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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

#141

Post by hjabird »

andy_ppp wrote: post #112
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.

When the alternative is failure I suppose you choose the least bad option. Nobody is betting the farm on ROCm!

True. This is the big advantage of an open standard instead jumping from one vendors walled garden to another.

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

#142

Post by diggan »

teucris wrote: post #137
kgeist wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In hindsight, yes, but just because a specific technology is leading an industry doesn’t mean it’s going to be the best option. It has to play out long enough for the market to indicate a preference. In this case, for better or worse, it looks like CUDA’s the preference.

> It has to play out long enough for the market to indicate a preference

By what measures hasn't that happened already? CUDA been around and constantly improving for more than 15 years, and there is no competitors in sight so far. It's basically the de facto standard in many ecosystems.

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

#143

Post by Certhas »

Cu3PO42 wrote: post #122

I'm really rooting for AMD to break the CUDA monopoly. To this end, I genuinely don't know whether a translation layer is a good thing or not. On the upside it makes the hardware much more viable instantly and will boost adoption, on the downside you run the risk that devs will never support ROCm, because you can just use the translation layer. I think this is essentially the same situation as Proton+DXVK for Linux g…

They are focusing on HPC first. Which seems reasonable if your software stack is lacking. Look for sophisticated customers that can help build an ecosystem.

As I mentioned elsewhere, 25% of GPU compute on the Top 500 Supercomputer list is AMD. This all on the back of a card that came out only three years ago. We are very rapidly moving towards a situation where there are many, many high-performance developers that will target ROCm.

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

#144

Post by hamandcheese »

Jorropo wrote: post #123
throwoutway wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? Apple Silicon exists, but Apple created a translation layer above it so the transition could be smoother.

This is extremely different, apple was targeting end consumers that just want their app to run. The performance between apple rosetta and native cpu were still multiple times different. People writing CUDA apps don't just want stuff to run, performance is an extremely important factor else they would target CPUs which are easier to program for. From their readme: > On Server GPUs, ZLUDA can compile CUDA GPU code to r…

> The performance between apple rosetta and native cpu were still multiple times different.

Rosetta 2 runs apps at 80-90% their native speed.

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

#146

Post by smoldesu »

mogoh wrote: post #85

Why is CUDA so prevalent oppose to its alternatives?

At first, it was because Nvidia had a wide variety of highly used cards that almost all support some form of CUDA. By-and-large, your gaming GPU could debug and run the same code that you'd scale up to a datacenter, which was a huge boon for researchers and niche industry applications.

With that momentum, CUDA got incorporated into a lot of high-performance computing applications. Few alternatives show up because there aren't many acceleration frameworks that are as large or complete as CUDA. Nvidia pushed forward by scaling down to robotics and edge-compute scale hardware, and now are scaling up with their DGX/Grace platforms.

Today, Nvidia is prevalent because all attempts to subvert them have failed. Khronos Group tried to get the industry to rally around OpenCL as a widely-supported alternative, but too many stakeholders abandoned it before the initial crypto/AI booms kicked off the demand for GPGPU compute.

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

#147

Post by [deleted] »

toxik wrote: post #24
fariszr wrote: post #3

> after the CUDA back-end was around for years and after dropping OpenCL, Blender did add a Radeon HIP back-end... But the real kicker here is that using ZLUDA + CUDA back-end was slightly faster than the native Radeon HIP backend. This is absolutely crazy.

Is AMD just a puppet org to placate antitrust fears? Why are they like this?

[deleted]

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

#148

Post by streb-lo »

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…

I have been using rocm on my 7800xt, it seems to be supported just fine.

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

#149

Post by owlbite »

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…

Code portability isn't performance portability, a fact that was driven home back in the bad old OpenCL era. Code is going to have to rewritten to be efficient on AMD architectures.

At which point why tie yourself to the competitor's language. Probably much more effective to just write a well optimized library that serves the MLIR/whatever is popular API in order to run big ML jobs.

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

#150

Post by spookie »

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…

To be fair, if anything, that table still shows you'll have compatibility with at least 3 major releases. Either way, I agree their strategy is getting results, it just takes time. I do prefer their open source commitment, I just hope they continue.
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