Comment by whywhywhywhy

6 days ago

An incompetent company shouldn't be allowed to succeed through government pressure just because a competent company raced ahead.

The direction of the tide has been obvious for 15-20 years and AMD fumbled it, they earned and deserve where they now sit.

It's not about deserving. It's about the fact that once a company grows so dominant, that they will undoubtedly exploit their position of power. Which is bad for innovation, bad for the consumers and so on.

I'm of the opinion that NVIDIA raced ahead thanks also to shady anti-consumer tactics (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2018/03/08/repor... https://youtu.be/H0L3OTZ13Os) so..

  • Find it strange to focus on what that article says when 10 years ago we were using CUDA in a professional context for real world work and AMD didn't have anything competitive at all in the field till very recently.

    If the tech was comparable maybe we could entertain the idea but Nvidia was just so absurdly ahead in tooling than AMD that the better dev team won.

    • Yes, the article focuses on GPP, which is more on the gaming side rather than the compute side. CUDA was clearly ahead and I think AMD still hasn't quite caught up, however, call me old fashioned but I don't like arbitrarily hardware-locked proprietay software frameworks like CUDA (and the same applies for all other nvidia stuff imho in the same category: rtx, dlss, gsync, etc).

      For sure the better dev team won there, but on the long run, especially once CUDA becomes the only way to do "professional real world work", I'd like the hardware company to sell the hardware and the software company to sell the software, to avoid a dominant market position that hurts consumers and the industry, which is forced to pay premiums to monopolists.

      I'm a bigger fan of the approach that AMD had over the years, their software frameworks are open and hardware agnostic, which resulted in improvements for everyone and not just their customers (e.g. Vulkan which came from Mantle, games with FSR or TressFX run well on all hardware, those with DLSS or Hairworks don't) and enable competition that brings prices down.

This isn't about "deserving". Clearly you still don't understand why monopoly prevention exists.

It's about protecting the customer and the market. Yes, Nvidia deserves their success - of course - but the concentration isn't good for the market. Companies exist to provide services and products to customers and should enjoy no special treatment from us, no matter how successful.

Also, any measure should be not as disruptive as to bankrupt the company or even put it in second place in the market. It's just about leveling the playing field.

  • In fact, splitting a company has been shown to be beneficial to investors (both "halves" are usually doing well).