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

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1045 points mfiguiere | 7 comments | 12 Feb 24 14:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.923s | source | bottom
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btown ◴[12 Feb 24 14:37 UTC] No.39345221[source]▶
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 was a hedge they think they no longer need, and they are missing the forest for the trees on the benefits of cross-pollination and open source ethos to their business.

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1. jandrese ◴[12 Feb 24 14:59 UTC] No.39345458[source]▶
AMD's management seems to be only vaguely aware that GPU compute is a thing. All of their efforts in the field feel like afterthoughts. Or maybe they are all just hardware guys who think of software as just a cost center.
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2. giovannibonetti ◴[12 Feb 24 15:18 UTC] No.39345724[source]▶
Maybe they just can't lure in good software developers with the right skill set, either due to not paying them enough or not having a good work environment in comparison to the other places that could hire them.
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3. captainbland ◴[12 Feb 24 15:29 UTC] No.39345899[source]▶
I did a cursory glance at Nvidia's and AMD's respective careers pages for software developers at one point - what struck me was they both have similarly high requirements for engineers in fields like GPU compute and AI but Nvidia hires much more widely, geographically speaking, than AMD.

As a total outsider it seems to me that maybe one of AMD's big problems is they just aren't set up to take advantage of the global talent pool in the same way Nvidia is.

4. newsclues ◴[12 Feb 24 15:32 UTC] No.39345939[source]▶
They are aware, but it wasn’t until recently that they had the resources to invest in the space. They had to build Zen and start making buckets of money first
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5. lostdog ◴[12 Feb 24 15:41 UTC] No.39346084[source]▶
It feels like "Make the AI software work on our GPUs," is on some VP's OKRs, but isn't really being checked on for progress or quality.
6. trynumber9 ◴[12 Feb 24 17:48 UTC] No.39347928[source]▶
That doesn't explain CDNA. They focused on high-throughput FP64 which is not where the market went.
7. beebeepka ◴[12 Feb 24 19:20 UTC] No.39349048[source]▶
Exactly. AMD stock was like 2 dollars just eight years ago. They didn't have any money and, amusingly, it was their GPU business that kept them going on life support.

Their leadership seems quite a bit more competent than random forum commenters give them credit for. I guess what they need, marketing wise, is a few successful halo GPU launches. They haven't done that in a while. Lisa acknowledged this years ago. It's marketing 101. I guess these things are easier said than done.