Hardware

AMD has had traidionally very competitive FLOPs with their shaders. The issue is that their software stack, for lack of a better word is; shit.

For specific customers, like national labs or research institutions, they can afford to pay a bunch of poor bastards to develop some of the compute kernels using the shitty tools. Because at the end of the day, most of their expenses are in terms of electricity and hardware, with salaries not being the critical cost for some of these projects. I.e. grad students are cheap!

However, when it comes to industry, things are a bit difference. First off, nobody is going to take a risk w a platform with little momentum behind it. Also they need to have access to talent pool that can develop and get the applications up and running as soon as possible. Under those scenarios, salaries (i.e. the people developing the tools) tend to be almost as important consideration as the HW. So you go with the vendor that gives you the biggest bang for your buck in terms of performance and time to market. And that is where CUDA wins hands down.

At this point AMD is just too behind, at least to get significant traction in industry.