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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 | 1 comments | 12 Feb 24 14:00 UTC | HN request time: 1.329s | 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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slashdev ◴[12 Feb 24 15:32 UTC] No.39345944[source]▶
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.
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cduzz ◴[12 Feb 24 15:45 UTC] No.39346142[source]▶
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."

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incrudible ◴[12 Feb 24 16:03 UTC] No.39346399[source]▶
Windows before NT was crap, so users had an incentive to upgrade. If there had existed a Windows 7 alternative that was near fully compatible and FOSS, I would wager Microsoft would have lost to it with Windows 8 and even 10. The only reason to update for most people was Microsoft dropping support.

For CUDA, it is not just AMD who would need to catch up. Developers also are not necessarily going to target the latest feature set immediately, especially if it only benefits (or requires) new hardware.

I accept the final statement, but that also means AMD for compute is gonna be dead like OS/2. Their stack just will not reach critical mass.

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BizarroLand ◴[12 Feb 24 17:04 UTC] No.39347325[source]▶
Todays linux OS's would have competed incredibly strongly against Vista and probably would have gone blow for blow against 7.

Proton, Wine, and all of the compatibility fixes and drive improvements that the community has made in the last 16 years has been amazing, and every day is another day where you can say that it has never been easier to switch away from Windows.

However, Microsoft has definitely been drinking the IBM koolaid a little to long and has lost the mandate of heaven. I think in the next 7-10 years we will reach a point where there is nothing Windows can do that linux cannot do better and easier without spying on you, and we may be 3-5 years from a "killer app" that is specifically built to be incompatible with Windows just as a big FU to them, possibly in the VR world, possibly in AR, and once that happens maybe, maybe, maybe it will finally actually be the year of the linux desktop.

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1. coderenegade ◴[13 Feb 24 02:59 UTC] No.39353772[source]▶
I don't think it'll be a killer app so much as a confluence of different factors. For one thing, we now live in a world where docker is fast becoming as ubiquitous as git, and unlike git, requires a Linux VM to run on Windows. It's also a key technology for the replication and distribution of ML models, which again, are developed on Linux, trained on clusters running Linux, and deployed to servers running Linux. And this is all done in Python, a language native to Linux, which is now one of the most used languages on Earth.

We already see things like Google abandoning tensorflow support for Windows, because they don't have enough devs using Windows to easily maintain it.

And of course, we have a changing of the guard in terms of a generation of software developers who primarily worked on Windows, because that was the way to do it, starting to retire. Younger devs came up in the Google era where Linux is a first class citizen alongside MacOS.

I think these factors are going to change the face of technology in the coming 15 years, and that's likely to affect how businesses and consumers consume technology, even if they don't understand what's actually running under the hood.