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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 | 6 comments | 12 Feb 24 14:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.877s | source | bottom
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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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hjabird ◴[12 Feb 24 15:26 UTC] No.39345853[source]▶
The problem with effectively supporting CUDA is that encourages CUDA adoption all the more strongly. Meanwhile, AMD will always be playing catch-up, forever having to patch issues, work around Nvidia/AMD differences, and accept the performance penalty that comes from having code optimised for another vendor's hardware. AMD needs to encourage developers to use their own ecosystem or an open standard.
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1. throwoutway ◴[12 Feb 24 15:54 UTC] No.39346270[source]▶
Is it? Apple Silicon exists, but Apple created a translation layer above it so the transition could be smoother.
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2. jack_pp ◴[12 Feb 24 16:04 UTC] No.39346421[source]▶
not really the same in that Apple was absolutely required to do this in order for people to transition smoothly and it wasn't competing against another company / platform, it just needed apps from its previous platform to work while people recompile apps for the current one which they will
3. Jorropo ◴[12 Feb 24 16:09 UTC] No.39346493[source]▶
This is extremely different, apple was targeting end consumers that just want their app to run. The performance between apple rosetta and native cpu were still multiple times different.

People writing CUDA apps don't just want stuff to run, performance is an extremely important factor else they would target CPUs which are easier to program for.

From their readme: > On Server GPUs, ZLUDA can compile CUDA GPU code to run in one of two modes: > Fast mode, which is faster, but can make exotic (but correct) GPU code hang. > Slow mode, which should make GPU code more stable, but can prevent some applications from running on ZLUDA.

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4. hamandcheese ◴[12 Feb 24 16:24 UTC] No.39346735[source]▶
> The performance between apple rosetta and native cpu were still multiple times different.

Rosetta 2 runs apps at 80-90% their native speed.

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5. piva00 ◴[12 Feb 24 16:36 UTC] No.39346899[source]▶
> The performance between apple rosetta and native cpu were still multiple times different.

Not at all, the performance hit was in the low 10s %, before natively supporting Apple Silicon most of the apps I use for music/video/photography didn't seem to have a performance impact at all, even more when the M1 machines were so much faster than the Intels.

6. Jorropo ◴[12 Feb 24 20:10 UTC] No.39349772{3}[source]▶
Indeed I got that wrong. Sadly minimal SIMD and hardware acceleration support.