Nvidia did a great job of avoiding the “oh we’re not in that market” trap that sunk Intel (phones, GPUs, efficient CPUs). Where Intel was too big and profitable to cultivate adjacent markets, Nvidia did everything they could to serve them and increase demand.
They positioned the company on high performance computing, even if maybe they didn't think they were a HPC company, and something was bound to happen in that market because everybody was doing more and more computing. Then they executed well with the usual amount of greed that every company has.
The only risk for well positioned companies is being too ahead of times: being in the right market but not surviving long enough to see a killer app happen.
For a few years they have repeated continuously how GPGPU can provide about 100 times more speed than CPUs.
This has always been false. GPUs are really much faster, but their performance per watt has oscillated during most of the time around 3 times and sometimes up to 4 times greater in comparison with CPUs. This is impressive, but very far from the "100" factor originally claimed by NVIDIA.
Far more annoying than the exaggerated performance claims, is how the NVIDIA CEO was talking during the first GPGPU years about how their GPUs will cause a democratization of computing, giving access for everyone to high-throughput computing.
After a few years, these optimistic prophecies have stopped and NVIDIA has promptly removed FP64 support from their price-acceptable GPUs.
A few years later, AMD has followed the NVIDIA example.
Now, only Intel has made an attempt to revive GPUs as "GPGPUs", but there seems to be little conviction behind this attempt, as they do not even advertise the capabilities of their GPUs. If Intel will also abandon this market, than the "general-purpose" in GPGPUs will really become dead.
Sure FP64 is a problem and not always available in the capacity people would like it to be, but there are a lot of things you can do just fine with FP32 and all of that research and engineering absolutely is done on GPU.
The AI-craze also made all of it much more accessible. You don't need advanced C++ knowledge anymore to write and run a CUDA project anymore. You can just take Pytorch, JAX, CuPy or whatnot and accelerate your numpy code by an order of magnitude or two. Basically everyone in STEM is using Python these days and the scientific stack works beautifully with nvidia GPUs. Guess which chip maker will benefit if any of that research turns out to be a breakout success in need of more compute?
When bitcoin was still profitable to mine on GPUs, AMD's performed better due to not being segmented like NVIDIA cards. It didn't help AMD, not that it matters. AMD started segmenting because they couldn't make a competitive card at a competitive price for the consumer market.
Ok. You're talking about performance.
> their performance per watt has oscillated during most of the time around 3 times and sometimes up to 4 times greater in comparison with CPUs
Now you're talking about perf/W.
> This is impressive, but very far from the "100" factor originally claimed by NVIDIA.
That's because you're comparing apples to apples per apple cart.
Even if we interpret the NVIDIA claim as referring to the performance available in a desktop, the GPU cards had power consumptions at most double in comparison with CPUs. Even with this extra factor there has been more than an order of magnitude between reality and the NVIDIA claims.
Moreover I am not sure whether around 2010 and before that, when these NVIDIA claims were frequent, the power permissible for PCIe cards had already reached 300 W, or it was still lower.
In any case the "100" factor claimed by NVIDIA was supported by flawed benchmarks, which compared an optimized parallel CUDA implementation of some algorithm with a naive sequential implementation on the CPU, instead of comparing it with an optimized multithreaded SIMD implementation on that CPU.
That aside, it still didn't make sense to compare apples to apples per apple cart...
Some of the near misses I remember included bitcoin. Many of the other attempts didn't ever see the light of day.
Luck in english often means success by chance rather than one's own efforts or abilities. I don't think that characterizes CUDA. I think it was eventual success in the face of extreme difficulty, many failures, and sacrifices. In hindsight, I'm still surprised that Jensen kept funding it as long as he did. I've never met a leader since who I think would have done that.
Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
When they couldn't deliver the console GPU they promised for the Dreamcast (the NV2), Shoichiro Irimajiri, the Sega CEO at the time let them keep the cash in exchange for stock [0].
Without it Nvidia would have gone bankrupt months before Riva 128 changed things.
Sega console arm went bust not that it mattered. But they sold the stock for about $15mn (3x).
Had they held it, Jensen Huang ,estimated itd be worth a trillion[1]. Obviously Sega and especially it's console arm wasn't really into VC but...
My wet dream has always been what if Sega and Nvidia stuck together and we had a Sega tegra shield instead of a Nintendo switch? Or even what if Sega licensed itself to the Steam Deck? You can tell I'm a sega fan boy but I can't help that the Mega Drive was the first console I owned and loved!
[0] https://www.gamespot.com/articles/a-5-million-gift-from-sega...
Look at it as, we're David against the Goliath, we're going to utilize open-source because that's how you win.
Then make zero effecting trying to increase adoption, which then result in reducing support for it and eventually giving up.
I remember ATI and Nvidia were neck-and-neck to launch the first GPUs around 2000. Just so much happening so fast.
I'd also say Nvidia had the benefit of AMD going after and focusing on Intel both at the server level as well as the integrated laptop processors, which was the reason they bought ATI.