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

phoronix.com

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

#51

Post by iforgotpassword »

formerly_proven wrote: post #22
my123 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's an oof indeed. Are AMD and Intel really that delusional, ie "once we get our own version of Cuda right everybody will just rewrite all their software to make use of it", or do they know something we mere mortals don't?

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

#52

Post by carlossouza »

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…

Because the supply for this market is constrained.

It's a pure business decision based on simple math.

If the estimated revenues from selling to the underserved market are higher than the cost of funding the project (they probably are, considering the obscene margins from NVIDIA), then it's a no-brainer.

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

#53

Post by giovannibonetti »

jandrese wrote: post #25
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.

Maybe they just can't lure in good software developers with the right skill set, either due to not paying them enough or not having a good work environment in comparison to the other places that could hire them.

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

#54

Post by Symmetry »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #37
izacus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IIRC (this could be old news) AMD GPUs are preferred in the supercomputer segment because they offer better flops/unit energy. However without a cuda-like you're missing out on the AI part of supercompute, which is increasing proportion. The margins on supercompute-related sales are very high. Simplifying, but you can basically take a consumer chip, unlock a few things, add more memory capacity, relicense, and your m…

It's more that the resource balance in AMD's compute line of GPUs (the CDNA ones) has been more focused on the double precision operations that most supercomputer code makes heavy use of.

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

#55

Post by AtheistOfFail »

formerly_proven wrote: post #22
my123 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> After two years of development and some deliberation, AMD decided that there is no business case for running CUDA applications on AMD GPUs.

Oof x2

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

#56

Post by KingOfCoders »

kkielhofner wrote: post #42
fariszr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the article, AMD seems to have pulled the plug on this as they think it will hinder ROCMv6 adoption, which still btw only supports two consumer cards out of their entire line up[1] 1. https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ROCm-6.0-Released

With the most recent card being their one year old flagship ($1k) consumer GPU... Meanwhile CUDA supports anything with Nvidia stamped on it before it's even released. They'll even go as far as doing things like adding support for new GPUs/compute families to older CUDA versions (see Hopper/Ada and CUDA 11.8). You can go out and buy any Nvidia GPU the day of release, take it home, plug it in, and everything just work…

AMD thinks the reason Nvidia is ahead of them is bad marketing on their part, and good marketing (All is AI) by Nvidia. They don't see the difference in software stacks.

For years I want to get off the Nvidia train for AI, but I'm forced to buy another Nvidia card b/c AMD stuff just doesn't work, and all examples work with Nvidia cards as they should.

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

#57

Post by hardware2win »

rubatuga wrote: post #41
blagie wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

x86 is not the same, the courts forced the release of x86 architecture to AMD during an antitrust lawsuit

You think x86 would be changed in such a way that it'd break and?

Because what else?

If so, then i think that this is crazy because software is harder to change than hardware

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