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

191–200 of 425 posts

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

#191

Post by swozey »

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?

Is this really a theory? If so my $8 AMD stock from, 2015? is currently worth $176 so they should make more shell companies they're doing great.

I guess that might answer my "Why would AMD find that having a CUDA competitor isn't a business case unless they couldn't do it or the cards underperformed significantly."

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

#192

Post by teucris »

diggan wrote: post #142
teucris wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There haven’t been any as successful, but there have been competitors. OpenCL, DirectX come to mind.

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

#193

Post by AYBABTME »

foobiekr wrote: post #174
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…

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…

You would think that by now AMD realizes that poor software is what left them behind in the dust, and would have changed that mindset.

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

#195

Post by visarga »

otoburb wrote: post #11
wheybags wrote: post #4

Cannot understand why AMD would stop funding this. It seems like this should have a whole team allocated to it.

They would always be at the mercy of NVIDIA's API. Without knowing the inner workings, perhaps a major concern with this approach is the need to implement on NVIDIA's schedule instead of AMD's which is a very reactive stance. This approach actually would make sense if AMD felt, like most of us perhaps, that the NVIDIA ecosystem is too entrenched, but perhaps they made the decision recently to discontinue funding beca…

> They would always be at the mercy of NVIDIA's API.

They only need to support PyTorch. Not CUDA

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

#196

Post by p_l »

robocat wrote: post #180
p_l wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've seen rumours from self-claimed ex-Lotus employees that IBM made a deal with Lotus to prioritise OS/2

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

#197

Post by swozey »

bick_nyers wrote: post #162
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.

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 att…

I just went through this this weekend - If you're running in Windows and want to use deepspeed, you have to still use Cuda 12.1 because deepspeed 13.1 is the latest that works with 12.1. There's no deepspeed for windows that works with 12.3.

I tried to get it working this weekend but it was a huge PITA so I switched to putting everything into WSL2 then in arch on there pytorch etc in containers so I could flip versions easily now that I know how SPECIFIC the versions are to one another.

I'm still working on that part, halfway into it my WSL2 completely broke and I had to reinstall windows. I'm scared to mount the vhdx right now. I did ALL of my work and ALL of my documentation is inside of the WSL2 archlinux and NOT on my windows machine. I have EVERYTHING I need to quickly put another server up (dotfiles, configs) sitting in a chezmoi git repo ON THE VM. That I only git committed one init like 5 mins into everything. THAT was a learning experience, now I have no idea if I should follow the "best practice" of keeping projects in wsl or having wsl reach out to windows, there's a performance drop. The 9p networking stopped working and no matter what I reinstalled, reset, removed features, reset windows, etc, it wouldn't start. But at least I have that WSL2 .vhdx image that will hopefully mount and start. And probably break WSL2 again. I even SPECIFICALLY took backups of the image as tarballs every hour in case I broke LINUX, not WSL.

If anyone has done sd containers in wsl2 already let me know. I've tried to use WSL for dev work (i use osx) like this 2-3 times in the last 4-5 years and I always run into some catastrophically broken thing that makes my WSL stop working. I hadn't used it in years so hoped it was super reliable by now. This is on 3 different desktops with completely different hardware, etc. I was terrified it would break this weekend and IT DID. At least I can be up in windows in 20 minutes thanks to chocolately and chezmoi. Wiped out my entire gaming desktop.

Sorry I'm venting now this was my entire weekend.

This repo is from a deepspeed contrib (iirc) and lists the reqs for deepspeed + windows that mention the version matches

https://github.com/S95Sedan/Deepspeed-Windows

> conda install pytorch==2.1.2 torchvision==0.16.2 torchaudio==2.1.2 pytorch-cuda=12.1 -c pytorch -c nvidia

It may sound weird to do any of this in Windows, or maybe not, but if it does just remember that it's a lot of gamers like me with 4090s who just want to learn ML stuff as a hobby. I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing but thank god I know containers and linux like the back of my hand.

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

#198

Post by ametrau »

rtavares wrote: post #28
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.

Later in the same thread: > ROCm is a brand name for ROCm™ open software platform (for software) or the ROCm™ open platform ecosystem (includes hardware like FPGAs or other CPU architectures). > Note, ROCm no longer functions as an acronym.

>> Note, ROCm no longer functions as an acronym.

That is really dumb. Like LLVM.

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

#199

Post by Avamander »

smoldesu wrote: post #124
hd4 wrote: post #60

The interest in this thread tells me there are a lot of people who are not cool with the CUDA monopoly.

Those people should have spoken up when their hardware manufacturers abandoned OpenCL. The industry set itself 5-10 years behind by ignoring open GPGPU compute drivers while Nvidia slowly built their empire. Just look at how long it's taken to re-impliment a fraction of the CUDA featureset on a small handful of hardware. CUDA shouldn't exist. We should have hardware manufacturers working together , using common APIs…

Is my impression wrong, that people understood the need for OCL only after CUDA had already cornered and strangled the market?

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

#200

Post by [deleted] »

sam_goody wrote: post #16

Aside from the latest commit, there has been no activity for almost 3 years (latest code change on Feb 22, 2021). People are criticizing AMD for dropping this, but it makes sense to stop paying for development when the dev has stopped doing the work, no? And if he means that AMD stopped paying 3 years ago - well, that was before dinosaurs and ChatGPT, and alot has changed since then. https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA/co…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN