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

They have made an alternative to the CUDA language with HIP, which can do most of the things the CUDA language can.

You could say that they haven't released supporting libraries like cuDNN, but they are making progress on this with AiTer for example.

You could say that they have fragmented their efforts across too many different paradigms but I don't think this is it because Nvidia also support a lot of different programming models.

I think the reason is that they have not prioritised support for ROCm across all of their products. There are too many different architectures with varying levels of support. This isn't just historical. There is no ROCm support for their latest AI Max 395 APU. There is no nice cross architecture ISA like PTX. The drivers are buggy. It's just all a pain to use. And for that reason "the community" doesn't really want to use it, and so it's a second class citizen.

This is a management and leadership problem. They need to make using their hardware easy. They need to support all of their hardware. They need to fix their driver bugs.

It's easy (and mostly correct) to blame management for this, but it's such a foundational issue that even if everyone up to the CEO pivoted on every topic, it wouldn't change anything. They simply don't have the engineering talent to pull this off, because they somehow concluded that making stuff open source means someone else will magically do the work for you. Nvidia on the other hand has accrued top talent for more than a decade and carefully developed their ecosystem to reach this point. And there are only so many talented engineers on the planet. So even if AMD leadership wakes up tomorrow, they won't go anywhere for a looong time.