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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

#241

Post by tadfisher »

ianlevesque wrote: post #237
mindcrime wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. This is very similar to the "catch-22" that IBM wound up in with OS/2 and the Windows API. On the one hand, by supporting Windows software on OS/2, they gave OS/2 customers access to a ready base of available, popular software. But in doing so, they also reduced the incentive for ISV's to produce OS/2 native software that could take advantage of unique features of OS/2. It's a classic "between a rock and a hard…

Thinking about the highly adjacent graphics APIs history, did anyone really 'win' the Direct3D, OpenGL, Metal, Vulkan war? Are we benefiting from the fragmentation? If the players in the space have naturally coalesced around one over the last decade, can we skip the thrashing and just go with it this time?

The game engines won. Folks aren't building Direct3D or Vulkan renderers; they're using Unity or Unreal or Godot and clicking "export" to target whatever API makes sense for the platform.

WebGPU might be the thing that unifies the frontend API for folks writing cross-platform renderers, seeing as browsers will have to implement it on top of the platform APIs anyway.

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

#242

Post by swozey »

katbyte wrote: post #219
bick_nyers wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vent away! Sounds frustrating for sure. As much as I love Microsoft/Windows for the work they have put into WSL, I ended up just putting Kubuntu on my devices and use QEMU with GPU passthrough whenever I need Windows. Gaming perf is good. You need an iGPU or a cheap second GPU for Linux in order to hand off a 4090 etc. to Windows (unless maybe your motherboard happens to support headless boot but if it's a consumer b…

I recently gave this a go as I’d not had a windows desktop for a long time, have a beefy Proxmox server and wanted to play some windows only games - works shockingly well with an a4000 and 35m optical hdmi cables! - however I’m getting random audio crackling and popping and I’ve yet to figure out what’s causing it. First I thought it was hardware related in a Remote Desktop session leading me to think some weird audi…

What are you running for audio? pipewire+jack, pipewire, jack2, pulseaudio? I wonder if it's from latency. Pulseaudio is the most common but if you do any audio engineering or play guitar etc with your machine we all use jack protocol for less latency.

https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?t=25556

Could be completely unrelated though, RDP sessions can definitely act up, get audio out of sync etc. I try to never do pass through rdp audio, it's not even enabled by default in the mstsc client IIRC but that may just be a "probably server" thing.

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

#243

Post by kkielhofner »

voakbasda wrote: post #128
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…

In the embedded space, Nvidia regularly drops support for older hardware. The last supported kernel for their Jetson TX2 was 4.9. Their newer Jetson Xavier line is stuck on 5.10. The hardware may be great, but their software ecosystem is utter crap. As long as they stay the unchallenged leader in hardware, I expect Nvidia will continue to produce crap software. I would push to switch our products in a heartbeat, if A…

In the embedded space customers develop bespoke solutions to well, embed them in products where they (essentially) bake the firmware image and more-or-less freeze the entire software stack less incremental updates. The next version of your product uses the next fresh Jetson and Jetpack release. Repeat. Using the latest and greatest kernel is far from a top consideration in these applications...

I was actually advising an HN user against using Jetson just the other day because it's such an extreme outlier when it comes to Nvidia and software support. Frankly Jetson makes no sense unless you really need the power efficiency and form-factor.

Meanwhile, any seven year old >= Pascal card is fully supported in CUDA 12 and the most recent driver releases. That combined with my initial data points and others people have chimed in with on this thread is far from "utter crap".

Use the right tool for the job.

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

#244

Post by 0x457 »

outside415 wrote: post #231
RamRodification wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and would also act as a disincentive for NVIDIA to make breaking changes to CUDA I don't know about that. You could kinda argue the opposite. "We improved CUDA. Oh it stopped working for you on AMD hardware? Too bad. Buy Nvidia next time"

NVIDIA is about ecosystem plays, they have no interest in sabotage or anti competition plays. Leave that to apple and google and their dumb app stores and mobile OSs.

> NVIDIA is about ecosystem plays, they have no interest in sabotage or anti competition plays.

Are we talking about the same NVIDIA? The entire Nvidia GPU strategy for nvidia is - make a feature (or find existing one) that performs better on their cards - pay developers to use (and sometimes misuse) it extensively.

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

#245

Post by atq2119 »

matchagaucho wrote: post #163
modeless wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been critical of AMD's failure to compete in AI for over a decade now, but I can see why AMD wouldn't want to go the route of cloning CUDA and I'm surprised they even tried. They would be on a never ending treadmill of feature catchup and bug-for-bug compatibility, and wouldn't have the freedom to change the API to suit their hardware. The right path for AMD has always been to make their own API that runs on all…

But AMD was formed to shadow Intel's x86?

AMD was founded at almost the same time as Intel. X86 didn't exist at the time.

But yes, AMD was playing the "follow x86" game for a long time until they came up with x86-64, which evened the playing field in terms of architecture.

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

#246

Post by atq2119 »

jandrese wrote: post #62
izacus wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most important decisions a company can do, is to decide which markets they'll focus in and which they won't. This is even true for megacorps (see: Google and their parade of messups). There's just not enough time to be in all markets all at once. So, again, it's not at all clear that AMD being in the compute GPU game is the automatic win for them in the future. There's plenty of companies that killed thems…

AMD is literally the only company on the market poised to exploit the explosion in demand for GPU compute after nVidia (sorry Intel). To not even really try to break in is insanity. nVidia didn't grow their market cap by 5x over the course of a year because people really got into 3D gaming. Even as an also ran on the coat tails of nVidia with a compatibility glue library the market is clearly demanding more product.

They are breaking in, though. By all accounts, MI300s are being sold as fast as they can make them.

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

#247

Post by LamaOfRuin »

sangnoir wrote: post #234
ianlevesque wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And indeed more than succeed, they invented x86_64.

x86_64's win was helped by Intel's Itanium misstep. AMD can't bank on Nvidia making a mistake, and Nvidia seems content with incremental changes to CUDA, contrasted with Intel's 32-bit to 64-bit transition. It is highly unlikely that AMD can find and exploit a similar chink in the amor against CUDA.

If they're content with incremental changes to CUDA then it doesn't cost much to keep updated compatibility and do it as quickly as any users actually adopt changes.

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

#248

Post by bluedino »

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…

> How many people are running an older version of CUDA right now on NVIDIA hardware for whatever particular reason?

I would guess there are lots of people still running CUDA 11. Older clusters, etc. A lot of that software doesn't get updated very often.

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

#249

Post by okanat »

alberth wrote: post #102
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…

DirectX vs OpenGL. This brings back memories of late 90s / early 00s of Microsoft pushing hard their proprietary graphic libraries (DirectX) vs open standards (OpenGL). Fast forward 25-years and even today, Microsoft still dominates in PC gaming as a result. There's a bad track record of open standard for GPUs. Even Apple themselves gave up on OpenGL and has their own proprietary offering (Metal).

OpenGL was invented at SGI and it was closed source until it was given away. It is very popular in its niche i.e. CAD design because the original closed source SGI APIs were very successful.

DirectX was targetted at gaming and was a much more limited simpler API which made programming games in it easier. It couldn't do everything that OpenGL can which is why CAD programs didn't use it even on Windows. DirectX worked because it chose its market correctly and delivered what the customers want. Window's exceptional backwards compatibility helped greatly as well. Many simple game engines still use DX9 API to this day.

It is not so much about having an open standard, but being able to provide extra functionality and performance. Unlike the CPU-dominated areas where executing the common baseline ISA is very competitive, in accelerated computing using every single bit of performance and having new and niche features matter. So providing exceptional hardware with good software is critical for the competition. Closed APIs have much more quick delivery time and they don't have to deal with multiple vendors.

Nobody except Nvidia delivers good enough low level software and their hardware is exceptionally good. AMD's combination is neither. The hardware is slower and it is hard to program so they continuously lose the race.

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

#250

Post by beebeepka »

latchkey wrote: post #205
Certhas wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most recent "card" is their MI300 line. It's annoying as hell to you and me that they are not catering to the market of people who want to run stuff on their gaming cards. But it's not clear it's bad strategy to focus on executing in the high-end first. They have been very successful landing MI300s in the HPC space... Edit: I just looked it up: 25% of the GPU Compute in the current Top500 Supercomputers is AMD ht…

I'm building a bare metal business around MI300x and top end Epyc CPUs. We will have them for rental soon. The goal is to build a public super computer that isn't just available to researchers in HPC.

Is it true MI300 line is 3-4x cheaper for similar performance than whatever nvidia is selling in highest segment?
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