[dajonker]

Even if the hardware is really good, the software should be even better if they want to succeed.

Support for operating systems, compilers, programming languages, etc.

This is why a Raspberry Pi is still so popular even though there are a lot of cheaper alternatives with theoretically better performance. The software support is often just not as good.

[wood_spirit]

Their customers are building supercomputers?

[stonogo]

If you want your customers to spend supercomputing money, you need to have a way for those customers to explore and learn to leverage your systems without committing a massive spend.

ARM, x86, and CUDA-capable stuff is available off the shelf at Best Buy. This means researchers don't need massive grants or tremendous corporate investment to build proofs of concepts, and it means they can develop in their offices software that can run on bigger iron.

IBM's POWER series is an example of what happens when you don't have this. Minimum spend for the entry-level hardware is orders of magnitude higher than the competition, which means, practically speaking, you're all-in or not at all.

CUDA is also a good example of bringing your product to the users. AMD spent years locking out ROCm behind weird market-segmentation games, and even today if you look at the 'supported' list in the ROCm documentation it only shows a handful of ultra-recent cards. CUDA, meanwhile, happily ran on your ten-year-old laptop, even if it didn't run great.

People need to be able to discover what makes your hardware worth buying.

[daveguy]

The implication wasn't to use the raspberry pi toolchain. Just that toolchains are required and are a critical part of developing for new hardware. The Intel/AMD toolchain they will be competing with is even more mature than rpi. And toolchain availability and ease of use makes a huge difference whether you are developing for supercomputers or embedded systems. From the article:

"It uses technology called RISC-V, an open computing standard that competes with Arm Ltd and is increasingly being used by chip giants such as Nvidia and Broadcom."

So the fact that rpi tooling is better than the imitators and it has maintained a significant market share lead is relevant. Market share isn't just about performance and price. It's also about ease of use and network effects that come with popularity.