Technology

It’s far worse than just simply ignoring what their users and customers want.

Nvidia makes a shit ton of money off of Linux. Between what their Tegra chips were sold for and their data center products being used on Linux (most recently in the AI space), their company is practically built in its success in using Linux for all their backend and supercomputing research.

They are literally as successful as they are, from using Linux themselves, but they treat the community like shit. They take take take, and then they go and shit on the front lawn.

Their senior leadership is ethically bankrupt trash and can go fuck themselves.

Hence its a featureset. CUDA has a more in depth feature set because Nvidia is the leader and gets to dictate where compute goes, this in turn has a cyclical feedbackloop as devs use CUDA which locks them more and more into the ecosystem. Its a self inflicting problem till one bows out, and it wont be Nvidia.

It forces AMD to have to play catchup and write a wrapper that converts CUDA into OpenCL because the devs wont do it.

Ai is the interesting situation because when it came to the major libraries (e.g pytorch, tensorflow), they already have non Nvidia backends, and with microsofts desire to get AI compute to every pc, it makes more sense for them to partner with AMD/Intel due to the pc requiring a processor, while an nvidia gpu in the pc is not guaranteed. This caused more natural escape from requiring CUDA. If a project requires an Nvidia gpu, it rolls back that it was a small dev who programmed with CUDA for a feature and not the major library.

Some of the LLMs it ships with are very reasonably sized and still be impressive. I can run them on a laptop with 32GB of RAM.

if AMD can do a Tesla equivalent with gobs of RAM and no display hardware I’d be all about it.

That segment of the market is less price-sensitive than gamers, which is why Nvidia is demanding the prices that they are for it.

An Nvidia H100 will give you 80GB of VRAM, but you'll pay $30,000 for it.

AMD competing with Nvidia in the sector more-strongly will improve pricing, but I doubt very much that it's going to make compute cards cheaper than GPUs.

Besides, if you did wind up with compute cards being cheaper, you'd have gamers just rendering frames on compute cards and then using something else to push the image to the screen. I know that Linux can do that with PRIME, and I assume that Windows can as well. That'd cause their attempt to split the market by price to fail. Nah, they're going to split things up by amount of VRAM on the card, not by whether there's a video interface on it.

I suspect that a better option is to figure out ways to reasonably split up models to run on lower-VRAM GPUs in parallel.