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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

#171

Post by [deleted] »

bachmeier wrote: post #157
Uehreka wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If something new comes along that provides better performance per dollar spent They won’t be able to do that, their hardware isn’t fast enough. Nvidia is beating them at hardware performance, AND ALSO has an exclusive SDK (CUDA) that is used by almost all deep learning projects. If AMD can get their cards to run CUDA via ROCm, then they can begin to compete with Nvidia on price (though not performance). Then, and o…

> They won’t be able to do that, their hardware isn’t fast enough. Well, then I guess CUDA is not really the problem, so being able to run CUDA on AMD hardware wouldn't solve anything. > try for an Embrace Extend Extinguish play against CUDA They wouldn't need to go that route. They just need a way to run existing CUDA code on AMD hardware. Once that happens, their customers have the option to save money by writing R…

[deleted]

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

#172

Post by paulmd »

roenxi wrote: post #70
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…

You've got to remember that AMD are behind at all aspects of this, including documenting their work in an easily digestible way. "Support" means that the card is actively tested and presumably has some sort of SLA-style push to fix bugs for. As their stack matures, a bunch of cards that don't have official support will work well [0]. I have an unsupported card. There are horrible bugs. But the evidence I've seen is t…

All versions of CUDA support PTX, which is an intermediate bytecode/compiler representation that can be finally-compiled by even CUDA 1.0.

So the contract is: as long as your future program does not touch any intrinsics etc that do not exist in CUDA 1.0, you can export the new program from CUDA 27.0 as PTX, and the GTX 6800 driver will read the PTX and let your gpu run it as CUDA 1.0 code… so it is quite literally just as they describe, unlimited forward and backward capability/support as long as you go through PTX in the middle.

https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/archive/10.1/parallel-thread-ex...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Thread_Execution

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

#173

Post by Keyframe »

This event of release is however a result of AMD stopped funding it per "After two years of development and some deliberation, AMD decided that there is no business case for running CUDA applications on AMD GPUs. One of the terms of my contract with AMD was that if AMD did not find it fit for further development, I could release it. Which brings us to today." from https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA?tab=readme-ov-file#faq

so, same mistake intel made before.

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

#174

Post by foobiekr »

cduzz wrote: post #95
slashdev wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" wind…

IBM was also incompetent and the os/2 team in Boca was had some exceptional engineers but was packed witg mostly mediocre-to-bad ones, which is why so many things in OS/2 were bad and why IBM got upset for Microsoft contributing negative work to the project because their lines of code contribution was negative (they were rewriting a lot of inefficient bloated IBM code).

A lot went wrong with os/2. For CUDA, I think a better analogy is vhs. The standard, in the effective not open sense, is what it is. AMD sucks at software and views it as an expense rather than an advantage.

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

#175

Post by foobiekr »

bachmeier wrote: post #157
Uehreka wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If something new comes along that provides better performance per dollar spent They won’t be able to do that, their hardware isn’t fast enough. Nvidia is beating them at hardware performance, AND ALSO has an exclusive SDK (CUDA) that is used by almost all deep learning projects. If AMD can get their cards to run CUDA via ROCm, then they can begin to compete with Nvidia on price (though not performance). Then, and o…

> They won’t be able to do that, their hardware isn’t fast enough. Well, then I guess CUDA is not really the problem, so being able to run CUDA on AMD hardware wouldn't solve anything. > try for an Embrace Extend Extinguish play against CUDA They wouldn't need to go that route. They just need a way to run existing CUDA code on AMD hardware. Once that happens, their customers have the option to save money by writing R…

Intel has the same software issue as AMD but their hardware is genuinely competitive if a generation behind. Cost and power wise, Intel is there; software? No.

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

#176

Post by dadadad100 »

p_l wrote: post #132
bell-cot wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But MS controlled the underlying OS. Letting them both throw money at the problem, and (by accounts at the time) frequently tweak the OS in ways that made life difficult for Lotus, WordPerfect, Ashton-Tate, etc.

Last I checked, Lotus did themselves by not innovating, and betting on the wrong horse (OS/2) then not doing well on a pivot to Windows. Meanwhile Excel was gaining features and winning users with them even before Windows was in play.

This is a key point. Before windows we had all the dos players - WordPerfect was king. Microsoft was more focused on the Mac. I’ve always assumed that Microsoft understood that a GUI was coming and trained a generation of developers on the main gui of the day. Once windows came out the dos focused apps could not adapt in time

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

#177

Post by paulmd »

modeless wrote: post #170
matchagaucho wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

PTX is just an ISA too. Programming languages annd ISA representations are effectively fungible, that’s the lesson of Microsoft CLR/Intermediate Language and Java too. A “machine” is a hardware and a language.

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

#178

Post by BizarroLand »

chuckadams wrote: post #136
panick21_ wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM also made a whole bunch of strategic mistakes beyond that. Most importantly their hardware division didn't give a flying f about OS/2. Even when they had a 'better Windows' they did not actually use it themselves and didn't push it to other vendors. Windows NT wasn't really relevant in that competition for much longer, only XP was finally for end consumers. > where nvidia has the standard that AMD is implementing…

Slapping a price tag of over $300 on OS/2 didn’t do IBM any favors either.

That's what happens when your primary business model is selling to the military. They had to pay what IBM charged them (within a small bit of reason) and it was incredibly difficult for them to pivot away from any path they chose in the 80's once they had chosen it.

However, that same logic doesn't apply to consumers, and since they continued to fail to learn that lesson now IBM doesn't even target the consumer market given that they never learned how to be competitive and could only ever effectively function when they had a monopoly or at least a vendor lock-in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_the_IBM_PC_busi...

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

#179

Post by leeoniya »

enonimal wrote: post #91

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…

fertile soil for Alyssa and Asahi Lina :)

https://rosenzweig.io/

https://vt.social/@lina

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

#180

Post by robocat »

p_l wrote: post #132
bell-cot wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But MS controlled the underlying OS. Letting them both throw money at the problem, and (by accounts at the time) frequently tweak the OS in ways that made life difficult for Lotus, WordPerfect, Ashton-Tate, etc.

Last I checked, Lotus did themselves by not innovating, and betting on the wrong horse (OS/2) then not doing well on a pivot to Windows. Meanwhile Excel was gaining features and winning users with them even before Windows was in play.

> betting on the wrong horse (OS/2)

Ahhhh, your hindsight is well developed. I would be interested to know the background on the reasons why Lotus made that bet. We can't know the counterfactual, but Lotus delivering on a platform owned by their deadly competitor Microsoft would seem to me to be a clearly worrysome idea to Lotus at the time. Turned out it was an existentially bad idea. Did Lotus fear Microsoft? "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run" is a myth[1] for a reason. Edit: DRDOS errors[2] were one reason Lotus might fear Microsoft. We can just imagine a narritive of a different timeline where Lotus delivered on Windows but did some things differently to beat Excel. I agree, Lotus made other mistakes and Microsoft made some great decisions, but the point remains.

We can also suspect that AMD have a similar choice now where they are forked. Depending on Nvidea/CUDA may be a similar choice for AMD - fail if they do and fail if they don't.

[1] http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done...

[2] https://www.theregister.com/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_inc...

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