> The point of the open standard is to untether your prospective customers from the incumbent.
That is the point.
But FWIW the incumbent adopts it and dominates anyway. (Though you now are technically "untethered.")
That is the point.
But FWIW the incumbent adopts it and dominates anyway. (Though you now are technically "untethered.")
That's assuming the incumbent's advantage isn't rooted in the lock-in.
If ML was suddenly untethered from CUDA, now you're competing on hardware. Intel would still have mediocre GPUs, but AMD's are competitive, and Intel's could be in the near future if they execute competently.
The open standard doesn't automatically give you the win, but it puts you in the ring.
And either of them have the potential to gain an advantage over Nvidia by integrating GPUs with their x86_64 CPUs, e.g. so the CPU and GPU can share memory, avoiding copying over PCIe and giving the CPU direct access to HBM. They could even put a cut down but compatible version of the technology in every commodity PC by default, giving them a huge installed base of hardware that encourages developers to target it.
Absolutely, SQL analytics people (like me) have been itching for a viable GPU for analytics for years now. The price/performance just isn't there yet because there's such a bias towards high compute and low memory.