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

It seems to me that AMD are crazy to stop funding this. CUDA-on-ROCm breaks NVIDIA's moat, and would also act as a disincentive for NVIDIA to make breaking changes to CUDA; what more could AMD want?

When you're #1, you can go all-in on your own proprietary stack, knowing that network effects will drive your market share higher and higher for you for free.

When you're #2, you need to follow de-facto standards and work on creating and following truly open ones, and try to compete on actual value, rather than rent-seeking. AMD of all companies should know this.

> and would also act as a disincentive for NVIDIA to make breaking changes to CUDA

I don't know about that. You could kinda argue the opposite. "We improved CUDA. Oh it stopped working for you on AMD hardware? Too bad. Buy Nvidia next time"

Yep, I develop several applications that use CUDA. I see AMD/Radeon powered computers for sale and want to buy one, but I am not going to risk not being able to run those applications or having to rewrite them.

If they want me as a customer, and they have not created a viable alternative to CUDA, they need to pursue this.

Also known as OS/2: Redux strategy.

Most CUDA applications do not target the newest CUDA version! Despite 12.1 being out, lots of code still targets 7 or 8 to support old NVIDIA cards. Similar support for AMD isn’t unthinkable (but a rewrite to rocm would be).

NVIDIA is about ecosystem plays, they have no interest in sabotage or anti competition plays. Leave that to apple and google and their dumb app stores and mobile OSs.

> NVIDIA is about ecosystem plays, they have no interest in sabotage or anti competition plays.

Are we talking about the same NVIDIA? The entire Nvidia GPU strategy for nvidia is - make a feature (or find existing one) that performs better on their cards - pay developers to use (and sometimes misuse) it extensively.

Define "viable"?

If you see:

1) billions of dollar at the stake

2) one of the most successful leadership

3) during hottest peroid of their business where they heard about Nvidia's moat probably thousands of times during last 18 months...

and you call some decision "crazy", then you probably do not have the same informations that they do

or they underperformed, who knows, but I bet on #1 reason.

That's exactly the point I was making above.

The 'crazy' decision is them slowly abandoning the PC gaming market which is where consumers get these cards, and focusing on the 'client' market to sell their 'Insight' datacenter/AI cards. I think the parent you are responding to isn't questioning why it is a bad 'make money now' profit decision but why it is a bad 'get people to use your system' decision.

"AMD’s client segment, mostly chips for PCs and laptops, rose 62% year over year to $1.46 billion in sales, thanks to recent chip launches.

Sales in AMD’s gaming segment, which includes “semi-custom” processors for Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation consoles, fell 17%. "

* https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/30/amd-earnings-report-q4-2024....

A backend that runs PyTorch out of the box and is as easy to setup / use as nvidia stack.

Installing PyTorch with the PyTorch website instructions for AMD was pretty painless for me on Linux. I know everybodies experience is different, but install wasn't the issue for me.

For me the issue on AMD was stability in situations when VRAM was getting tight.