←back to thread

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

(www.phoronix.com)
1045 points mfiguiere | 1 comments | 12 Feb 24 14:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.211s | source
Show context
Keyframe ◴[12 Feb 24 16:45 UTC] No.39347045[source]▶
This event of release is however a result of AMD stopped funding it per "After two years of development and some deliberation, AMD decided that there is no business case for running CUDA applications on AMD GPUs. One of the terms of my contract with AMD was that if AMD did not find it fit for further development, I could release it. Which brings us to today." from https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA?tab=readme-ov-file#faq

so, same mistake intel made before.

replies(8): >>39348941 #>>39349405 #>>39349842 #>>39350224 #>>39351024 #>>39351568 #>>39352021 #>>39360332 #
1. jacoblambda ◴[12 Feb 24 20:15 UTC] No.39349842[source]▶
I mean it could also be that there was no business case for it as long as it remained closed source work.

If the now very clearly well functioning implementation continues to perform as well as it is, the community may be able to keep it funded and functioning.

And the other side of this is that with renewed AMD interest/support for the rocm/HIP project, it might be just good enough as a stopgap step to push projects towards rocm/HIP adoption. (included below is another blurb from the readme).

> I am a developer writing CUDA code, does this project help me port my code to ROCm/HIP?

> Currently no, this project is strictly for end users. However this project could be used for a much more gradual porting from CUDA to HIP than anything else. You could start with an unmodified application running on ZLUDA, then have ZLUDA expose the underlying HIP objects (streams, modules, etc.), allowing to rewrite GPU kernels one at a time. Or you could have a mixed CUDA-HIP application where only the most performance sensitive GPU kernels are written in the native AMD language.