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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

#181

Post by modeless »

paulmd wrote: post #177
modeless wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

PTX is not a hardware ISA though, it's still software and can change more rapidly.

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

#182

Post by shmerl »

Anything that breaks CUDA lock-in is great! This reminds how DX/D3D lock-in was broken by dxvk and vkd3d-proton.

> It apparently came down to an AMD business decision to discontinue the effort

Bad decision if that's the case. May be someone can pick it up, since it's open now.

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

#183

Post by hasmanean »

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.

Compute unified device architecture ?

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

#184

Post by BizarroLand »

incrudible wrote: post #115
cduzz wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Windows before NT was crap, so users had an incentive to upgrade. If there had existed a Windows 7 alternative that was near fully compatible and FOSS, I would wager Microsoft would have lost to it with Windows 8 and even 10. The only reason to update for most people was Microsoft dropping support. For CUDA, it is not just AMD who would need to catch up. Developers also are not necessarily going to target the latest…

Todays linux OS's would have competed incredibly strongly against Vista and probably would have gone blow for blow against 7.

Proton, Wine, and all of the compatibility fixes and drive improvements that the community has made in the last 16 years has been amazing, and every day is another day where you can say that it has never been easier to switch away from Windows.

However, Microsoft has definitely been drinking the IBM koolaid a little to long and has lost the mandate of heaven. I think in the next 7-10 years we will reach a point where there is nothing Windows can do that linux cannot do better and easier without spying on you, and we may be 3-5 years from a "killer app" that is specifically built to be incompatible with Windows just as a big FU to them, possibly in the VR world, possibly in AR, and once that happens maybe, maybe, maybe it will finally actually be the year of the linux desktop.

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

#185

Post by swozey »

I may have missed it in the article, but this post would mean absolutely nothing to me except for the fact that last week I got into stable diffusion so I'm crushing my 4090 with pytorch and deepspeed, etc and dealing with a lot of nvidia ctk/sdk stuff. Well, I'm actually trying to do this in windows w/ wsl2 and deepmind/torch/etc in containers and it's completely broken so not crushing currently.

I guess awhile ago it was found that Nvidia was bypassing the kernels GPL license driver check and I read that kernel 6.6 was going to lock that driver out if they didn't fix it, and from what I've read there was no reply or anything done by nvidia yet. Which I think I probably just can't find.

Am I wrong about that part?

We're on kernel 6.7.4 now and I'm still using the same drivers. Did it get pushed back, did nvidia fix it?

Also, while trying to find answers myself I came across this 21 year old post which is pretty funny and very apt for the topic https://linux-kernel.vger.kernel.narkive.com/eVHsVP1e/why-is...

I'm seeing conflicting info all over the place so I'm not really sure what the status of this GPL nvidia driver block thing is.

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

#187

Post by BearOso »

incrudible wrote: post #131
nindalf wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD is betting big on GPUs. They recently released the MI300, which has "2x transistors, 2.4x memory and 1.6x memory bandwidth more than the H100, the top-of-the-line artificial-intelligence chip made by Nvidia" ( https://www.economist.com/business/2024/01/31/could-amd-brea... ). They very much plan to compete in this space, and hope to ship $3.5B of these chips in the next year. Small compared to Nvidia's revenues o…

They are trying to compete in the segment of data center market where the shots are called by bean counters calculating FLOPS per dollar.

A market where Nvidia chips are all bought out, so what's left?

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

#188

Post by ColonelPhantom »

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…

CUDA dropped Tesla (from 2006!) only as of 7.0, which seems to have released around 2015. Fermi support lasted from 2010 until 2017, giving it a solid 7 years still. Kepler support was dropped around 2020, and the first cards were released in 2012.

As such Fermi seems to be the shortest supported architecture, and it was around for 7 years. GCN4 (Polaris) was introduced in 2016, and seems to have been officially dropped around 2021, just 5 years in. While you could still get it working with various workarounds, I don't see the evidence of Nvidia being even remotely as hasty as AMD with removing support, even for early architectures like Tesla and Fermi.

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

#189

Post by ametrau »

Certhas wrote: post #143
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 wi…

Is a top 500 super computer list a good way of measuring relevancy in the future?

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

#190

Post by chem83 »

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…

To be fair to AMD, they've been trying to solve ML workload portability at more fundamental levels with the acquisition of Nod.ai and de-facto incorporation of Google's IREE compiler project + MLIR.
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