This NVidia stuff is getting ridiculous. Apple basically killed off any Deep Learning enthusiasts and nobody could do any serious computing-intense stuff on their platform. A polished toy.
Nvidia blocks the Nouveau drivers from working properly on Maxwell2 or newer cards: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-...
I currently run an EVGA 980Ti Classified in my hackintosh. It’s great hardware, but with the frequency of glitches that the drivers bring I’m increasingly inclined to sell it and replace it with an AMD card.
Performance is an issue, but the bigger issue is that your model just won't work.
NVIDIA is really the only game in town right now. Google's TPUs are somewhat of an exception but they only sort of count, because you can't just go buy a TPU for training. Makes TPUs a non-starter for a lot of businesses.
What's interesting is the slow pace of change. 3 years ago we were in the exact same place. I don't see it changing overnight.
but that's what this is, right? https://coral.withgoogle.com/products/
I bet if NVIDIA significantly investing in GPU applications the competition would too.
It makes a whole lot of sense for #1 to vendorlock and #2 onwards to promote open standards. (See Microsoft circa 2001 vs. Microsoft today)
If everybody went vendor-agnostic you'd get a lot less support or you would have to find somebody else to pick up the mantle with an economic motive.