Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

phoronix.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 425 posts

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

#161

Post by spookie »

justinclift wrote: post #82
jandrese wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD is literally the only company on the market poised to exploit the explosion in demand for GPU compute after nVidia (sorry Intel). To not even really try to break in is insanity. nVidia didn't grow their market cap by 5x over the course of a year because people really got into 3D gaming. Even as an also ran on the coat tails of nVidia with a compatibility glue library the market is clearly demanding more product.

Isn't Intel's next gen GPU supposed to be pretty strong on compute? Read an article about it recently, but when trying to remember the details / find it again just now I'm not seeing it. :(

Their OneAPI is really interesting!

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

#162

Post by bick_nyers »

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 latest version of CUDA is 12.3, and version 12.2 came out 6 months prior. How many people are running an older version of CUDA right now on NVIDIA hardware for whatever particular reason?

Even if AMD lagged support on CUDA versioning, I think it would be widely accepted if the performance per dollar at certain price points was better.

Taking the whole market from NVIDIA is not really an option, it's better to attack certain price points and niches and then expand from there. The CUDA ship sailed a long time ago in my view.

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

#163

Post by matchagaucho »

modeless wrote: post #156
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…

I've been critical of AMD's failure to compete in AI for over a decade now, but I can see why AMD wouldn't want to go the route of cloning CUDA and I'm surprised they even tried. They would be on a never ending treadmill of feature catchup and bug-for-bug compatibility, and wouldn't have the freedom to change the API to suit their hardware. The right path for AMD has always been to make their own API that runs on all…

But AMD was formed to shadow Intel's x86?

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

#164

Post by [deleted] »

RamRodification wrote: post #94
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"

[deleted]

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

#166

Post by rob74 »

largbae wrote: post #69
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…

It certainly seems ironic that the company that beat Intel at its own compatibility game with x86-64 would abandon compatibility with today's market leader.

The situation is a bit different: AMD got its foot in the door with the x86 market because IBM back in the early 1980s forced Intel to license the technology so AMD could act as a second source of CPUs. In the GPU market, ATI (later bought by AMD) and nVidia emerged as the market leaders after the other 3D graphics pioneers (3Dfx) gave up - but their GPUs were never compatible in the first place, and if AMD tried to make them compatible, nVidia could sue the hell out of them...

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

#167

Post by hjabird »

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.

There are some great replies to my comment - my original comment was too reductive. However, I still think that entrenching CUDA as the de-facto language for heterogeneous computing is a mistake. We need an open ecosystem for AI and HPC, where vendors compete on producing the best hardware.

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

#169

Post by Zardoz84 »

incrudible wrote: post #125
alberth wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DirectX vs OpenGL. This brings back memories of late 90s / early 00s of Microsoft pushing hard their proprietary graphic libraries (DirectX) vs open standards (OpenGL). Fast forward 25-years and even today, Microsoft still dominates in PC gaming as a result. There's a bad track record of open standard for GPUs. Even Apple themselves gave up on OpenGL and has their own proprietary offering (Metal).

To add to that, Linux gaming today is dominated by a wrapper implementing DirectX.

Vulkan running an emulation of DirectX and being faster

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

#170

Post by modeless »

matchagaucho wrote: post #163
modeless wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been critical of AMD's failure to compete in AI for over a decade now, but I can see why AMD wouldn't want to go the route of cloning CUDA and I'm surprised they even tried. They would be on a never ending treadmill of feature catchup and bug-for-bug compatibility, and wouldn't have the freedom to change the API to suit their hardware. The right path for AMD has always been to make their own API that runs on all…

But AMD was formed to shadow Intel's x86?

ISAs are smaller and less stateful and better documented and less buggy and most importantly they evolve much more slowly than software APIs. Much more feasible to clone. Especially back when AMD started.
Post reply on HN