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Comment by hvs | Hacker News Reader

(Most) people don't make decisions based on overarching theories of what's good for everyone. They need to solve a problem as easy as possible and most people feel that CUDA is easier to use than OpenCL. Plus, NVidia has been a leader in this space.

Also, this isn't a monopoly, OpenCL exists.

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And given that CUDA is essentially free and you simply pay for the hardware it is actually not such a bad deal. Economies of scale are such that if you can run your workload on gaming hardware you're going to get incredible performance for very little money.

NVIDIA will prevent you to buy gaming hardware and push you into buying the 10x more expensive ones.

There are 2 NVIDIA drivers. It turns out pinned memory transfers are 2x faster with the Tesla driver (vs the Geforce driver). This can matter a lot for some workloads. For some reason you can't use the faster driver with cheap consumer cards.

So, in my view NVIDIA is dumbing down performance for OpenCL and CUDA alike, and also slowing down the unavoidable OpenCL adoption.

Source?

Making decisions and thinking what's good for the ecosystem are two different things. I can still buy nVidia for my company, and think and say at the same time that it's bad.

Of course, while it's the cheap consumer garbage ^W^W pro-gaming hardware, the prices are okay, since these are kept in check by AMD. Once we get to the relabelled consumer garbage ^W^W^W professional compute hardware, you pay for it. Dearly. Why? No one that keeps them in check through competition.

For the uninitiated, could you explain what you mean by "cheap consumer garbage" and "relabelled consumer garbage"?

Its pretty easy to slap a new label on a card and call it enterprise. Consumer cards can be kept from eating the enterprise sales by creating artificial barriers around what you can do with each line of card.

Not OP, but my guess would be he meant GTX 1080, Titan & co. I would bet the difference in price in comparison to GTX 1050 doesn't come from increased manufacturing costs.

I think he meant GeForce vs Tesla. The GTX 1080Ti is at the higher end of the GTX line yet it's one of the best in terms of "dollar to performance ratio".

EDIT: even the Titan Xp while being much more expensive than the 1080Ti is still vastly cheaper than Teslas

He's referring to the fact that the GeForce line of consumer grade GPUs and the professional line of Tesla HPC Compute cards are probably using the same silicon.

I thought Tesla GPUs are tested to higher standards (e.g. Stable at higher clock speed) and don't have disabled/faulty cores. Consumer GPUs have GPU cores disabled permitting higher silicon production yields.

Core disabling and under clocking are what's known as "product binning" and it's why you have 4, 6, 8, and 12 core CPUs. Tesla GPUs are probably the cream of the crop but they're still cut from the same cloth.

Presumably the Tesla cards, which are targeted at mostly simulations/HPC and enterprise. These tend to start at around 3K a piece.

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