I have no insights into internals of Nvidia, but it really doesn’t make sense to me how there is literally no alternatives that are even close to its maturity. I remember in the early days OpenMP and PPL being contenders early on, but I never heard about them after and only CUDA kept going. I was working on a graduate project in 2009 and I remember us looking into OpenMP and CUDA and going with CUDA because we found it easier to use. But also along with CUDA, only Nvidia pushed the whole GPGPU idea and AMD (and Microsoft to some extent) only paid lip service to the concept without any actual commitment like Nvidia did for a long time.

apple has a lot to do with it. Apple drove the early days of opencl, and pulled out some time in ~2012. Ian made a decision to cut opencl support at Nvidia at some point in time after that.

I can't speak to why AMD is so massively incompetent or why they weren't a factor in driving a competitor

> It also broke even relatively early in terms of making money because of oil and gas.

Beg your pardon? what does this mean?

This is circa 2009 or so

https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/gpugems3/part-vi-gpu-co...