CUDA does involve a massive investment for Nvidia. It's not that it's impossible to replicate the functionality. But once a company has replicated that functionality, that company basically is going to be selling at competitive prices, which isn't a formula for high profits.

Notably, AMD funded a CUDA clone, ZLUDA, and then quashed it[1]. Comments at the time here involved a lot of "they would always be playing catch up".

I think the mentality of chip makers generally is that they'd rather control a small slice of a market than fight competitively for a large slice. It makes sense in that they invest years in advance and expect those investments to pay high profits.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/amd-asks-dev...

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noosphr 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Cuda isn't a massive investment, it's 20 years worth of institutional knowledge with a stable external api. There are very few companies outside of 00s Microsoft who have managed to support 20 years worth of backward compatibility along with the bleeding edge.

	▲	Izikiel43 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Cuda isn't a massive investmen > it's 20 years worth of institutional knowledge with a stable external api > There are very few companies outside of 00s Microsoft who have managed to support 20 years worth of backward compatibility along with the bleeding edge. To me that sounds like massive investment

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triknomeister 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

ZLUDA was quashed due to concerns about infringement /violating terms of use.

	▲	joe_the_user a day ago \| parent [-]
		That was the story but the legality of cloning an API/ABI/etc is well established by, for example Google vs Oracle (though with gotchas that might Nvidia to put a legal fight).