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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 | 4 comments | 12 Feb 24 14:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.737s | 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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hjabird ◴[12 Feb 24 15:26 UTC] No.39345853[source]▶
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.
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1. mindcrime ◴[12 Feb 24 18:25 UTC] No.39348398[source]▶
Yep. This is very similar to the "catch-22" that IBM wound up in with OS/2 and the Windows API. On the one hand, by supporting Windows software on OS/2, they gave OS/2 customers access to a ready base of available, popular software. But in doing so, they also reduced the incentive for ISV's to produce OS/2 native software that could take advantage of unique features of OS/2.

It's a classic "between a rock and a hard place" scenario. Quite a conundrum.

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2. ianlevesque ◴[12 Feb 24 18:31 UTC] No.39348479[source]▶
Thinking about the highly adjacent graphics APIs history, did anyone really 'win' the Direct3D, OpenGL, Metal, Vulkan war? Are we benefiting from the fragmentation?

If the players in the space have naturally coalesced around one over the last decade, can we skip the thrashing and just go with it this time?

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3. tadfisher ◴[12 Feb 24 18:41 UTC] No.39348615[source]▶
The game engines won. Folks aren't building Direct3D or Vulkan renderers; they're using Unity or Unreal or Godot and clicking "export" to target whatever API makes sense for the platform.

WebGPU might be the thing that unifies the frontend API for folks writing cross-platform renderers, seeing as browsers will have to implement it on top of the platform APIs anyway.

4. pjmlp ◴[13 Feb 24 06:54 UTC] No.39355263[source]▶
You missed the Nintendo and Sony APIs as well.

FOSS folks make this a bigger issue than it really is, game studios make a pluggable API on their engine and call it a day, move on into everything else that matters in actually delivering a game.