For these reasons, and others, it is hard to describe Nvidia’s action as anything other than the construction of a competitive moat. Nvidia made a general-purpose GPU that represented the first major leap forward in computational acceleration since the invention of the CPU. The GPU’s programmable layer, CUDA, was not only easy to use but also opened up a wide range of functions across scientific, technical, and industrial sectors. As more people learned CUDA, the demand for GPUs increased. By the early 2010s, the market for general-purpose GPUs that had once looked moribund appeared to be on
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