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.
Competing on price when the entrenched incumbent has 80% margins does not sell me on the idea.
Or to put it another way, it would not be good for AMD.