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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: 0.211s | 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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largbae ◴[12 Feb 24 15:28 UTC] No.39345893[source]▶
It certainly seems ironic that the company that beat Intel at its own compatibility game with x86-64 would abandon compatibility with today's market leader.
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1. rob74 ◴[12 Feb 24 16:40 UTC] No.39346966[source]▶
The situation is a bit different: AMD got its foot in the door with the x86 market because IBM back in the early 1980s forced Intel to license the technology so AMD could act as a second source of CPUs. In the GPU market, ATI (later bought by AMD) and nVidia emerged as the market leaders after the other 3D graphics pioneers (3Dfx) gave up - but their GPUs were never compatible in the first place, and if AMD tried to make them compatible, nVidia could sue the hell out of them...