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Comment by qayxc | Hacker News Reader

It's more than that - NVIDIA invested massively in their software ecosystem and mindshare (e.g. by a huge sponsoring program that saw universities flooded with their hardware).

AMD cards offer comparable compute performance and are sometimes even better. What AMD lacks, though, are ready-to-use software packages like CUDA, cuDNN, cuBLAS, and the like.

NVIDIA basically bought their way into the research community and solidified their strong foothold by keeping CUDA proprietary.

It's fascinating how other companies (Microsoft) get bashed on a regular basis for using the exact same tactics (see Direct3D vs OpenGL on Windows), while people are perfectly fine with NVIDIA doing it...

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> people are perfectly fine with NVIDIA doing it

I assure you, the affected scientists who have to fight tooth and nail for funding are less than impressed that they are dependent on the mercy of a single vendor.

> a huge sponsoring program that saw universities flooded with their hardware

This is really important, and I don't think people quite realise the scale. I was doing a Physics MSc in 2012 and it seemed that almost everybody in computational physics was doing some variant of reimplementing Y with CUDA.

That's not to say it was the wrong tool for many of the jobs – though for some it apparently was, judging by the levels of stress – but I did find it a bit weird how this was an approach to research that pretty much completely ignored vendor lock-in.

Because NVIDIA did not do anything illegal - so far. MS is a convicted monopolist that actively went after competitors rather than just to let the market decide. What NVIDIA has done so far is perfectly fine in my book, paying companies not to use competitor hardware, funding third party lawsuits and stealing IP, the browser wars and so on are things that Microsoft has done.

AMD does have ROCm/HIP, hipDNN and hipBLAS (which mirror their counterparts), but these and the rest of their modern GPGPU stack suffer from a lack of polish, ineffective evangelism and subpar documentation. It's difficult to justify using them unless you work at somewhere like ORNL where folks are building new infrastructure using exclusively AMD GPUs.

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