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AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

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Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#11

Post by otoburb »

wheybags wrote: post #4

Cannot understand why AMD would stop funding this. It seems like this should have a whole team allocated to it.

They would always be at the mercy of NVIDIA's API. Without knowing the inner workings, perhaps a major concern with this approach is the need to implement on NVIDIA's schedule instead of AMD's which is a very reactive stance.

This approach actually would make sense if AMD felt, like most of us perhaps, that the NVIDIA ecosystem is too entrenched, but perhaps they made the decision recently to discontinue funding because they (now?) feel otherwise.

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#13

Post by iforgotpassword »

btown wrote: post #8

Why would this not be AMD’s top priority among priorities? Someone recently likened the situation to an Iron Age where NVIDIA owns all the iron. And this sounds like AMD knowing about a new source of ore and not even being willing to sink a single engineer’s salary into exploration. My only guess is they have a parallel skunkworks working on the same thing, but in a way that they can keep it closed-source - that this…

Someone built the same a while ago for Intel gpus, I think even still the old pre-Xe ones. With arc/xe on the horizon, people had the same question: why isn't Intel sponsoring this or even building their own. It was speculated that this might get them into legal hot water with Nvidia, Google VS. Oracle was brought up, etc...

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#14

Post by my123 »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #13
btown wrote: post #8

Why would this not be AMD’s top priority among priorities? Someone recently likened the situation to an Iron Age where NVIDIA owns all the iron. And this sounds like AMD knowing about a new source of ore and not even being willing to sink a single engineer’s salary into exploration. My only guess is they have a parallel skunkworks working on the same thing, but in a way that they can keep it closed-source - that this…

Someone built the same a while ago for Intel gpus, I think even still the old pre-Xe ones. With arc/xe on the horizon, people had the same question: why isn't Intel sponsoring this or even building their own. It was speculated that this might get them into legal hot water with Nvidia, Google VS. Oracle was brought up, etc...

They financed the prior iteration of Zluda: https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA?tab=readme-ov-file#faq

but then stopped

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#15

Post by miduil »

Wow, this is great news. I really hope that the community will find ways to sustainable fund this project, being suddenly run a lot of innovative CUDA based projects on AMD GPUs is a big game-changer, especially because you don't have to deal with the poor state of nvidia on linux support.

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#16

Post by sam_goody »

Aside from the latest commit, there has been no activity for almost 3 years (latest code change on Feb 22, 2021).

People are criticizing AMD for dropping this, but it makes sense to stop paying for development when the dev has stopped doing the work, no?

And if he means that AMD stopped paying 3 years ago - well, that was before dinosaurs and ChatGPT, and alot has changed since then.

https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA/commits/v3

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#17

Post by AndrewKemendo »

ROCm is not spelled out anywhere in their documentation and the best answers in search come from Github and not AMD official documents

"Radeon Open Compute Platform"

https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm/issues/1628

And they wonder why they are losing. Branding absolutely matters.

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#18

Post by geodel »

btown wrote: post #8

Why would this not be AMD’s top priority among priorities? Someone recently likened the situation to an Iron Age where NVIDIA owns all the iron. And this sounds like AMD knowing about a new source of ore and not even being willing to sink a single engineer’s salary into exploration. My only guess is they have a parallel skunkworks working on the same thing, but in a way that they can keep it closed-source - that this…

Well simplest reason would be money. There are few companies rolling in kind of money like Nvidia and AMD is not one of them. Cloud vendors would care a bit for them it is just business if Nvidia cost a lot more they in turn charge their customers a lot more while keeping their margins. I know some people still harbors notion that competition will lower the price, and it may, just not in sense customers imagine.

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#19

Post by izacus »

btown wrote: post #8

Why would this not be AMD’s top priority among priorities? Someone recently likened the situation to an Iron Age where NVIDIA owns all the iron. And this sounds like AMD knowing about a new source of ore and not even being willing to sink a single engineer’s salary into exploration. My only guess is they have a parallel skunkworks working on the same thing, but in a way that they can keep it closed-source - that this…

Why do you think running after nVidia for this submarket is a good idea for them? The AMD GPU team isn't especially big and the development investment is massive. Moreover, they'll have the opportunity cost for projects they're now dominating in (all game consoles for example).

Do you expect them to be able to capitalize on the AI fad so much (and quickly enough!) that it's worth dropping the ball on projects they're now doing well in? Or perhaps continue investing into the part of the market where they're doing much better than nVidia?

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#20

Post by whizzter »

sam_goody wrote: post #5

I don't really follow this, but isn't it a bad sign for ROCm that, for example, ZLUDA + Blender 4's CUDA back-end delivers better performance than the native Radeon HIP back-end?

Could be that the CUDA backend has seen far more specialization optimizations whereas the seeingly fairly fresh HIP backend hasn't had as many developers looking at it, in the end a few more control instructions on the CPU side to go through the ZLUDA wrapper will be insignificant compared to all the time spent inside better optimized GPU kernels.
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