←back to thread

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

(www.phoronix.com)
1045 points mfiguiere | 2 comments | 12 Feb 24 14:00 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
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.

replies(14): >>39345241 #>>39345302 #>>39345393 #>>39345400 #>>39345458 #>>39345853 #>>39345857 #>>39345893 #>>39346210 #>>39346792 #>>39346857 #>>39347433 #>>39347900 #>>39347927 #
fariszr ◴[12 Feb 24 14:39 UTC] No.39345241[source]▶
According to the article, AMD seems to have pulled the plug on this as they think it will hinder ROCMv6 adoption, which still btw only supports two consumer cards out of their entire line up[1]

1. https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ROCm-6.0-Released

replies(4): >>39345503 #>>39345558 #>>39346200 #>>39346480 #
kkielhofner ◴[12 Feb 24 15:07 UTC] No.39345558[source]▶
With the most recent card being their one year old flagship ($1k) consumer GPU...

Meanwhile CUDA supports anything with Nvidia stamped on it before it's even released. They'll even go as far as doing things like adding support for new GPUs/compute families to older CUDA versions (see Hopper/Ada and CUDA 11.8).

You can go out and buy any Nvidia GPU the day of release, take it home, plug it in, and everything just works. This is what people expect.

AMD seems to have no clue that this level of usability is what it will take to actually compete with Nvidia and it's a real shame - their hardware is great.

replies(5): >>39345774 #>>39345894 #>>39346438 #>>39346550 #>>39346788 #
1. voakbasda ◴[12 Feb 24 16:12 UTC] No.39346550{3}[source]▶
In the embedded space, Nvidia regularly drops support for older hardware. The last supported kernel for their Jetson TX2 was 4.9. Their newer Jetson Xavier line is stuck on 5.10.

The hardware may be great, but their software ecosystem is utter crap. As long as they stay the unchallenged leader in hardware, I expect Nvidia will continue to produce crap software.

I would push to switch our products in a heartbeat, if AMD actually gets their act together. If this alternative offers a path to evaluate our current application software stack on an AMD devkit, I would buy one tomorrow.

replies(1): >>39348665 #
2. kkielhofner ◴[12 Feb 24 18:45 UTC] No.39348665[source]▶
In the embedded space customers develop bespoke solutions to well, embed them in products where they (essentially) bake the firmware image and more-or-less freeze the entire software stack less incremental updates. The next version of your product uses the next fresh Jetson and Jetpack release. Repeat. Using the latest and greatest kernel is far from a top consideration in these applications...

I was actually advising an HN user against using Jetson just the other day because it's such an extreme outlier when it comes to Nvidia and software support. Frankly Jetson makes no sense unless you really need the power efficiency and form-factor.

Meanwhile, any seven year old >= Pascal card is fully supported in CUDA 12 and the most recent driver releases. That combined with my initial data points and others people have chimed in with on this thread is far from "utter crap".

Use the right tool for the job.