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

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.

>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...

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.

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.