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195 points rbanffy | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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pie420 ◴[] No.42176400[source]
layperson with no industry knowledge, but it seems like nvidia's CUDA moat will fall in the next 2-5 years. It seems impossible to sustain those margins without competition coming in and getting a decent slice of the pie
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metadat ◴[] No.42176440[source]
But how will AMD or anyone else push in? CUDA is actually a whole virtualization layer on top of the hardware and isn't easily replicable, Nvidia has been at it for 17 years.

You are right, eventually something's gotta give. The path for this next leg isn't yet apparent to me.

P.s. how much is an exaflop or petaflop, and how significant is it? The numbers thrown around in this article don't mean anything to me. Is this new cluster way more powerful than the last top?

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bryanlarsen ◴[] No.42176567[source]
Anybody spending tens of billions annually on Nvidia hardware is going to be willing to spend millions to port their software away from CUDA.
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pjmlp ◴[] No.42182571[source]
First they need to support everything that CUDA is capable of in programing language portfolio, tooling and libraries.
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bryanlarsen ◴[] No.42183003[source]
A typical LLM might use about 0.1% of CUDA. That's all that would have to be ported to get that LLM to work.
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pjmlp ◴[] No.42183651[source]
Which is missing the point why CUDA has won.

Then again, maybe the goal is getting 0.1% of CUDA market share. /s

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1. imtringued ◴[] No.42184220{5}[source]
Nvidia has won because their compute drivers don't crash people's systems when they run e.g. Vulkan Compute.

You are mostly listing irrelevant nice to have things that aren't deal breakers. AMD's consumer GPUs have a long history of being abandoned a year or two after release.

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2. pjmlp ◴[] No.42184735[source]
CUDA C++, CUDA Fortran, CUDA Anything PTX, plus libraries, IDE integration, GPU graphical debugging, aren't only nice to have things.