Uh, and everyone else who isn't NVIDIA or the "Competition" aka AMD? Do we get the good old "Don't like the way Private Company does X, build your own X then!"? Everyone had years to provide a competitive petroleum company - apparently Standard Oil did nothing wrong after all.
Lazy end users, not writing drivers to hardware they don't have engineering specs to. Oh well, NVIDIA might get more than they bargained for with their scheme to dominate GPGPU with their proprietary API. It would be a real shame if people started using GPUs for rendering graphics, and just computed the prior work loads on DSPs and FPGAs sitting behind APIs already wired into LLVM, and silicon fab at process levels suited to the task only gets cheaper as new facilities are created to meet the demands of the next node level. That would be just awful, CUDA being so great and all - so beloved due to "Investments ... made 15-17 years ago" and no other reason. Huh, I wonder if that is why they unsuccessfully tried to buy Arm - because they knew the GPU carriage is at risk of turning back into a pumpkin, and they want to continue dominating the market of uncanny cat image generators.
Again, AMD and Intel could have done their job to appeal to developers, they fully failed at it .
ARM you say?
Ironically Google never supported OpenCL on mobile, rather pushed their RenderScript dialect that no one cares, and now is pushing for Vulkan Compute, even worse than OpenCL in regards to tooling.
Neither does gaslighting or dismissively waving off someone else's suffering, but golly gee do responses like yours seem to make up a disproportionate amount of programmer's attitudes toward end users nowadays.
Time was you didn't need to have a multi-billion dollar tech company behind you to write drivers or low level API's because you could actually get access to accurate datasheets, specs, etc.
Now good luck if you want to facecheck some weird little piece of hardware to learn without signing a million NDA's or being held hostage by signed firmware blobs.
That's a bit beside the main point though, as my gripes with Nvidia stem from their user hostile approach to their drivers rather than their that use the drivers.
Stop seeing devs as seperate from end users. That's how you get perverse ecosystems and worse, get perverted code.
Furthermore, you shouldn't tout that end users aren't writing GPGPU code as either an excuse, or point of pride. If we were actually doing our jobs half as well as we should be (as programmers/computer scientists/teachers), they damn well would be.
> and just computed the prior work loads on DSPs and FPGAs sitting behind APIs already wired into LLVM
Ha, ha, good one. Upstream LLVM supports PTX just fine. (and GCC too by the way)
FPGAs have a _much more_ closed-down toolchain. They're really not a good example to take. Compute toolchains for FPGAs are really brittle and don't perform that well. They're _not_ competitive with GPUs perf-wise _and_ are much more expensive.
More seriously, CUDA maps to the hardware well. ROCm is a CUDA API clone (albeit a botched one).
> the market of uncanny cat image generators.
GPUs are used for far more things than that. Btw, Intel's Habana AI accelerators have a driver stack that is also closed down in practice.
They don't have anyone to blame but themselves.