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That’s an absurd statement considering Nvidia has been pushing CUDA since 2007. I doubt Nvidia was making a “bet” on set-top boxes as the next 100 billion dollar idea. It was simply gaming adjacent which was the main market for GPUs which is their business. Nvidia has maintained their position on GPGPUs potential for 15 years before they paid off. Literally no other company had that vision. If that was an obvious thing, where is Intel, AMD, Samsung, TI, or Qualcomm chips? They only had 15 years. It’s crazy to call it “right place right time” when they have been anticipating it for over 15 years.

Self driving cars are poised to be huge, Nvidia simply didn’t have good execution or plan there because they focused on the hardware rather than data collection. Not sure how the ARM acquisition attempt was an unforced error. Data centers are buying Nvidia GPUs and AMD CPUs. Could have been Nvidia both. It was just in an unfavorable political climate.

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CUDA was just not that big of a commitment of resources honestly for a gpu company. It also broke even relatively early in terms of making money because of oil and gas. Jensen personally threatened to axe the entire project multiple times when we nearly failed to meet certain contracts.
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I have no insights into internals of Nvidia, but it really doesn’t make sense to me how there is literally no alternatives that are even close to its maturity. I remember in the early days OpenMP and PPL being contenders early on, but I never heard about them after and only CUDA kept going. I was working on a graduate project in 2009 and I remember us looking into OpenMP and CUDA and going with CUDA because we found it easier to use. But also along with CUDA, only Nvidia pushed the whole GPGPU idea and AMD (and Microsoft to some extent) only paid lip service to the concept without any actual commitment like Nvidia did for a long time.
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apple has a lot to do with it. Apple drove the early days of opencl, and pulled out some time in ~2012. Ian made a decision to cut opencl support at Nvidia at some point in time after that. Had apple actually made a proper GPU compute language standard after walking from opencl, it might not have been such a empty landscape. But alas, apple wasn't in the HPC business, which was the only place that actually made money from GPGPU.

I can't speak to why AMD is so massively incompetent or why they weren't a factor in driving a competitor.

A factor that might not be obvious is that in 2012 CUDA was mostly a commercial failure. Aside from some penetration into oil and gas HPC and things like physics acceleration in games, there wasn't much traction.

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> It also broke even relatively early in terms of making money because of oil and gas.

Beg your pardon? what does this mean?

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It didn't even start with AI, their exorbitant valuations go all the way back to the days of the cryptocurrency mining craze.

But as a counterpoint: AMD is very similar but hasn't benefitted nearly as much. They've been plastering "AI" all over their webpage for years, with little to show for it. So maybe there was something that Nvidia was doing right.

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CUDA is what they did right. That and they focused on developers (tooling, support, drivers) outside of gaming long before it was obviously a relevant market. Jensen does deserve a lot of credit.
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They didn't just focus on gaming though. They've spent the last two decades making sure they're the obvious choice for scientific and engineering number crunching, by creating and continuing to invest in CUDA. Which is also why they have been an obvious choice for the AI crowd.

They've benefitted from being in the right place, but being there was not (or, not only) luck.

Compare to AMD which did not do that and has not had the same level of benefit from the AI wave despite everyone obviously wanting a competitor to create price pressure.

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Is successfully maintaining product leadership in a lucrative consumer category a failure to you?... Their self driving car tech is used in multiple products and clearly represents a future growth area. They've correctly predicted market movements and trends, built or bought up all the pieces needed to offer complete solutions with leading performance.

There would be no AI boom without Nvidia, their cards were instrumental to making it possible, that's why they're so dominant.

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The AI winter wouldn't have ended without NVidia cards. NVidia didn't benefit from the AI boom, they made it possible. CUDA is the be all and end all of the AI boom.

Anyone who thinks otherwise is welcome to try and get AMD cards working.

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The ARM acquisition attempt looks better each day now that x86 is zooming into irrelevance and Apple Silicon remains exclusive to Apple products.
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was arm a bad move in retrospect?
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