Software company is a pretty good description for both.
Just because software plays a role, doesn't make them software companies. It is like saying all companies are "electrical companies" because they require electricity to operate.
I don’t suppose you know a good “for dummies” explanation of why CUDA is such an insurmountable moat for them?
Like, what is it about that software that AMD can’t produce for their own hardware, or for a most important subset, with these $1T market stakes?
AMD may develop their own software layer, but a lot of things already work on CUDA, and the job to port this to a different platform may be non-trivial (or even possible depending on the level of feature parity).
Theoretically the moat isn’t insurmountable and AMD has made some inroads thanks to the open source community but in practice a generic CUDA layer requires a ton of R&D that AMD hasn’t been able to afford since the ATI acquisition. It’s been fighting for its existence for most of that time and just never had the money to invest in catching up to NVIDIA beyond the hardware. Even something as seemingly simple as porting the BLAS library to CUDA is a significant undertaking that has to validate numerical codes while dealing with floating point subtleties. The CPU versions of these libraries are so foundational and hard to get right that they’re still written in FORTRAN and haven’t changed much in decades. Everything built on top of those libraries then requires having customers who can help you test and profile real code in use. When people say that software isn’t a moat they’re talking about basic CRUD over a business domain where all it takes is a competent developer and someone with experience in the industry to replicate. CUDA is about as far from that as you can get in software without stepping on Mentor Graphics’ or Dassault’s toes.
There’s a second factor which is that hardware companies tend to have horrible software cultures, especially when silicon is the center of gravity. The hardware guys in leadership discount the value of software and that philosophy works itself down the hierarchy. In this respect NVIDIA is very much an outlier and it shows in CUDA. Their moat isn’t just the software but the organization that allowed it to flourish in a hardware company, which predates their success in AI (NVIDIA has worked with game developers for decades to optimize individual games).
BLAS is an example though, it’s the tip of an iceberg.
the second problem is that so many libraries and existing software is cuda only. even some obscure hardware stuff. i discovered the hard way that some AMD thinkpads dont support thunderbolt transfer speeds on their usb-c ports, whereas nvidia ones do
the third problem is that the cost to develop a cuda equivalent is so great that its cheaper for companies like google to make TPU and amazon to make Trainium. its literally cheaper to make an entire new chipset than it is to fix AMd. i dont see companies like apple/amzn/goog etc fixing AMDs chips
Is it? Or does AMD expect to make a profit and it's cheaper to make your own chips at cost?
which is why nvidia hardware trades at a 4x premium to AMD
its not necessarily cheaper to make chips at cost either. nobody is making them, only designing them. so first you have to design your new chip, then you have to get a minimum order in with the chip fab so big it competes on unit economics, and then finally you have to get your dev team to write a CUDA equivalent software that is a problem so hard its only really been solved by apple, google, intel, and nvidia
only companies with big fab orders can get priority too.. if a company did all of the above and was ready to go, they probably wouldn't get fab capacity until 2030
