3 ms·

> it is mostly the fault of competing vendors that there is no CUDA or almost-CUDA implementation I very much agree, but I also don't have the skills or knowle

> it is mostly the fault of competing vendors that there is no CUDA or almost-CUDA implementation I very much agree, but I also don't have the skills or knowledge to say what kind of effort it takes to build such a language/toolchain. It seems like such an obvious opportunity for AMD, and has for so long, could it be less incompetence and more engineering difficulty and/or adoption struggles? I know I've seen talk of CUDA-killers around these parts before, would love to hear more details from people more familiar with this stuff.

microcolonel 8y ago
> I know I've seen talk of CUDA-killers around these parts before, would love to hear more details from people more familiar with this stuff. From the market perspective, it seems to me that a "CUDA killer" would not actually help. I think we need a free CUDA toolchain.
- claytonjy 8y ago
  I think that's roughly what I meant; I'd like to see AMD dump resources into making a fully open, compatible-with-all-modern-GPUs toolchain to directly compete with and replace the CUDA one. For all I know, they already are? Heck even a non-open, AMD-specific toolchain would probably be great for consumers, but an open, cross-compatible toolchain would be even better for us, and might be better for AMD as well by allowing non-AMD-employed experts to contribute.
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    > I think that's roughly what I meant; I'd like to see AMD dump resources into making a fully open, compatible-with-all-modern-GPUs toolchain to directly compete with and replace the CUDA one. For all I know, they already are? There's OpenCL. Except OpenCL performance is worse than CUDA performance on NVidia, so anyone using NVidia's hardware (essentially, everyone) pretty much wants to use CUDA instead.
    - claytonjy 8y ago
      Exactly. We need something roughly on-par with CUDA, though it could be a bit below CUDA on Nvidia cards if it allows near-CUDA performance on non-Nvidia cards. Making all this easier to install/use/deploy could go a long way to winning user over, too; I'll gladly let a model run longer if I spent a lot less time getting things setup properly. The integration part is no small amount of work; it needs to be so smooth that I don't have to care what kind of card I have, and can run TF/Pytorch/etc. models in the same way regardless.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      OpenCL made the mistake of being C only in the beginning while CUDA embraced C, C++ and Fortran, plus any language that would bother to write a PTX backend. SPIR was too little, too late.
      - microcolonel 8y ago
        Maybe we could have a PTX frontend for SPIR-V. ;- )
  - nhaehnle 8y ago
    You mean like HIP?[0] [0] https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP
    - claytonjy 8y ago
      Maybe! To be a success, I think it needs to integrate with TF/Pytorch/etc. at least as seamlessly as CUDA does and be clearly competitive in benchmarks of common DL stuff (e.g. training on Imagenet). It's not clear to me it's even possible to take a TF model I have and use this to run it on an AMD card.
- orbifold 8y ago
  There is a free CUDA tool chain it is called clang, there just isn’t a runtime library or backend for any other architecture except NVIDIA at the moment although I think AMD is working on it.

microcolonel 8y ago

> I know I've seen talk of CUDA-killers around these parts before, would love to hear more details from people more familiar with this stuff. From the market perspective, it seems to me that a "CUDA killer" would not actually help. I think we need a free CUDA toolchain.

claytonjy 8y ago
I think that's roughly what I meant; I'd like to see AMD dump resources into making a fully open, compatible-with-all-modern-GPUs toolchain to directly compete with and replace the CUDA one. For all I know, they already are? Heck even a non-open, AMD-specific toolchain would probably be great for consumers, but an open, cross-compatible toolchain would be even better for us, and might be better for AMD as well by allowing non-AMD-employed experts to contribute.
- jcranmer 8y ago
  > I think that's roughly what I meant; I'd like to see AMD dump resources into making a fully open, compatible-with-all-modern-GPUs toolchain to directly compete with and replace the CUDA one. For all I know, they already are? There's OpenCL. Except OpenCL performance is worse than CUDA performance on NVidia, so anyone using NVidia's hardware (essentially, everyone) pretty much wants to use CUDA instead.
  - claytonjy 8y ago
    Exactly. We need something roughly on-par with CUDA, though it could be a bit below CUDA on Nvidia cards if it allows near-CUDA performance on non-Nvidia cards. Making all this easier to install/use/deploy could go a long way to winning user over, too; I'll gladly let a model run longer if I spent a lot less time getting things setup properly. The integration part is no small amount of work; it needs to be so smooth that I don't have to care what kind of card I have, and can run TF/Pytorch/etc. models in the same way regardless.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    OpenCL made the mistake of being C only in the beginning while CUDA embraced C, C++ and Fortran, plus any language that would bother to write a PTX backend. SPIR was too little, too late.
    - microcolonel 8y ago
      Maybe we could have a PTX frontend for SPIR-V. ;- )
- nhaehnle 8y ago
  You mean like HIP?[0] [0] https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP
  - claytonjy 8y ago
    Maybe! To be a success, I think it needs to integrate with TF/Pytorch/etc. at least as seamlessly as CUDA does and be clearly competitive in benchmarks of common DL stuff (e.g. training on Imagenet). It's not clear to me it's even possible to take a TF model I have and use this to run it on an AMD card.
orbifold 8y ago
There is a free CUDA tool chain it is called clang, there just isn’t a runtime library or backend for any other architecture except NVIDIA at the moment although I think AMD is working on it.