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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: 0.407s | 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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dlewis1788 ◴[01 Apr 25 14:59 UTC] No.43547586[source]▶
CUDA is an entire ecosystem - not a single programming language extension (C++) or a single library, but a collection of libraries & tools for specific use cases and optimizations (cuDNN, CUTLASS, cuBLAS, NCCL, etc.). There is also tooling support that Nvidia provides, such as profilers, etc. Many of the libraries build on other libraries. Even if AMD had the decent, reliable language extensions for general-purpose GPU programming, they still don't have the libraries and the supporting ecosystem to provide anything to the level that CUDA provides today, which is a decade plus of development effort from Nvidia to build.
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1. guywithahat ◴[01 Apr 25 15:38 UTC] No.43548095[source]▶
The counter point is they could make a higher level version of CUDA which wouldn't necessitate all the other supporting libraries. The draw of cuBLAS is that CUDA is a confusing pain. It seems reasonable to think they could write a better, higher level language (in the same vein as triton) and not have to write as many support libraries
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2. dlewis1788 ◴[01 Apr 25 16:40 UTC] No.43548849[source]▶
100% valid - Nvidia is trying to address that now with cuTile and the new Python front-end for CUTLASS.