CUDA Backward Compatibility as Strategic Constraint

CUDA is both Nvidia’s biggest strategic advantage, and a massive constraint. MatX CEO @reinerpope says Jensen could scrap CUDA’s backward-compatibility guarantee, but likely won’t because it would erode Nvidia’s ecosystem lock-in: “Their promise is you can take a CUDA program written 10 years ago and run it on the next-gen Nvidia GPU.” “That means the next-gen GPU has to look a lot like the GPU from 10 years ago.” “The CUDA lock-in is very valuable in the mid and tail of the market, where people are sensitive to software costs. But at the head of the market in the frontier labs, software isn’t the main cost. Hardware is.”