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Apple's MLX adding CUDA support

(github.com)
548 points nsagent | 1 comments | 14 Jul 25 21:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.21s | source
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lukev ◴[15 Jul 25 02:18 UTC] No.44567263[source]▶
So to make sure I understand, this would mean:

1. Programs built against MLX -> Can take advantage of CUDA-enabled chips

but not:

2. CUDA programs -> Can now run on Apple Silicon.

Because the #2 would be a copyright violation (specifically with respect to NVidia's famous moat).

Is this correct?

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saagarjha ◴[15 Jul 25 02:28 UTC] No.44567309[source]▶
No, it's because doing 2 would be substantially harder.
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hangonhn ◴[15 Jul 25 02:48 UTC] No.44567414[source]▶
Is CUDA tied very closely to the Nvidia hardware and architecture so that all the abstraction would not make sense on other platforms? I know very little about hardware and low level software.

Thanks

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1. lcnielsen ◴[15 Jul 25 05:48 UTC] No.44568191[source]▶
The kind of CUDA you or I would write is not very hardware specific (a few constants here and there) but the kind of CUDA behind cuBLAS with a million magic flags, inline PTX ("GPU assembly") and exploitation of driver/firmware hacks is. It's like the difference between numerics code in C and and numerics code in C with tons of in-line assembly code for each one of a number of specific processors.

You can see similar things if you buy datacenter-grade CPUs from AMD or Intel and compare their per-model optimized BLAS builds and compilers to using OpenBLAS or swapping them around. The difference is not world ending but you can see maybe 50% in some cases.