The ‘enthusiast’ side where all the university students and tinkerer devs reside is totally screwed up though. AMD is mirroring Nvidia’s VRAM cartel pricing when they have absolutely no reason to. It’s completely bonkers. AMD would be in a totally different place right now if they had sold 40GB/48GB 7900s for an extra $200 (instead of price matching an A6000).

Eh, the biggest issue here is that most (post-secondary) students probably just have a laptop for whatever small GPGPU learning they’re doing, which is overwhelmingly dominated by Nvidia. For grad students they’ll have access to the institution resources, which is also dominated by Nvidia (this has been a concerted effort).

Only a few that explicitly pursue AMD hardware will end up with it, but that also requires significant foundational work for the effort. So the easiest path for research is throw students at CUDA and Nvidia hardware.

Basically, Nvidia has entrenched itself in the research/educational space, and that space is slow moving (Java is still the de facto CS standard, with only slow movements to Python happening at some universities), so I don’t see much changing, unless AMD decides it’s very hungry and wants to chase the market.