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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

#321

Post by mqus »

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.

If their primary objective is to sell cards, then they should make it as easy as possible to switch cards.

If their primary objective is to break the CUDA monopoly, they should up their game in software, which means going as far as implementing support for their hardware in the most popular user apps themselves, if necessary. But since they don't seem to want to do that, they should really go for option one, especially if a single engineer already got so far.

Let's say AMD sold a lot of cards with CUDA support. Now nvidia tries to cut them off. What will happen next? A lot of people will replace their cards with nvidia ones. But a lot of the rest will try to make their expensive AMD cards work regardless. And if AMD provides a platform for that, they will get that work for free.

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

#322

Post by jvanderbot »

stcredzero wrote: post #224
ianlevesque wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And indeed more than succeed, they invented x86_64.

And indeed more than succeed, they invented x86_64. If AMD invented the analogous to x86_64 for CUDA, this would increase competition and progress in AI by some huge fraction.

Why "if only". Intel had been around forever when AMD showed up. CUDA isn't unassailable

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

#323

Post by Eisenstein »

tester756 wrote: post #305
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…

If you see: 1) billions of dollar at the stake 2) one of the most successful leadership 3) during hottest peroid of their business where they heard about Nvidia's moat probably thousands of times during last 18 months... and you call some decision "crazy", then you probably do not have the same informations that they do or they underperformed, who knows, but I bet on #1 reason.

The 'crazy' decision is them slowly abandoning the PC gaming market which is where consumers get these cards, and focusing on the 'client' market to sell their 'Insight' datacenter/AI cards. I think the parent you are responding to isn't questioning why it is a bad 'make money now' profit decision but why it is a bad 'get people to use your system' decision.

"AMD’s client segment, mostly chips for PCs and laptops, rose 62% year over year to $1.46 billion in sales, thanks to recent chip launches.

Sales in AMD’s gaming segment, which includes “semi-custom” processors for Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation consoles, fell 17%. "

* https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/30/amd-earnings-report-q4-2024....

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

#324

Post by Farfignoggen »

JonChesterfield wrote: post #289
Farfignoggen wrote: post #283

Phoronix Article from earlier(1): "While AMD ships pre-built ROCm/HIP stacks for the major enterprise Linux distributions, if you are using not one of them or just want to be adventurous and compile your own stack for building HIP programs for running on AMD GPUs, one of the AMD Linux developers has written a how-to guide. "(1) (1) "Building An AMD HIP Stack From Upstream Open-Source Code Written by Michael Larabel i…

Hähnle is one of our best, that'll be solid. http://nhaehnle.blogspot.com/2024/02/building-hip-environmen... . Looks pretty similar to how I build it. Side point, there's a driver in your linux kernel already that'll probably work. The driver that ships with rocm is a newer version of the same and might be worth building via dkms. Very strange that the rocm github doesn't have build scripts but whatever, I've been tr…

From the Phoronix comments section of the Article that I linked to:

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-d...

And I'm on Linux Mint 21.3 and so how to change any instillation script to think that Mint is Ubuntu to get that to maybe work there but there's no how-to for Mint like the one that AMD provides for Ubuntu! And really that's compiled By AMD for the specific Linux Kernel so not any DKMS sort of methods there AFAIK! but I'm no Linux Expert and just want some one-click install or that to ship with the Distro already working so Blender 3D's iGPU/dGPU accelerated Cycles rendering is possible on AMD Radeon consumer GPUs.

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

#325

Post by varelse »

imtringued wrote: post #65
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…

This feels like a massive punch in the gut. An opensource project, not ruined by AMD's internal mismanaged gets shit done within two years and AMD goes "meh"?!? There are billions of dollars on the line! It's like AMD actively hates it's customers. Now the only thing they need to do is make sure ROCm itself is stable.

[dead]

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

#326

Post by jherico »

gdiamos wrote: post #303
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…

These were a huge pain in the ass when I tried this 20 years ago on Ocelot. Eventually one of the NVIDIA engineers just asked me to join and I did. :-P

Do the job you want, not the job you have, eh?

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

#327

Post by Rafuino »

pheatherlite wrote: post #316
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this not priority #1 for them, with NVIDIA stock shooting to the moon because everyone does machine learning using CUDA-centric tools? If AMD could get 90% of the CUDA ML stuff to seamlessly run on AMD hardware, and could provide hardware at a competitive cost-per-performance (which I assume they probably could since NVIDIA must have an insane profit margin on their GPUs), wouldn't that be the opportunity to e…

The only reason our lab bought 20k worth of Nvidia gpu cards rather than amd was the cuda industry standard (might as wellbe). It's kind of mind boggling how much business amd must be losing over this.

So, your lab bought ~1 GPU?

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

#328

Post by mjcohen »

alwayslikethis wrote: post #31
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.

I mean, I also had to look up what CUDA stands for.

Can't Use Devices (by) AMD

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

#329

Post by RachelF »

Keyframe wrote: post #173

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…

Yeah, AMD look like idiots for doing this.

Either they are very stupid, or open sourcing the library stops NVidia from suing them in a repeat of the Oracle/Google lawsuit over Java APIs?

I'm not sure what the reason is?

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

#330

Post by JonChesterfield »

Farfignoggen wrote: post #324
JonChesterfield wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hähnle is one of our best, that'll be solid. http://nhaehnle.blogspot.com/2024/02/building-hip-environmen... . Looks pretty similar to how I build it. Side point, there's a driver in your linux kernel already that'll probably work. The driver that ships with rocm is a newer version of the same and might be worth building via dkms. Very strange that the rocm github doesn't have build scripts but whatever, I've been tr…

From the Phoronix comments section of the Article that I linked to: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-d... And I'm on Linux Mint 21.3 and so how to change any instillation script to think that Mint is Ubuntu to get that to maybe work there but there's no how-to for Mint like the one that AMD provides for Ubuntu! And really that's compiled By AMD for the specific Linux Kernel so not any DKMS s…

If you wait for a while then Debian packaging effort will flow down through the repos and you'll have apt install or synaptic GUI access to the prebuilt binaries.

You've already got an amdgpu driver in your kernel. Possibly an old one but it'll be there. ROCm is userspace.

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