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That sentence explains perfectly well what it means by democratizing, and how is independent of the platform being tied to nvidia.
by rrss 7y ago
That sentence explains perfectly well what it means by democratizing, and how is independent of the platform being tied to nvidia.
- shmerl 7y agoCan you elaborate please? I was under the impression that CUDA is tied to Nvidia, unless you mean there are now working shims for other GPUs.
- Athas 7y agoCUDA is ultimately an API. AMD even has a converter for transforming CUDA cuda to something more portable[0]. While it would be better in a democratic sense for GPUs to be accessed using a fully free API, having an easily usable proprietary API is still more democratic than a difficult-to-use API (especially when, as here, the easy-to-use layer is actually fully free, and can perhaps be retargeted to fully free lower layers later). [0]: https://gpuopen.com/compute-product/hip-convert-cuda-to-portable-c-code/ https://gpuopen.com/compute-product/hip-convert-cuda-to-port...
- shmerl 7y agoIt still looks like porting idea, not like a shim that makes CUDA run on AMD. So I'd say CUDA is still locked to Nvidia. AMD are trying to ease up the transition to portable options - that's surely good, but it's not a full fledged lock-in unlocking. I'd say, Nvidia are being hypocritical here, with this whole "democratizing" claim. They are direct beneficiaries of the lock-in they are advancing with it.