not to mention SPIR-V integrates OpenGL with Vulkan and and for OpenCL, moving towards a broader range of language support outside of mere wrappers including but not limited to even Javascript.

Since SPIR-V allows you to effectively define your own Shader APIs, and OpenCL has more and more bindings with other platforms, including ones that support the web like Go, Javascript and a new support layer for WebGL, it is absolutely a game (no pun intended) for Nvidia to lose in the longrun.

When has a monopoly never not been caught frantically trying to buy out knockoff companies that spawned from teams developing on opensrouce alternatives in innovative places after they became comfortable and confident with being a closed source monopoly?

On top of this, graphics programmers, the games industry and advanced web support, especially now that AWS and I think google cloud integrate server hosting with GPUs (and companies like Blazing DB for easier integration) will only exponeniate the rate of advantage opensource has since this is a race with some of the best programmers in the world, with a ton of money behind it.

I am curious what NVIDIAS end game is here. Already they were trailing behind the after party with their releases post AMD Ryzen, and I havn't heard anything at all exciting on NVIDIAs part to counter since the Vulkan release and SPIR-V integration announcements, which are some of the most promising I've seen yet, and expansive for programmers who have otherwise avoided this platform due to the extremely indepth learning curve and requirements to be somewhat experienced C/C++ programmers.

It took me 8months to be able to write a good kernel and some good host code with opencl because I did the entire integration in C and C++ and I've been developing with it since 1.2, but with more languages a broader range of support applications, perspectives and contributions will go to the opensource dev.

So far, outside of currently dominating the industry and embedding some long term runway with large contracts and having a head on red tape involved with larger corporations they have contracts for hardware and support embedded with, I don't see what advantages NVIDIA is getting the industry excited about in the long run.

When it comes to savvy programmers in Silicon Valley, a friend of mine who works as a PhD programmer in Deep Learning with Google Scientists did an unofficial ad hoc poll on her twitter, asking people why so much opencl hate and so much CUDA in the valley? There were lots of responses from lots of people, but I only saw on repeated reason over and over again, the initial learning curve is lower with CUDA and its more convenient. There were no specs of performance advantages in discussion.

In the functionalities I apply OpenCL to, CUDA doesn't even offer the same functionality, and in many ways processes algorithms by simply parsing out algorithms CPUs utilized, but OpenCL never assumed this as an optimal path, and reconsiders the entire structure of the algorithm and data its working with, often times reorganizing formats for processing entirely different from CPUs that NVIDIA incorporates as a default.

It's more work to learn than CUDA, but the advantages are worth it in my experience so far.

As a last consideration, When it comes to NVIDIA trying to make their products compatible with OpenCL and OpenGL, I predict that promise of that to be delayed at best, as it took NVIDIA 5 years to make their hardware std OpenCl 1.2 compatible. Vulkan is extremely large in terms of the source code, and SPIR-V is nontrivial, OpenCL is standard 2.0 now, so if getting OpenCL 1.2 was hard for them to integrate in under 5 years, we can expect a lot longer given the new releases.

The learning curve is now going away with the recent releases, so whats the next step with NVIDIA? Good question. The only advantage they seem to have is that they have an advantage right now, but that becomes circular and perhaps backwards going forward.

This strangely reminds me of Microsoft getting ubuntu to run in a Windows partition checksum for checksum, to offer cross compatibility with other operating systems as an advantage to stay competitive in the demographic that produces the most advancement within their own industry.