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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: 0.281s | 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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fulladder ◴[01 Apr 25 17:23 UTC] No.43549332[source]▶

>>43547309 (OP) #

I've been telling people for years that NVIDIA is actually a software company, but nobody ever listens. My argument is that their silicon is nothing special and could easily be replicated by others, and therefore their real value is in their driver+CUDA layer.

(Maybe "nothing special" is a little bit strong, but as a chip designer I've never seen the actual NVIDIA chips as all that much of a moat. What makes it hard to find alternatives to NVIDIA is their driver and CUDA stack.)

Curious to hear others' opinions on this.

replies(1): >>43554802 #

1. ◴[02 Apr 25 08:51 UTC] No.43554802[source]▶