stuff and nonesense
Reputable
Cloners coalesced around x86 because the big name adopter was IBM. The IBM platform was built from commercially available components and could be easily copied.coalesced around nvidia rapidly as they did with 8086 and Intel.
The only proprietary element of the IBM PC was the BIOS software and at the time there were no software patents. Copyright was the only protection.
Cleanroom Design - redesigned implementation
I can’t recall which company but an enterprising cloner company employed a team to analyse the chip operation, feed it inputs - record the outputs, rinse and repeat until all eventualities are covered. From that list a specification was drawn up. Those guys were finished and left the project so that there was no contact with a second team. The second team programmmed a functionally equivalent bios chip. The flood gates opened and the cloners were let loose. The rest is history.
Nvidia weren’t the first to the party with GPGPU implementations, openGL and DirectX, others before were producing limited software interfaces BUT they did happen across a Stanford engineer who had implemented a solution on early GeForce GPUs, employed him, embraced and extended his ideas and developed CUDA. Following this was the acquisition of Physx giving them more tools to play with.
CUDA had greater scope in the earlier days of its existence than its competition, was more focussed and made the integration its routines into different development languages relatively pain free. It gained traction.
Today, it is difficult to depose the GPGPU king, there has to be a compelling reason.. or invalidate software patents
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