Comment by quickthrowman
Comment by quickthrowman 3 days ago
> Finally, most of the call for AMD to develop a CUDA alternative is based on a desire for cheaper compute. That's not a good business venture to invest in against a dominate player because price sensitive customers are poor customers.
Nvidia’s gross margins are 80% on compute GPUs, that is excessive and likely higher than what cocaine and heroin dealers have for gross margins. Real competition would be a good thing for everyone except Nvidia.
80% isn't a ridiculous margin if nobody else is selling the same compute. Software margins famously go much higher, to as much as 95% or high-nines for cloud products. People pay the price hand over fist, because there simply isn't equivalent hardware to compete with. It's practically a steal for certain HPC customers that want the latest and greatest out of TSMC.
I agree with both your comment and the parent comment - serious competition could spell the end for CUDA's dominance. But there will never be serious competition, CUDA has the head-start and their competitors threw in the towel with OpenCL. Khronos can't get Apple to sign onto a spec and they can't get AMD to change their architecture - open GPGPU compute is stuck in neutral while Nvidia is shifting into 6th gear. Reality is that Nvidia could charge cloud-level margins and get away with it, because Apple is the only other TSMC customer with equivalent leverage and they pretend the server market doesn't exist.