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.

With Nvidia controlling 90%+ of the market, this is not a viable option. They'd better lean hard into CUDA support if they want to be relevant.

A bit of story telling here:

IBM and Microsoft made OS/2. The first version worked on 286s and was stable but useless.

The second version worked only on 386s and was quite good, and even had wonderful windows 3.x compatibility. "Better windows than windows!"

At that point Microsoft wanted out of the deal and they wanted to make their newer version of windows, NT, which they did.

IBM now had a competitor to "new" windows and a very compatible version of "old" windows. Microsoft killed OS2 by a variety of ways (including just letting IBM be IBM) but also by making it very difficult for last month's version of OS/2 to run next month's bunch of Windows programs.

To bring this back to the point -- IBM vs Microsoft is akin to AMD vs Nvidia -- where nvidia has the standard that AMD is implementing, and so no matter what if you play in the backward compatibility realm you're always going to be playing catch-up and likely always in a position where winning is exceedingly hard.

As WOPR once said "interesting game; the only way to win is to not play."