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Ask HN: Why hasn’t AMD made a viable CUDA alternative?

183 points spacebanana7 | 2 comments | 01 Apr 25 14:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source

I appreciate developing ROCm into something competitive with CUDA would require a lot of work, both internally within AMD and with external contributions to the relevant open source libraries.

However the amount of resources at stake is incredible. The delta between NVIDIA's value and AMD's is bigger than the annual GDP of Spain. Even if they needed to hire a few thousand engineers at a few million in comp each, it'd still be a good investment.

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dagmx ◴[01 Apr 25 14:51 UTC] No.43547492[source]▶
AMD have actually made several attempts at it.

The first time, they went ahead and killed off their effort to consolidate on OpenCL. OpenCL went terribly (in no small part because NVIDIA held out on OpenCL 2 support) and that set AMD back a long ways.

Beyond that, AMD does not have a strong software division or one with the teeth to really influence hardware to their needs . They have great engineers but leadership doesn’t know how to get them to where they need to be.

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WithinReason ◴[01 Apr 25 15:23 UTC] No.43547900[source]▶
This is it, it's an organisational skill issue. To be fair, being a HW company and a SW company at the same time is very difficult.
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1. dagmx ◴[01 Apr 25 15:33 UTC] No.43548029[source]▶
It is but you have to be.

It’s been key to the success of their peers. NVIDIA and Apple are the best examples but even Intel to a smaller degree.

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2. latchkey ◴[02 Apr 25 17:33 UTC] No.43559140[source]▶
https://x.com/AnushElangovan is now in charge of the software part of things and is making great progress very quickly.