I appreciate your points but you're being generous to AMD. They bought ATI in 2006. I remember in 2007 seeing CUDA for the first time in the password cracking scene and thinking wow they've done something amazing. OpenCL was there too, the "one framework heterogenious processing" sounded amazing but quickly became the ugly cousin.
Then in 2011 with crypto, once again Nvidia was always supported but ATI was that other case that required the different install with only some support.
Then 6 years ago when I started working professionally in ai, it was CUDA only for most of the applications. AMD had some stuff but had pretty much given up on OpenCL and at this point was a distant second. If you chose AMD you were quickly going to be locked out while the cool kids played with CUDA and TF. This was in a time when there may have only been one framework or library to do a particular algo. So it really was a lockout.
So to your point, 16 years ago when I first saw GPGPU, you could bet your house on it becoming something massive. The scientific applications alone were obvious to anyone with a copy of BOINC.
Nvidia have shown a masterclass of building something as a corporate over many years and really dominating all competition. AMD should have jumped onboard with TF and made sure any CUDA enabled algo had a _insert whatever AMD would have used_ equivalent. But they didn't, they couldn't even get linux drivers to work.
Then in 2011 with crypto, once again Nvidia was always supported but ATI was that other case that required the different install with only some support.
Then 6 years ago when I started working professionally in ai, it was CUDA only for most of the applications. AMD had some stuff but had pretty much given up on OpenCL and at this point was a distant second. If you chose AMD you were quickly going to be locked out while the cool kids played with CUDA and TF. This was in a time when there may have only been one framework or library to do a particular algo. So it really was a lockout.
So to your point, 16 years ago when I first saw GPGPU, you could bet your house on it becoming something massive. The scientific applications alone were obvious to anyone with a copy of BOINC.
Nvidia have shown a masterclass of building something as a corporate over many years and really dominating all competition. AMD should have jumped onboard with TF and made sure any CUDA enabled algo had a _insert whatever AMD would have used_ equivalent. But they didn't, they couldn't even get linux drivers to work.