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
If you replace CUDA -> x86 and NVIDIA -> Intel, you'll see a familiar story which AMD has already proved it can work through.

These were precisely the arguments for 'x86 will entrench Intel for all time', and we've seen AMD succeed at that game just fine.

>>jvande+NO
The difference is that AMD's CPUs are designed to implement the x86 and x86-64 ISA, so there is no loss of performance. In contrast, AMD and NVIDA's GPU instruction sets and architectures are not the same, and to get top performance out of these architectures code needs to be customized for them.

If you slap a CUDA compatibility layer on top of AMD, then CUDA code optimized for NVIDIA chips would run, but would suffer a performance penalty compared to code that was customized/tuned for AMD, so unless AMD GPUs were sold cheap enough (i.e. with low profit margin) to mitigate this loss of performance you might as well buy NVIDIA in the first place.