Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why CUDA translation wont unlock AMD

eliovp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 85 posts

Re: Why CUDA translation wont unlock AMD

#31

Post by measurablefunc »

bee_rider wrote: post #30
measurablefunc wrote: post #3

[flagged]

The AI is too busy making Ghibli profile pictures or whatever the thing is now. We asked it to make a plan for how to fix the situation, but it got stuck. “Ok, I’m helping the people build an AI to translate NVIDIA codes to AMD” “I don’t have enough resources” “Simple, I’ll just use AMD chips to run an AI code translator, they are under-utilized. I’ll make a step by step process to do so” “Step 1: get code kernels fo…

The real question is whether it will be as unprofitable to do this type of automated runtime translation from one GPU vendor to another as it is to generate Mario clips & Ghibli images.

Re: Why CUDA translation wont unlock AMD

#32

Post by bigyabai »

measurablefunc wrote: post #24
jsheard wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Take the ROCm specification, take your CUDA codebase, let one of the agentic AIs translate it all into ROCm ...sounds like asking for a 1:1 mapping to me. If you meant asking the AI to transmute the code from NV-optimal to AMD-optimal as it goes along, you could certainly try doing that, but the idea is nothing more than AI fanfic until someone shows it actually working.

Now that I have clarified the point about AI optimizing the code from CUDA to fit AMD's runtime what is your contention about the possibility of such a translation?

There is an old programmer's joke about writing abstractions and expecting zero-cost.

Re: Why CUDA translation wont unlock AMD

#34

Post by stingraycharles »

lvl155 wrote: post #9

Let’s just say what it is: devs are too constrained to jump ship right now. It’s a massive land grab and you are not going to spend time tinkering with CUDA alternatives when even a six-month delay can basically kill your company/organization. Google and Apple are two companies with enough resources to do it. Google isn’t because they’re keeping it proprietary to their cloud. Apple still have their heads stuck in san…

Google has their own TPUs so they don’t have any vendor lock-in issues at all.

OpenAI OTOH is big enough that the vendor lock-in is actually hurting them, and them making that massive deal with AMD may finally push the needle for AMD and improve things in the ecosystem to make AMD a smooth experience.

Re: Why CUDA translation wont unlock AMD

#35

Post by bigyabai »

manjose2018 wrote: post #33

https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2025/03/08/AMD-... https://tinygrad.org/ is the only viable alternative to CUDA that I have seen popup in the past few years.

Viable how? "Feasible" might be a better word here, I haven't heard many (any?) war-stories about a TinyBox in production but maybe I'm OOTL.

Re: Why CUDA translation wont unlock AMD

#36

Post by measurablefunc »

bigyabai wrote: post #32
measurablefunc wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that I have clarified the point about AI optimizing the code from CUDA to fit AMD's runtime what is your contention about the possibility of such a translation?

There is an old programmer's joke about writing abstractions and expecting zero-cost.

How does that apply in this case? The whole point is that the agentic AI/AGI skips all the abstractions & writes optimized low-level code for each GPU vendor from a high-level specification. There are no abstractions other than whatever specifications GPU vendors provide for their hardware which are fed into the agentic AI/AGI to do the necessary work of creating low-level & optimized code for specific tasks.

Re: Why CUDA translation wont unlock AMD

#38

Post by nutjob2 »

measurablefunc wrote: post #20
j16sdiz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same as "Why just outsourcing it to " AI aint magic. You need more effort to manage, test and validate that.

[flagged]

> Isn't AGI around the corner?

There isn't even a concrete definition of intelligence, let alone AGI, so no it's not.

That's just mindless hype at this point.

Post reply on HN