whoa - are you telling me that the nVidia drivers on Linux are so stable that they are building a commercial deep learning system on top of that. Is this the same thing as normal graphics drivers ?
nVidia uses CUDA or OpenGL - so its not quite the question of proprietary API.
At this point, I'm not worried about "framerate on my linux box isnt as good as windows".. its more "it works...".
[0] https://developer.nvidia.com/deep-learning-courses
[1] http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2015/webinar/deep-learn...
You've been sold the idea that a "powerful GPU" needs to suck a lot of power all the time.
There is no real reason a "powerful GPU" shouldn't be able to scale its power usage way down when doing something simple like browsing the web. The only reason NVidia weren't able to do the "low power" thing on these systems is they weren't able to be the ones putting their GPUs on the same die as the CPU like Intel (& AMD) were. But of course they still wanted part of the action, so people ended up being sold this massive engineering bodge and told it's a good thing.
and keep in mind, it is a binary blob. proprietary to the core. in fact, CUDA the protocol itself is kinda proprietary.
if you base your solution on OpenCL, you can use all the vendors. nvidia, amd, imb, intel, altera, etc...
but NVIDIA spends billions on marketing to convince you that only CUDA matters. the same way sony spent millions to convince you that only laser disc^H^H^H^H^H^H mini disc ^H^H^H^H^H memory stick ^H^H^H^H^H blue ray, matter.