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Why doesn't Nvidia have more competition?
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this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
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Eh, the biggest issue here is that most (post-secondary) students probably just have a laptop for whatever small GPGPU learning they're doing, which is overwhelmingly dominated by Nvidia. For grad students they'll have access to the institution resources, which is also dominated by Nvidia (this has been a concerted effort).
Only a few that explicitly pursue AMD hardware will end up with it, but that also requires significant foundational work for the effort. So the easiest path for research is throw students at CUDA and Nvidia hardware.
Basically, Nvidia has entrenched itself in the research/educational space, and that space is slow moving (Java is still the de facto CS standard, with only slow movements to Python happening at some universities), so I don't see much changing, unless AMD decides it's very hungry and wants to chase the market.
Lower VRAM prices could help, but the truth is people and intuitions are willing to pay more (obviously) for plug and play.
I dunno. From my more isolated perspective on GitHub and small LLM testing circles, I see a lot of 3090s, 4090s, sometimes arrays of 3060s/3090s or old P40s or MI50s, which people got basically for the purpose of experimentation and development because they can't drop (or at least justify) $5K.
They would 100% drop that money on at least one 7900 48GB instead (as the sheer capacity is worth it over the speed hit and finickiness), and then do a whole bunch of bugfixing/testing on them. I know I would. Hence the Framework Strix Halo thing is sold out even though it's... rather compute-lite compared to a 3090+ GPU.
It seems like a tiny market, but a lot of the frameworks/features/models being developed by humble open source devs filter up to the enterprise space. You'd absolutely see more enterprise use once the toolkits were hammered out on desktops... But they aren't, because AMD gives us no incentive to do so. A 7900 is just not worth the trouble over a 3090/4090 if its VRAM capacity is the same, and this (more or less) extends up and down the price ranges.