AMD ROCm vs Nvidia CUDA has been discussed to death, but I'm curious how AMD fares compared to some of the AI training accelerator vendors. I think it would be

AMD ROCm vs Nvidia CUDA has been discussed to death, but I'm curious how AMD fares compared to some of the AI training accelerator vendors. I think it would be much more damning if AMD were worse than some upstart, because the upstart wouldn't have the huge resource advantage and decade long head start of Nvidia. From my limited experience it seems like Google TPU and Cerebras are much nicer to use for AI training, from the standpoint of driver and software stability, documentation, and ecosystem support. Perhaps that's not a fair comparison. From what I know AMD and NVIDIA use GPGPU cores (now with AI-focused instructions) plus separate AI-specific accelerator blocks. Conceptually, GPGPU + NPU on one die. NPUs can be much simpler than general-purpose GPUs. So AMD's driver and software stack likely needs to be an order of magnitude more complex than the NPU vendors' in order to accommodate other non-AI use cases. But to an end user it doesn't really matter why it sucks, only that it does.