This isn’t a pure software engineering time lockin; some of that money is going to go to legal action looking for a hint big targets have done the license-noncompliant thing.
Edit: Additionally, I don’t think a world where “most but not all” software engineering is automated is one where it will be a simple matter to spin up a thousand effective SWEs of that capability; I think there’s first a world where that’s still relatively expensive even if most software engineering is being done by automated systems. Paying $8000 for overnight service of 1000 software engineers would be a rather fine deal, currently, but still too much for most people.
I don’t think that will be at all important. You are creating alternate reimplementations of the CUDA API, you aren’t ‘translating’ or decompiling it. And if you are buying billions of dollars of GPUs, you can afford to fend off some Nvidia probes and definitely can pay $0.000008b periodically for an overnighter. (Indeed, Nvidia needing to resort to such Oracle-like tactics is a bear sign.)
While there’s truth in what you say, I also think a market that’s running thousands of software engineers is likely to be hungry for as many good GPUs as the current manufacturers can make. NVIDIA not being able to sustain a relative monopoly forever still doesn’t put it in a bad position.
People will hunger for all the GPUs they can get, but then that means that the favored alternative GPU ‘manufacturer’ simply buys out the fab capacity and does so. Nvidia has no hardware moat: they do not own any chip fabs, they don’t own any wafer manufacturers, etc. All they do is design and write software and all the softer human-ish bits. They are not ‘the current manufacturer’ - that’s everyone else, like TSMC or the OEMs. Those are the guys who actually manufacture things, and they have no particular loyalty to Nvidia. If AMD goes to TSMC and asks for a billion GPU chips, TSMC will be thrilled to sell the fab capacity to AMD rather than Nvidia, no matter how angry Jensen is.
So in a scenario like mine, if everyone simply rewrites for AMD, AMD raises its prices a bit and buys out all of the chip fab capacity from TSMC/Intel/Samsung/etc—possibly even, in the most extreme case, buying capacity from Nvidia itself, as it suddenly is unable to sell anything at its high prices that it may be trying to defend, and is forced to resell its reserved chip fab capacity in the resulting liquidity crunch. (No point in spending chip fab capacity on chips you can’t sell at your target price and you aren’t sure what you’re going to do.) And if AMD doesn’t do so, then player #3 does so, and everyone rewrites again (which will be easier the second time as they will now have extensive test suites, two different implementations to check correctness against, documentation from the previous time, and AIs which have been further trained on the first wave of work).
It’s probably worth mentioning that there’s now a licensing barrier to running CUDA specifically through translation layers: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-bans-using-translation-layers-for-cuda-software-to-run-on-other-chips-new-restriction-apparently-targets-zluda-and-some-chinese-gpu-makers
This isn’t a pure software engineering time lockin; some of that money is going to go to legal action looking for a hint big targets have done the license-noncompliant thing.
Edit: Additionally, I don’t think a world where “most but not all” software engineering is automated is one where it will be a simple matter to spin up a thousand effective SWEs of that capability; I think there’s first a world where that’s still relatively expensive even if most software engineering is being done by automated systems. Paying $8000 for overnight service of 1000 software engineers would be a rather fine deal, currently, but still too much for most people.
I don’t think that will be at all important. You are creating alternate reimplementations of the CUDA API, you aren’t ‘translating’ or decompiling it. And if you are buying billions of dollars of GPUs, you can afford to fend off some Nvidia probes and definitely can pay $0.000008b periodically for an overnighter. (Indeed, Nvidia needing to resort to such Oracle-like tactics is a bear sign.)
While there’s truth in what you say, I also think a market that’s running thousands of software engineers is likely to be hungry for as many good GPUs as the current manufacturers can make. NVIDIA not being able to sustain a relative monopoly forever still doesn’t put it in a bad position.
People will hunger for all the GPUs they can get, but then that means that the favored alternative GPU ‘manufacturer’ simply buys out the fab capacity and does so. Nvidia has no hardware moat: they do not own any chip fabs, they don’t own any wafer manufacturers, etc. All they do is design and write software and all the softer human-ish bits. They are not ‘the current manufacturer’ - that’s everyone else, like TSMC or the OEMs. Those are the guys who actually manufacture things, and they have no particular loyalty to Nvidia. If AMD goes to TSMC and asks for a billion GPU chips, TSMC will be thrilled to sell the fab capacity to AMD rather than Nvidia, no matter how angry Jensen is.
So in a scenario like mine, if everyone simply rewrites for AMD, AMD raises its prices a bit and buys out all of the chip fab capacity from TSMC/Intel/Samsung/etc—possibly even, in the most extreme case, buying capacity from Nvidia itself, as it suddenly is unable to sell anything at its high prices that it may be trying to defend, and is forced to resell its reserved chip fab capacity in the resulting liquidity crunch. (No point in spending chip fab capacity on chips you can’t sell at your target price and you aren’t sure what you’re going to do.) And if AMD doesn’t do so, then player #3 does so, and everyone rewrites again (which will be easier the second time as they will now have extensive test suites, two different implementations to check correctness against, documentation from the previous time, and AIs which have been further trained on the first wave of work).
But why would the profit go to NVIDIA, rather than TSMC? The money should go to the company with the scarce factor of production.