"We've all heard explanations about the advantages of NVIDIA’s software stack for acceleration compared to platforms like AMD’s, which seems like a lazy explanation for why NVIDIA is out-innovating its competitors."
Why is this lazy? Software written against CUDA probably represents 100s of millions (maybe more) of man hours of development. Those hours of development have also been spent to establish relative stability and compatibility with multiple software stacks versus all other platforms. Unless there is a very good reason (orders of magnitude improvement in something important to you versus NVidia) you have no incentive to change (and in fact it may be incredibly risky to do so). NVidia has kept up with the market on their hardware and most of the areas where other chips provided significant benefit there were trade offs in compatibility or stability. Not to say that it will not change but it seems to me that is still the primary reason i.e. no one ever got fired for choosing NVidia.
"We've all heard explanations about the advantages of NVIDIA’s software stack for acceleration compared to platforms like AMD’s, which seems like a lazy explanation for why NVIDIA is out-innovating its competitors."
Why is this lazy? Software written against CUDA probably represents 100s of millions (maybe more) of man hours of development. Those hours of development have also been spent to establish relative stability and compatibility with multiple software stacks versus all other platforms. Unless there is a very good reason (orders of magnitude improvement in something important to you versus NVidia) you have no incentive to change (and in fact it may be incredibly risky to do so). NVidia has kept up with the market on their hardware and most of the areas where other chips provided significant benefit there were trade offs in compatibility or stability. Not to say that it will not change but it seems to me that is still the primary reason i.e. no one ever got fired for choosing NVidia.