[lcnielsen]

> funny how efficient markets work.

Can one really speak of efficient markets when there are multiple near molopolies at various steps in the production chain with massive integration, and infinity amounts of state spending in the process?

[fooker]

Yes, free markets and monopolies are not incompatible.

When a monopoly uses it's status in an attempt to gain another monopoly, that's a problem and governments eventually strike this behavior down.

Sometimes it takes time, because you'd rather not go on a ideology power trip and break something that's useful to the country/world.

[Perseids]

> > Can one really speak of efficient markets

> Yes, free markets and monopolies are not incompatible.

How did you get from "efficient markets" to "free markets"? The first could be accepted as inherently value, while the latter is clearly not, if this kind of freedom degrades to: "Sure you can start your business, it's a free country. For certain, you will fail, though, because there are monopolies already in place who have all the power in the market."

Also, monopolies are regularly used to squeeze exorbitant shares of the added values from the other market participants, see e.g. Apple's AppStore cut. Accepting that as "efficient" would be a really unusual usage of the term in regard to markets.

[bigyabai]

Sure they can. CUDA used to have a competitor, sponsored by Apple. It's name is OpenCL.

[pjmlp]

It was never really a competitor, as the other two sponsors Intel and AMD, never deliverd anything great with it.

Additionally the tooling is horrendous, plain old C, with the same compilation model as OpenGL.

It took getting a hard beating from CUDA, to finally add a bytecode format (SPIR), and at least support C++ as well.

Additionally the other mobile OS big name never cared about OpenCL, rather pushed their own thing, Renderscript.

[dannyw]

And after Apple dropped NVIDIA, they stopped caring about openCL performance on their GPUs.