_g... People made a programming language & a compiler/runtime for GPGPU in 2004: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrookGPU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrookGPU
- hot_gril 3y agoEverything has old beginnings that the specialists will remember, but GPU compute really reached mass popularity and became a large selling point for Nvidia in the 2010s.