zlacker

>>mfigui+(OP)
Why would this not be AMD’s top priority among priorities? Someone recently likened the situation to an Iron Age where NVIDIA owns all the iron. And this sounds like AMD knowing about a new source of ore and not even being willing to sink a single engineer’s salary into exploration.

My only guess is they have a parallel skunkworks working on the same thing, but in a way that they can keep it closed-source - that this was a hedge they think they no longer need, and they are missing the forest for the trees on the benefits of cross-pollination and open source ethos to their business.

>>btown+y6
The problem with effectively supporting CUDA is that encourages CUDA adoption all the more strongly. Meanwhile, AMD will always be playing catch-up, forever having to patch issues, work around Nvidia/AMD differences, and accept the performance penalty that comes from having code optimised for another vendor's hardware. AMD needs to encourage developers to use their own ecosystem or an open standard.

>>hjabir+Kg
> The problem with effectively supporting CUDA is that encourages CUDA adoption all the more strongly.

I'm curious about this. Sure some CUDA code has already been written. If something new comes along that provides better performance per dollar spent, why continue writing CUDA for new projects? I don't think the argument that "this is what we know how to write" works in this case. These aren't scripts you want someone to knock out quickly.

>>bachme+ul
If something new comes along that provides better performance per dollar, but you have no confidence that it'll continue to be available in the future, it's far less appealing. There's also little point in being cheaper if it just doesn't have the raw performance to justify the effort in implementing in that language.

CUDA currently has the better raw performance, better availability, and a long record indicating that the platform won't just disappear in a couple of years. You can use it on pretty much any NVIDIA GPU and it's properly supported. The same CUDA code that ran on a GTX680 can run on an RTX4090 with minimal changes if any (maybe even the same binary).

In comparison, AMD has a very spotty record with their compute technologies, stuff gets released and becomes effectively abandonware, or after just a few years support gets dropped regardless of the hardware's popularity. For several generations they basically led people on with promises of full support on consumer hardware that either never arrived or arrived when the next generation of cards were already available, and despite the general popularity of the rx580 and the popularity of the Radeon VII in compute applications, they dropped 'official' support. AMD treats its 'consumer' cards as third class citizens for compute support, but you aren't going to convince people to seriously look into your platform like that. Plus, it's a lot more appealing to have "GPU acceleration will allow us to take advantage of newer supercomputers, while also offering massive benefits to regular users" than just the former.

This was ultimately what removed AMD as a consideration for us when we were deciding on which to focus on for GPU acceleration in our application. Many of us already had access to an NVIDIA GPU of any sort, which would make development easier, while the entire facility had one ROCm capable AMD GPU at the time, specifically so they could occasionally check in on its status.