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

183 points spacebanana7 | 1 comments | 01 Apr 25 14:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.203s | 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.

1. z3phyr ◴[01 Apr 25 17:25 UTC] No.43549345[source]▶
In turn I will raise you the following: Why are GPU ISA trade secrets at all? Why not open them up like CPU ISAs, get rid of specialized cores and let compiler writers port their favorite languages to compile into native GPU programs? Everyone will be happy. Game devs will be happy with more control over the hardware, Compiler devs will be happy to run haskell or prolog natively on GPUs, ML devs will be happier, NVIDIA/AMD will be happier with taking the MainStage.