Re:Nvidia CEO: We bet the farm on AI and no one knew it
by diegof79 on Thursday December 21, 2023 @11:31AM
(#38722667)
It wasn't luck. For example, the book "Good Strategy/Bad Strategy" has a chapter about the NVidia strategy in its early days. You'll find a lot of similarities to what happened with CUDA.
In its early days, NVidia focused on its delivery speed by having a unified software driver/integration strategy. The TNT video card was meh, the TNT2 a little better but inferior to 3Dfx... by the time they launched GeForce, 3Dfx didn't have a product ready to compete. Their driver/integration/product test strategy made that speed possible.
With that background you can understand why CUDA wasn't lucky, they repeated the same approach: combine their hardware with the software.
In its early days, NVidia focused on its delivery speed by having a unified software driver/integration strategy. The TNT video card was meh, the TNT2 a little better but inferior to 3Dfx... by the time they launched GeForce, 3Dfx didn't have a product ready to compete. Their driver/integration/product test strategy made that speed possible.
With that background you can understand why CUDA wasn't lucky, they repeated the same approach: combine their hardware with the software.