AI will take down Nvidia’s moat. When it becomes trivial to translate CUDA/PTX to HIP, SYCL or Metal, CUDA is no longer the moat, it becomes the intermediate representation.
the source language has never been the moat. Nvidia sells to hyperscalers. Hyperscalers have armies of kernel authors who have no issue translating shaders by hand (or now with claude). Nvidia's moat is (and will remain for the foreseeable future) the entire stack. you cannot fathom the pain and misery of working on literally any other stack. if you've never debugged a GPU synchronization error or kernel panic due to some GPU firmware bug or fought absolute shit profilers hunting for perf you really have no idea what you're talking about.
EDIT: i can't believe this really requires saying but graphics and compute are not the same domain at all. if you work in graphics for GPU but not compute then you are still way out of your depth commenting. to wit: graphics people do not (and cannot) write CUDA kernels/shaders.
You can simply disagree with me, regardless of my experience (or lack thereof).
that's exactly what i did and made an argument for why i think you're wrong. in response you provided exactly zero substantive remarks other than "i've written shaders" and then accused me of pissing.
also FYI it's clear from your profile that you've only worked on graphics (embree, blender, etc) and not compute. so i'll repeat: you're an outsider and you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
“if you've never debugged a GPU synchronization error or kernel panic due to some GPU firmware bug or fought absolute shit profilers hunting for perf”
I have done all of those things. As part of my full time job, for years.
Now that we’ve put all of that aside, can we stop talking about me and go back to discussing moats? What do you think are top three things that are holding customers back from buying AMD GPUs instead of Nvidia GPUs?
I could be misremembering, but I think Jensen Huang himself once called CUDA or the CUDA ecosystem their moat, and it certainly seems to be accepted narrative in the tech press. They may be wrong there, and you sharing your first hand experience here would be helpful to many of us readers here.
My 7900XTX is supported, I run local models via rocm all the time recently, mostly to play with/experiment on, Vulcan works as well and for some models works better (or the trade offs are better for that use case).
Their mistake was simply not picking and going all in earlier, they let nvidia become the defacto standard without even contesting it on both the hardware side and software side and that’s a hard though not impossible comeback to make.
Long term I think they’ll catch up in capability if not market share because simply too much money on the table not to.
https://rocm.docs.amd.com/_/downloads/radeon-ryzen/en/docs-6...
Not useful. A crap NVIDIA card can get you started with CUDA. You have to reach students. Without students, there's no future
“graphics people do not (and cannot) write CUDA kernels/shaders” is just not true at all. All it would take to verify that would be things like reading the introduction of the OptiX documentation, a small sample of SIGGRAPH GPU papers or the Blender/Cycles source code.
ZLUDA is already doing that, no?
I personally had to put all my toy projects into hiatus to be able to keep up with life. Maybe if things get a little lighter, we can thaw them or start working on a couple of interesting ones which I stumble on.
It's niche, performance and code-quality sensitive, needs deep and wide knowledge, and hardware dependent.