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

Cannot understand why AMD would stop funding this. It seems like this should have a whole team allocated to it.

They would always be at the mercy of NVIDIA's API. Without knowing the inner workings, perhaps a major concern with this approach is the need to implement on NVIDIA's schedule instead of AMD's which is a very reactive stance.

This approach actually would make sense if AMD felt, like most of us perhaps, that the NVIDIA ecosystem is too entrenched, but perhaps they made the decision recently to discontinue funding because they (now?) feel otherwise.

They've been at mercy of Intel x86 APIs for a long time. Didn't kill them.

What happens here is that the original vendor loses control of the API once there are multiple implementations. That's the best possible outcome for AMD.

In either case, they have a limited window to be adopted, and that's more important. The abstraction layer here helps too. AMD code is !@#$%. If this were adopted, it makes it easier to fix things underneath. All that is a lot more important than a dream of disrupting CUDA.

x86 is not the same, the courts forced the release of x86 architecture to AMD during an antitrust lawsuit