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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

#21

Post by EspadaV9 »

sam_goody wrote: post #16

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/co…

Pretty sure this was developed in private, but because AMD cancelled the contract he has been allowed to open source the code, and this is the "throw it over the fence" code dump.

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

#22

Post by formerly_proven »

my123 wrote: post #14
iforgotpassword wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> [2021] After some deliberation, Intel decided that there is no business case for running CUDA applications on Intel GPUs.

oof

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

#23

Post by blagie »

otoburb wrote: post #11
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 beca…

They've been at mercy of Intel x86 APIs for a long time. Didn't kill them.

What happens here is that the original vendor loses control of the API once there are multiple implementations. That's the best possible outcome for AMD.

In either case, they have a limited window to be adopted, and that's more important. The abstraction layer here helps too. AMD code is !@#$%. If this were adopted, it makes it easier to fix things underneath. All that is a lot more important than a dream of disrupting CUDA.

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

#24

Post by toxik »

fariszr wrote: post #3

> after the CUDA back-end was around for years and after dropping OpenCL, Blender did add a Radeon HIP back-end... But the real kicker here is that using ZLUDA + CUDA back-end was slightly faster than the native Radeon HIP backend. This is absolutely crazy.

Is AMD just a puppet org to placate antitrust fears? Why are they like this?

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

#25

Post by jandrese »

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…

AMD's management seems to be only vaguely aware that GPU compute is a thing. All of their efforts in the field feel like afterthoughts. Or maybe they are all just hardware guys who think of software as just a cost center.

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

#26

Post by Ambroisie »

sam_goody wrote: post #16

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/co…

My thinking is that the dev _did_ work on it for X amount of time, but as part of their contract is not allowed to share the _actual_ history of the repo, thus the massive code dumped in their "Nobody expects the Red Team" commit?

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

#27

Post by KeplerBoy »

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?

Surely this can be attributed to Blender's HIP code just being suboptimal because nobody really cares about it. By extension nobody cares about it because performance is suboptimal.

It's AMDs job to break that circle.

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

#28

Post by rtavares »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #17

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.

Later in the same thread:

> ROCm is a brand name for ROCm™ open software platform (for software) or the ROCm™ open platform ecosystem (includes hardware like FPGAs or other CPU architectures).

> Note, ROCm no longer functions as an acronym.

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

#29

Post by marcus0x62 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #17

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.

That, and it only runs on a handful of their GPUs.

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

#30

Post by jandrese »

izacus wrote: post #19
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…

If the alternative it to ignore one of the biggest developing markets then yeah, maybe they should start trying to catch up. Unless you think GPU compute is a fad that's going to fizzle out?
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