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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 | 4 comments | 12 Feb 24 14:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.967s | source
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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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coldtea ◴[12 Feb 24 15:55 UTC] No.39346295[source]▶
>The problem with effectively supporting CUDA is that encourages CUDA adoption all the more strongly

Worked fine for MS with Excel supporting Lotus 123 and Word supporting WordPerfect's formats when those were dominant...

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bell-cot ◴[12 Feb 24 16:07 UTC] No.39346457[source]▶
But MS controlled the underlying OS. Letting them both throw money at the problem, and (by accounts at the time) frequently tweak the OS in ways that made life difficult for Lotus, WordPerfect, Ashton-Tate, etc.
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1. p_l ◴[12 Feb 24 16:14 UTC] No.39346585[source]▶
Last I checked, Lotus did themselves by not innovating, and betting on the wrong horse (OS/2) then not doing well on a pivot to Windows.

Meanwhile Excel was gaining features and winning users with them even before Windows was in play.

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2. dadadad100 ◴[12 Feb 24 16:56 UTC] No.39347201[source]▶
This is a key point. Before windows we had all the dos players - WordPerfect was king. Microsoft was more focused on the Mac. I’ve always assumed that Microsoft understood that a GUI was coming and trained a generation of developers on the main gui of the day. Once windows came out the dos focused apps could not adapt in time
3. robocat ◴[12 Feb 24 16:59 UTC] No.39347244[source]▶
> betting on the wrong horse (OS/2)

Ahhhh, your hindsight is well developed. I would be interested to know the background on the reasons why Lotus made that bet. We can't know the counterfactual, but Lotus delivering on a platform owned by their deadly competitor Microsoft would seem to me to be a clearly worrysome idea to Lotus at the time. Turned out it was an existentially bad idea. Did Lotus fear Microsoft? "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run" is a myth[1] for a reason. Edit: DRDOS errors[2] were one reason Lotus might fear Microsoft. We can just imagine a narritive of a different timeline where Lotus delivered on Windows but did some things differently to beat Excel. I agree, Lotus made other mistakes and Microsoft made some great decisions, but the point remains.

We can also suspect that AMD have a similar choice now where they are forked. Depending on Nvidea/CUDA may be a similar choice for AMD - fail if they do and fail if they don't.

[1] http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done...

[2] https://www.theregister.com/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_inc...

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4. p_l ◴[12 Feb 24 17:16 UTC] No.39347497[source]▶
I've seen rumours from self-claimed ex-Lotus employees that IBM made a deal with Lotus to prioritise OS/2