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Comment by kartD | Hacker News Reader

CUDA mainly. It's fast (faster than OpenCL) and NVIDIA is really good with their software. CuDNN for deep neural networks is almost an industry standard. Nvidia understands software and markets better, while AMD sits on their butts for too long. Granted AMD always come out with a good open source solution that is always just a bit worse and very late. NVIDIA tries to create markets while AMD mess up and end up becoming followers. Shame really.

Edit: this is a good step though. AMD should be pushing the envelope and hopefully with Zen, they can actually realize some of the gains of HSA (which they tried to pioneer but it wasn't so useful since Bulldozer isn't that good)

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Shame because AMD seems to pop out cards with higher max tflops but seems to fail hard in the software department

CUDA is not [unqualified] "faster than OpenCL". NVIDIA does design software better than AMD, without a doubt. I think it's likely that NVIDIA decided to push CUDA and lag OCL support if their customers balked at having to port between the two. It's not that hard to port IMO, they're extremely similar.

OpenCL IMO is an ugly API born of the equivalently ugly CUDA driver API because Steve Jobs got butthurt at Jensen Huang for announcing a deal with Apple prematurely. Downvote all you like, but as John Oliver would say "That's just a fact." I witnessed it secondhand from within NVIDIA.

In contrast, OpenCL could have been a wonderful vendor-independent solution for mobile, but both Apple and Google conspired independently to make that impossible (ironic in Apple's case because of OpenCL's origin story and idiotic in the case of Google and its dreadful Renderscript, a glorified reinvention of Ian Buck's Ph.D. thesis work, Brook).

Fortunately, AMD appears to have figured out OpenCL has no desktop traction and they have embarked on building a CUDA compiler for AMD GPUs called R.O.C (Radeon Open Compute). They have also shown dramatically improved performance at targeted deep learning benchmarks. It's early, but so is the deep learning boom.

The wildcard for me is what Intel will decide to do next.

The big win IMO is vendor-unlocking all the OSS CUDA code out there.

https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute https://techaltar.com/amd-rx-480-gpu-review/2/

Jobs might've been butthurt and it might've made better incentive but nobody likes to sole-source critical technology elements.

It would have been fantastic if Intel had stopped beating the linpack horse a lot sooner and built a viable competitor to GPUs by now. Not this timeline though alas... Maybe 2020?

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