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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

#91

Post by enonimal »

From the ARCHITECTURE.md:

> Those pointers point to undocumented functions forming CUDA Dark API. It's impossible to tell how many of them exist, but debugging experience suggests there are tens of function pointers across tens of tables. A typical application will use one or two most common. Due to they undocumented nature they are exclusively used by Runtime API and NVIDIA libraries (and in by CUDA applications in turn). We don't have names of those functions nor names or types of the arguments. This makes implementing them time-consuming. Dark API functions are are reverse-engineered and implemented by ZLUDA on case-by-case basis once we observe an application making use of it.

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

#92

Post by Cheer2171 »

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

Are you freaking kidding me!?!? Fire those MBAs immediately.

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

#93

Post by yywwbbn »

izacus wrote: post #40
jandrese wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

One of the most important decisions a company can do, is to decide which markets they'll focus in and which they won't. This is even true for megacorps (see: Google and their parade of messups). There's just not enough time to be in all markets all at once. So, again, it's not at all clear that AMD being in the compute GPU game is the automatic win for them in the future. There's plenty of companies that killed thems…

> So, again, it's not at all clear that AMD being in the compute GPU game is the automatic win for them in the future. There's

You’re right about that but it seems that it’s pretty clear that not being in the compute GPU game is an automatic loss for them (look at their recent revenue growth in the past quarter and two by in each sector)

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

#94

Post by RamRodification »

lambdaone wrote: post #75

It seems to me that AMD are crazy to stop funding this. CUDA-on-ROCm breaks NVIDIA's moat, and would also act as a disincentive for NVIDIA to make breaking changes to CUDA; what more could AMD want? When you're #1, you can go all-in on your own proprietary stack, knowing that network effects will drive your market share higher and higher for you for free. When you're #2, you need to follow de-facto standards and work…

> and would also act as a disincentive for NVIDIA to make breaking changes to CUDA

I don't know about that. You could kinda argue the opposite. "We improved CUDA. Oh it stopped working for you on AMD hardware? Too bad. Buy Nvidia next time"

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

#95

Post by cduzz »

slashdev wrote: post #78
hjabird wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with effectively supporting CUDA is that encourages CUDA adoption all the more strongly. Meanwhile, AMD will always be playing catch-up, forever having to patch issues, work around Nvidia/AMD differences, and accept the performance penalty that comes from having code optimised for another vendor's hardware. AMD needs to encourage developers to use their own ecosystem or an open standard.

With Nvidia controlling 90%+ of the market, this is not a viable option. They'd better lean hard into CUDA support if they want to be relevant.

A bit of story telling here:

IBM and Microsoft made OS/2. The first version worked on 286s and was stable but useless.

The second version worked only on 386s and was quite good, and even had wonderful windows 3.x compatibility. "Better windows than windows!"

At that point Microsoft wanted out of the deal and they wanted to make their newer version of windows, NT, which they did.

IBM now had a competitor to "new" windows and a very compatible version of "old" windows. Microsoft killed OS2 by a variety of ways (including just letting IBM be IBM) but also by making it very difficult for last month's version of OS/2 to run next month's bunch of Windows programs.

To bring this back to the point -- IBM vs Microsoft is akin to AMD vs Nvidia -- where nvidia has the standard that AMD is implementing, and so no matter what if you play in the backward compatibility realm you're always going to be playing catch-up and likely always in a position where winning is exceedingly hard.

As WOPR once said "interesting game; the only way to win is to not play."

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

#96

Post by bachmeier »

hjabird wrote: post #63
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…

The problem with effectively supporting CUDA is that encourages CUDA adoption all the more strongly. Meanwhile, AMD will always be playing catch-up, forever having to patch issues, work around Nvidia/AMD differences, and accept the performance penalty that comes from having code optimised for another vendor's hardware. AMD needs to encourage developers to use their own ecosystem or an open standard.

> The problem with effectively supporting CUDA is that encourages CUDA adoption all the more strongly.

I'm curious about this. Sure some CUDA code has already been written. If something new comes along that provides better performance per dollar spent, why continue writing CUDA for new projects? I don't think the argument that "this is what we know how to write" works in this case. These aren't scripts you want someone to knock out quickly.

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

#97

Post by panick21_ »

hjabird wrote: post #63
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…

The problem with effectively supporting CUDA is that encourages CUDA adoption all the more strongly. Meanwhile, AMD will always be playing catch-up, forever having to patch issues, work around Nvidia/AMD differences, and accept the performance penalty that comes from having code optimised for another vendor's hardware. AMD needs to encourage developers to use their own ecosystem or an open standard.

That's not guaranteed at all. One could make the same argument about Linux vs Commercial Unix.

If the put their stuff as OpenSource, including firmware, I think they will win out eventually.

And its also not a guarantee that Nvidia will always produce the superior hardware for that code.

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

#98

Post by kgeist »

hjabird wrote: post #63
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…

The problem with effectively supporting CUDA is that encourages CUDA adoption all the more strongly. Meanwhile, AMD will always be playing catch-up, forever having to patch issues, work around Nvidia/AMD differences, and accept the performance penalty that comes from having code optimised for another vendor's hardware. AMD needs to encourage developers to use their own ecosystem or an open standard.

Intel embraced Amd64 ditching Itanium. Wasn't it a good decision that worked out well? Is it comparable?

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

#99

Post by fortran77 »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #56
kkielhofner wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At the risk of sounding like Jeff Ballmer, the reason I only use NVIDIA for GPGPU work (our company does a lot of it!) is the developer support. They have compilers, tools, documentation, and tech support for developers who want to do any type of GPGPU computing on their hardware that just isn't matched on any other platform.

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

#100

Post by imtringued »

izacus wrote: post #40
jandrese wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

One of the most important decisions a company can do, is to decide which markets they'll focus in and which they won't. This is even true for megacorps (see: Google and their parade of messups). There's just not enough time to be in all markets all at once. So, again, it's not at all clear that AMD being in the compute GPU game is the automatic win for them in the future. There's plenty of companies that killed thems…

Are you seriously telling me they shouldn't invest into one of their core markets? The necessary investments are probably insignificant. Let's say you need a budget of 10 million dollars (50 developers) to assemble a dev team to fix ROCM. How many 7900 XTX to break even on revenue? Roughly 9000. How many did they sell? I'm too lazy to count but Mindfactory a German online shop alone sold around 6k units.
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