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While the revenue comes from Hardware, Driver is actually the centre of value. Just look at the history of Graphics Card ( even before the term GPU was born ), there are plenty of decent graphics hardware that fail to compete simply because of poor drivers.

Of course this also means there is potential for a competitor to gain competitive advantage when they dont have to rely on GPU for revenue and profits generation. I expect or hope that to be Intel. ( That is ignoring GPU's potential patents issues )




> While the revenue comes from Hardware, Driver is actually the centre of value.

And IME it is the proprietary drivers that usually offer least value and most problems. That sways buying decisions.


Then explain why everyone buys Nvidia cards for GPGPU?


Because GPGPU software stacks do a very poor job of supporting either of OpenCL or Vulkan Compute, which are the main free alternatives to CUDA. This is especially problematic in the ML space.


Yes that was my point which contradicts what foxbluff wrote >> And IME it is the proprietary drivers that usually offer least value and most problems <<


CUDA does not inherently offer "more value" than Vulkan Compute, though. It was simply developed earlier.




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