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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 | 1 comments | 12 Feb 24 14:00 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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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izacus ◴[12 Feb 24 14:54 UTC] No.39345400[source]▶
Why do you think running after nVidia for this submarket is a good idea for them? The AMD GPU team isn't especially big and the development investment is massive. Moreover, they'll have the opportunity cost for projects they're now dominating in (all game consoles for example).

Do you expect them to be able to capitalize on the AI fad so much (and quickly enough!) that it's worth dropping the ball on projects they're now doing well in? Or perhaps continue investing into the part of the market where they're doing much better than nVidia?

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1. currymj ◴[12 Feb 24 15:11 UTC] No.39345620[source]▶
everyone buying GPUs for AI and scientific workloads wishes AMD was a viable option, and this has been true for almost a decade now.

the hardware is already good enough, people would be happy to use it and accept that's it's not quite as optimized for DL as Nvidia.

people would even accept that the software is not as optimized as CUDA, I think, as long as it is correct and reasonably fast.

the problem is just that every time i've tried it, it's been a pain in the ass to install and there are always weird bugs and crashes. I don't think it's hubris to say that they could fix these sorts of problems if they had the will.