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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: 0s | 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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postalrat ◴[01 Apr 25 14:41 UTC] No.43547347[source]▶
Because they dont want nvidia to be in control of their own development efforts.
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jsheard ◴[01 Apr 25 14:42 UTC] No.43547359[source]▶
The question was why don't they have anything as good as CUDA, not why don't they adopt CUDA itself.
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cmrdporcupine ◴[01 Apr 25 14:45 UTC] No.43547402[source]▶
Isn't the "goodness" of CUDA really down to its mass adoption -- and therefore its community and network effects -- not strictly its technical attributes?

If I recall, there are various "GPU programming" and "AI" efforts that have existed for AMD GPUs, but none of them have had the same success in large part because they're simply non-"standard?"

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1. fulladder ◴[01 Apr 25 18:02 UTC] No.43549738[source]▶
I don't think it's just adoption and network effects, though that is part of the equation. The other big (bigger?) piece is that the CUDA landscape is very complete, with libraries and examples for many different kinds of use cases, and they are well documented and easy to get started with. Ctrl+F this page for "ecosystem" and you'll find another comment that explains it better than I can.