I'm not sure how nvidia's driver track record would have helped them, but drivers nor linux nor software in any way has ever really been nvidia's strong-suit. but even with the popularity of it CUDA cannot explain nvidia's success alone; you also need the demand of butcoin and the secondary-but-farcical imitation of LLMs but also the inexplicable lack of awareness of alternatives that need explaining...
I worked on CUDA and OpenCL in the 2010-2014 timeframe, well before buttcoin and LLMs were profit centers, and Nvidia was already well ahead in the "GPUs as general compute" area. Literally everyone doing highly parallel HPC wanted to use Nvidia, despite AMD having higher throughout for some workloads. It was better, easier to use software.
I'll add to that: even though it is true that "drivers nor linux nor software in any way has ever really been nvidia's strong-suit", as GP put it, their software was still miles ahead of its competitors. In the land of the blind a one-eyed man is king, and all that.
I would agree if I didn't associate nvidia with incomprehensibly bad support for drivers. Idk, maybe this is a linux-only thing, but it's hard to imagine a vendor with a worse reputation for delivering functional software. Only perhaps microsoft itself has tried to be even more anti-consumer in their approach to support.
Cuda is ok, but it's the sheer mass of people targeting the platform that makes it more interesting than eg opencl. It hasn't don't anything clearly better aside from aggressively trying to court developer interest. It will pass and we will have stronger runtimes for it.
What really sets nvidia apart is its ability to market to people. Truly phenomenal performance.
Yea sure I see what you mean. So can you tell me what reputation AMD has for CUDA support on Linux? Or any of the other GPU providers?
They have none because their driver support is nonexistent. That's why everyone under the sun uses Nvidia despite their abysmal software support: it's still better than everyone else.
