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NVIDIA has so much cash these days that they don't have to do just one thing. They can do _all_ the things, at the same time. This realistically would only take a 5-7 person team, including the manager. That's $2M/yr tops, all in, which is peanuts for NVIDIA. Much less if the author is not based in the US.

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With what ROI? This isn't charity.

Enable more people to build more GPU-accelerated software, which in turn drives sales of their GPUs. A cuda-specific library like this also strengthens their monopoly on GPU compute.

It's hard to put in numbers because it depends on the software that will be built. A single marginally popular software adding or improving GPU-acceleration could easily increase GPU sales by $2M/year

They already made it when CUDA 3.0 introduced PTX instead of being C focused like most Khronos stuff.

NVidia is not to blame when others fail to execute and aren't able to provide the same polyglot level and IDE integrations as NVidia.

They don't have any issues trying to keep up with demand, on the contrary, there aren't enough of them to sell.

Precisely. Their lead over AMD is insurmountable only because of CUDA. They should feed the goose that lays such awesome golden eggs, and feed it well.

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