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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

CUDA is pure lock-in, so it only makes sense for antitrust regulators to evaluate if it's causing anti-competitive damage to the market. Hint - it is. Lock-in is never good.

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Sure is, but there is nothing stopping AMD or Intel from building a working alternative to CUDA, so how is it anti-competitive? The problem with OpenCL, Sycl, ROC, etc. is that the developer experience is terrible. Cumbersome to set up, difficiult to get working accross platforms, lack of major quality of life features, etc.

One example of how they might be abusing their monopoly is by forcing data centers to pay an inflated price for hardware that is similar to consumer GPUs: https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock

If this is abuse, I have bad news for you about AMD and their arbitrary restriction of rocm for consumer GPUs.

Making a must-have product doesn’t constitute being an anti-competitive monopolist. Coca Cola isn’t a monopolist because classic coke just tastes so good and yet they refuse to share the recipe with Pepsi Cola.

Anti-competitiveness is more leveraging the must-have nature of CUDA to shelter Nvidia from competition. E.G. an OEM can’t sell professional laptops that support CUDA if it sells AMD gaming laptops or something - just to illustrate. Or Coca Cola refusing to sell coke to a store that also sells Pepsi causing the store to not stock Pepsi.

Monopoly law isn’t meant to simply punish success and exclusivity.

It's not about a must have. It's about a must have being tied to them. That tying is what's harming the market by preventing interoperability. It only makes sense to prevent such kind of traps.

I.e. a must have can be a must have without artificially added tying (lock-in) detail. Then it's not causing harm.

Wouldn't that logic also apply to, say, Apple?

Of course it would. And should be applied.

Apple doesn't control an entire industry. You can buy an Android phone and fully participate in the mobile phone world never talking to Apple. You cannot participate in the AI world without NVIDIA.

You don't need to control the entire industry to cause anti-competitive damage. You just need to have enough leverage that your influence can't be ignored.

Examples of Apple doing that is banning competing browsers on iOS and then pushing W3C and developers in the direction they want due to "you can't ignore us". There was a whole list of bad examples. Touch events, fighting against SPIR-V in WebGPU, fighting against adoption of Media Source Extensions (to benefit their video solutions) and etc. and etc.

They very clearly cause a ton of damage to the market by slowing down and sabotaging the progress of interoperable technology to harm competition.

Apple doesn't prevent competing browsers. Just different engines.

And just because they don't rush to incorporate every web feature doesn't make them anti-competitive. Especially when most of the time they are right to do because either (a) they impact security or battery life or (b) they are non-standard.

Case in point SPIR-V which unless I am mistaken is exclusively controlled by Khronos.

> Apple doesn't prevent competing browsers. Just different engines

And you should know well it's the same thing, since above listed issues are defined by the engine. Whatever label you put on top doesn't change the essence of what the problem is.

Basically, you completely missed the point.

No I stated a fact.

There is far more to a browser than just the engine as we've seen with Arc.

Apple is the only competitor to Google's 65% (direct) plus reskinned Chromium dominance of the browser market.

Meanwhile, I'm happy with the direction they push W3C and developers. Without them, Google would just push the web to whatever they want (more than they already do).

That doesn't excuse all the garbage Apple doing for the sake of their lock-in. They totally should have been blasted by anti-trust years ago for banning competing browsers on iOS. And many other things.

Seems like EU finally started getting the point before US regulators did.

And why can’t you just use an AMD GPU? Is it because stores don’t sell them? Is it because motherboards don’t support them? Is it because you can’t rent one from a cloud provider? No, it’s because they don’t fucking work when you try to use them for ML.

That's not really relevant. Antitrust laws tend to focus on abusing your monopoly position, not having it. Microsoft was sued for using its Windows monopoly to force IE on people, not for having the monopoly by itself.

It applies to game consoles as well, nintendo/sony/microsoft selling a hardware, and require to pay THEM when I want to run something on it, is outrageous.

I don't really understand this argument. There are tons of alternatives. If I want to build and design a product a certain way, and you don't like it, simply don't buy it? This is a genuine question because I realize I am probably in the minority on HN, so please don't downvote just because of that.

I just think that regulations in general should be applied only when necessary, and then be applied with great force.

The user experience for game consoles largely falls back on the manufacturer. If Xbox had loads of unvetted buggy games and malware swimming in the ecosystem, people might be less inclined to buy an Xbox. So Microsoft sets about establishing some control over the ecosystem. Apple's App Store was really the first time that your average Joe could download an application from the internet and not have to worry about viruses. It was a big deal that added a lot of value to the user experience.

It was, probably, but it is not anymore. It forces itself to be a middle man by every possible method, and just leeches on transactions.

It's particularly annoying that those who either don't understand or actively dislike a product Maker's core values or principles poured into that Maker's product, keep trying to tear apart people's choice to buy a product built that way.

How can a product on its own cause anti-competitive damage?

When it's used as a tool that makes it impossible or very costly to switch from what such tool is tied to.

To give an example. If CUDA wouldn't have been tied to Nvidia hardware, developers could use CUDA on any competing hardware. Being tied limits the choice. That's the essence of lock-in damage. Development tools should be development tools, not ways to control the market.

That's why there is value in something that breaks lock-in - that improves competition.

> If CUDA wouldn't have been tied to NVIDIA hardware...

Initially I thought that AMD didn't offer a CUDA reimplementation out of NIH-syndrome (as it would be a marketing coup for NVIDIA), but then I saw that NVIDIA seem to be actively trying to shut-down independent attempts at running CUDA on non-NVIDIA hardware: https://www.techpowerup.com/319984/nvidia-cracks-down-on-cud...

They should lose. As I said in another comment, SCOTUS just ruled that APIs weren't copyrightable, and there's a HUGE parallel with Microsoft and Sun Microsystems over Java. In the end, Sun settled for Microsoft to stop saying "Java compatible" and $20 million. The community on the other hand got OpenJDK four years later.

Just do it. Fuck the lawyers. When you win, you toss some cash and they'll ya for it.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/sun-microsoft-settle...

There would have to be more to it. If cuda is just the software that Nvidia customers use, or nvidia hardware is chosen because cuda is better software, it's not going to pass a market welfare test nor would monopolistic practices be found. Expensive switching costs per se aren't considered damage to welfare.

But what prevents anyone from developing an OpenCUDA?

It's been almost 25 years ago, but this was the crux of the Sun Microsystems v. Microsoft lawsuit. It's why OpenJDK exists. Even three years ago the Supreme Court ruled that you can't copyright an API.

I mean, it feels breathtakingly obvious. Not only is there historical precedents for just doing this, there're legal precedents as well.

Cost. What prevents someone from making something new to fight against an incumbent? Cost of entry most of the time. That's the mentality in the lock-in. Make switching too expensive and difficult to even bother. Possible? Yes, but hard enough.

When someone manages to overcome the cost and commoditize what lock-in was walling - it improves things. Even better if someone manages to do it while breaking lock-in itself. Sort of like writing a wrapper to run CUDA on non Nvidia GPUs (what ZLUDA is doing).

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