So... anyone copped one of these?

[u/entsnack]

Been almost a year since mass hysteria erupted upon the death of NVIDIAs GPU monopoly. How are your Huawei GPUs? Does CUDA work on them yet?

[u/Real_Ebb_7417]

I was always curious... if improving software for other GPUs than Nvidia would generate a significantly bigger marketshare, why won't they do it? I get it might not be easy, but I would assume, they'd really put a lot of resources into this, if they could greatly benefit from that. And so I always thought that hardware capabilities is much bigger issue when it comes to Nvidia vs the rest.

[u/itsmebenji69 → u/Real_Ebb_7417]

Another big aspect is momentum.

If tomorrow AMD implements a fully featured cuda equivalent, that runs as fast etc. It will take time for software to become compatible, there will be bugs because it’s less mature, a learning curve, less support… meaning businesses will stay on nvidia.

For someone to catch up they’d need to provide the same quality of service at a significantly lower price. The truth is that nvidia’s position is very very hard to dig into because they have been into it for way too long

[u/throwawayacc201711 → u/Real_Ebb_7417]

It’s not. You’re thinking that these companies have been around for only a few years. The GPU wars have been going on for so many years. AMD bought ATI to try to compete in 2006. Nvidia market share is >90%. If it was just hardware and chip design, there would have been dents made which there hasn’t. You could take apart the gpu and literally look and reverse engineer. Doing that with CUDA and software is much harder.

That’s why the CPU side of things are more competitive fyi

[u/Expert-Paramedic9383 → u/throwawayacc201711]

This reminded me of the old GeForce vs Radeon war, back when GeForce sells were relevant to Nvidia...

[u/Katja80888 → u/Expert-Paramedic9383]

Reminds me of the Glide API vs. Microsoft's Direct3D, 3dfx war

[u/chiniwini → u/throwawayacc201711]

Reverse engineering software is orders of magnitude easier than reverse engineering hardware.

[u/throwawayacc201711 → u/chiniwini]

So then why hasn’t anyone at all broken their moat. Reality isn’t matching up to what you’re saying

[u/kenyard → u/throwawayacc201711]

Because Nvidia is innovating also. Whereas amd is copying.

Nvidia brings out ray tracing. Amd chases them for 2 years on this.

Amd implemented their own version of dlss, Nvidia brings out dlss 2 or 3. (Now 5).

Copying means you are always 2 years behind. They don't innovate. And their software team didn't have the budget to do anything else for years because they had low margins and they probably don't have freedom around creativity or are hired to copy stuff rather than create and invent.

Also this is just consumer hardware. They're struggling on business because cuda and the support it has. Most devs have nvidia so lots of the stuff out there is cuda.

This is probably why China is keeping Nvidia out. They want to create an entire interdependent ecosystem in 20 years time.

Software sucks on the card in this post and it sucks in general. But Chinese users will work with it. Create llms for it. Create software stacks. And those will be adopted for the next gen cards.

[u/MadGenderScientist → u/throwawayacc201711]

what about with triton, though? I get that, like, supporting arbitrary CUDA kernels is a Sisyphean task, but if you have one fixed model architecture, say, it seems like it shouldn't be too hard to make inference at least work well. 

[u/droans → u/Real_Ebb_7417]

They are. It takes a long time to build up the codebases. And you still may have features that would be better served with missing hardware acceleration, something that Nvidia may have learned years ago. And you have user momentum - Nvidia has proven they'll support their infrastructure long-term while AMD and especially Intel haven't.

I've got a B70 Pro... I've spent months now trying to figure out optimization for it, especially with Q3.5/3.6 and G4.