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

> after the CUDA back-end was around for years and after dropping OpenCL, Blender did add a Radeon HIP back-end... But the real kicker here is that using ZLUDA + CUDA back-end was slightly faster than the native Radeon HIP backend.

This is absolutely crazy.

Is AMD just a puppet org to placate antitrust fears? Why are they like this?

Is this really a theory? If so my $8 AMD stock from, 2015? is currently worth $176 so they should make more shell companies they're doing great.

I guess that might answer my "Why would AMD find that having a CUDA competitor isn't a business case unless they couldn't do it or the cards underperformed significantly."

For some reason AMD's GPU division continues to be run, well, horribly. The CPU division is crushing it, but the GPU division is comically bad. During the great GPU shortage AMD had multiple opportunities to capture chunks of the market and secure market share, increasing the priority for developers to acknowledge and target AMD's GPUs. What did they do instead? Not a goddamn thing, they followed Nvidia's pricing and managed to sell jack shit (like seriously the RX 580 is still the first AMD card to show up on the steam hardware survey).

They're not going big enough dies at the top end to compete with nvidia for the halo, and they're refusing to undercut at the low end where nvidia's reputation for absurd pricing is at an all time high. AMD's GPU division is a clown show, it's impressively bad. Even though the hardware itself is fine they just can't stop either making terrible product launches, awful pricing strategies, or just brain dead software choices like shipping a feature that triggered anti-cheat, getting their customers predictably banned & angering game devs in the process

And relevant to this discussion Nvidia's refusal to add VRAM to their lower end cards is a prime opportunity for AMD to go after the lower-end compute / AI interested crowd who will become the next generation software devs. What are they doing with this? Well, they're not making ROCm available to basically anyone, that's apparently the winning strategy. ROCm 6.0 only supports the 7900 XTX and the... Radeon VII. The weird one-off Vega 20 refresh. Of all the random cards to support, why the hell would you pick that one???