←back to thread

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

(www.phoronix.com)
1045 points mfiguiere | 3 comments | 12 Feb 24 14:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.5s | source
Show context
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.

replies(14): >>39345241 #>>39345302 #>>39345393 #>>39345400 #>>39345458 #>>39345853 #>>39345857 #>>39345893 #>>39346210 #>>39346792 #>>39346857 #>>39347433 #>>39347900 #>>39347927 #
fariszr ◴[12 Feb 24 14:39 UTC] No.39345241[source]▶
According to the article, AMD seems to have pulled the plug on this as they think it will hinder ROCMv6 adoption, which still btw only supports two consumer cards out of their entire line up[1]

1. https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ROCm-6.0-Released

replies(4): >>39345503 #>>39345558 #>>39346200 #>>39346480 #
1. bhouston ◴[12 Feb 24 15:02 UTC] No.39345503[source]▶
AMD should have the funds to push both of these initiatives at once. If the ROCM team has political reasons to kill the competition, it is because they are scared it will succeed. I've seen this happen in big companies.

But management at AMD should be above petty team politics and fund both because at the company level they do not care which solution wins in the end.

replies(2): >>39345957 #>>39346316 #
2. imtringued ◴[12 Feb 24 15:33 UTC] No.39345957[source]▶
Why would they be worried about people using their product? Some CUDA wrapper on top of ROCM isn't going to get them fired. It doesn't get rid of ROCM's function as a GPGPU driver.
3. zer00eyz ◴[12 Feb 24 15:57 UTC] No.39346316[source]▶
If your AMD you don't want to be compatible till you have a compelling feature of your own.

Good enough CUDA + New feature x gives them leverage in the inevitable court battle(S) and patten sharing agreement that everyone wants to see.

AMD' already stuck its toe in the water: new CPU's with their AI cores built in. If you can get a AM5 socket to run with 196 gigs, that's a large (all be it slow) model you can run.