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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 | 2 comments | 12 Feb 24 14:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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. whywhywhywhy ◴[12 Feb 24 17:46 UTC] No.39347900[source]▶
> Why would this not be AMD’s top priority among priorities?

Same reason it wasn't when it was obvious Nvidia was taking over this space maybe 8 years ago now when they let OpenCL die then proceeded to do nothing till it's too late.

Speaking to anyone working in general purpose GPU coding back then they all just said the same thing, OpenCL was a nightmare to work with and CUDA was easy and mature compared to it. Writing was on the wall where things were heading the second you saw a photon based renderer running on GPU vs CPU all the way back then, AMD has only themselves to blame because Nvidia basically showed them the potential with CUDA.

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2. btown ◴[12 Feb 24 19:06 UTC] No.39348881[source]▶
One would hope that they've learned since then - but it could very well be that they haven't!