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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: 0.21s | 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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1. owlbite ◴[12 Feb 24 16:28 UTC] No.39346792[source]▶
Code portability isn't performance portability, a fact that was driven home back in the bad old OpenCL era. Code is going to have to rewritten to be efficient on AMD architectures.

At which point why tie yourself to the competitor's language. Probably much more effective to just write a well optimized library that serves the MLIR/whatever is popular API in order to run big ML jobs.