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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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wheybags ◴[12 Feb 24 14:33 UTC] No.39345186[source]▶
Cannot understand why AMD would stop funding this. It seems like this should have a whole team allocated to it.
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otoburb ◴[12 Feb 24 14:41 UTC] No.39345254[source]▶
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.

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blagie ◴[12 Feb 24 14:55 UTC] No.39345418[source]▶
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.

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1. lambdaone ◴[12 Feb 24 15:40 UTC] No.39346080{3}[source]▶
More than that, a second implementation of CUDA acts as a disincentive for NVIDIA to make breaking changes to it, since it would reduce any incentive for software developers to follow those changes, as it reduces the value of their software by eliminating hardware choice for end-users (which in some case like large companies are also the developers themselves).

At the same time, open source projects can be pretty nimble in chasing things like changing APIs, potentially frustrating the effectiveness of API pivoting by NVIDIA in a second way.