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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: 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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fancyfredbot ◴[01 Apr 25 14:49 UTC] No.43547461[source]▶
There is more than one way to answer this.

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.

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thrtythreeforty ◴[01 Apr 25 14:58 UTC] No.43547568[source]▶
This ticket, finally closed after being open for 2 years, is a pretty good micocosm of this problem:

https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm/issues/1714

Users complaining that the docs don't even specify which cards work.

But it goes deeper - a valid complaint is that "this only supports one or two consumer cards!" A common rebuttal is that it works fine on lots of AMD cards if you set some environment flag to force the GPU architecture selection. The fact that this is so close to working on a wide variety of hardware, and yet doesn't, is exactly the vibe you get with the whole ecosystem.

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1. citizenpaul ◴[01 Apr 25 19:06 UTC] No.43550313[source]▶
I've thought about this myself and come to a conclusion that your link reinforces. As I understand it most companies doing (EE)hardware design and production consider (CS) software to be a second class citizen at the the company. It looks like AMD after all this time competing with NVIDIA has not learned the lesson. That said I have never worked in hardware so I'm taking what I've heard from other people.

NVIDIA while far from perfect has always easily kept stride in software quality ahead of AMD for over 20 years. While AMD repeatedly keeps falling on their face and getting egg all over themselves again and again and again as far as software goes.

My guess is NVIDIA internally has found a way to keep the software people from feeling like they are "less than" the people designing the hardware.

Sounds easily but apparently not. AKA management problems.

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2. bgnn ◴[01 Apr 25 22:01 UTC] No.43551785[source]▶
This is correct but one of the reasons is the SWE at HW companies are living in their own bubble. They somehow don't follow the rest of the SW developments.

I'm a chip design engineer and I get frustrated with the garbage SW/FW team come up with, to the extent that I write my own FW library for my blocks. While doing that I try to learn the best practices, do quite a bit of research.

One other reason is, SW was only FW till not long ago, which was serving the HW. So there was almost no input from SW to HW development. This is clearly changing but some companies, like Nvidia, are ahead of the pack. Even Apple SoC team is quite HW centric compared to Nvidia.