←back to thread

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: 0.211s | 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.

Show context
whywhywhywhy ◴[01 Apr 25 14:40 UTC] No.43547335[source]▶
The answer is in the question, because if they had the foresight to do such a thing the tech would already be here, instead they thought 1 dimensionally about their product, were part of the group that fumbled OpenCL and now they're a decade behind playing catch up.
replies(2): >>43547379 #>>43547882 #
bluGill ◴[01 Apr 25 14:44 UTC] No.43547379[source]▶
A good group can catch up significantly in 2 years. They will still be behind, but if they are cheaper (or just you can buy them) that would still go a long way.
replies(3): >>43547589 #>>43547724 #>>43547858 #
whatever1 ◴[01 Apr 25 14:59 UTC] No.43547589[source]▶
I think even with the trashy api and drivers if they release graphic cards with 4x the memory of the nvidia equivalents the community would put the effort to make them work.
replies(2): >>43547800 #>>43549422 #
1. DrNosferatu ◴[01 Apr 25 17:30 UTC] No.43549422[source]▶
This: provide cards with extra larger VRAM pools than the competition - to provide a real edge in LLM inferencing - and the users will come.

This happened with bitcoin.