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AMD's equivalent is HIP [1], for sufficiently flexible definitions of "equivalent". I can't speak to how complete/correct/performant it is (I'm just a guy runni

AMD's equivalent is HIP [1], for sufficiently flexible definitions of "equivalent". I can't speak to how complete/correct/performant it is (I'm just a guy running tutorial/toy-level ML stuff on an RDNA1 card), but part of AMD's problem is that it might not practically matter how well they do this because the broader ecosystem support specifically for the CUDA stack is so entrenched. [1] https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP

chaostheory 3y ago
I’m not super familiar with HIP, but historically AMD’s past responses to CUDA only supported a small set of GPUs, was poorly documented, and was poorly maintained. It seemed like AMD’s attention span on these projects felt similar to Google’s attention span for new projects ie it’s a good bet that it will die in favor of a new SDK which will ultimately suffer the same fate
- 0xcde4c3db 3y ago
  I don't disagree with your general impression, but the flip-side of it (combined with the fact that the stack is open-source) is that they're not in a position to execute some exquisitely bullshit market segmentation strategy, and there are at least some wins to be had if you put in a bit of legwork (like making Stable Diffusion run on the GPU I've owned for years instead of spending an indefensible amount of money on the rough Nvidia equivalent).
  - chaostheory 3y ago
    HIP is a good start since it has CUDA compatibility and open source from the beginning. The issue is that developers still might not invest in it until AMD shows that they’re willing to commit to it unlike their past projects. A lot of them have been burned on this front by AMD, but the open source designation should help a lot.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      It's not even AMD's unwillingness to commit. They were among the first to implement Vulkan and OpenCL, and have a decent legacy of GPU hardware support. Their open-source kernel drivers on Linux are cream-of-the-crop, and their raster APIs are so good that they truly rival Nvidia. The biggest issue is frankly that other stakeholders are doing their own thing, and pretending it's okay. Long-term, I think this will be Nvidia's real coup-de-grace; letting local devices do inferencing, while selling their GPUs to larger deployments and training applications. Stuff like CoreML and ROCm are nice, but don't directly threaten CUDA. If their competitors want to be rid of CUDA, then they have to gang up on them and offer a better alternative. Until then, Nvidia will have a market. It's true what they say, nice guys really do finish last in this economy.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    > they're not in a position to execute some exquisitely bullshit market segmentation strategy nevertheless that is exactly what they spent the last decade trying, with ROCm not even officially supporting the consumer-card variants of the handful of radeon pro cards that actually got support. AMD's GPGPU software support was almost entirely segmented to the CDNA cards for the HPC market until literally a month ago, and still completely ignores any sort of binary compatibility story (they really want you to distribute as source and compile in-situ, which really makes it a non-starter for end-user software or commercial distribution).

chaostheory 3y ago

I’m not super familiar with HIP, but historically AMD’s past responses to CUDA only supported a small set of GPUs, was poorly documented, and was poorly maintained. It seemed like AMD’s attention span on these projects felt similar to Google’s attention span for new projects ie it’s a good bet that it will die in favor of a new SDK which will ultimately suffer the same fate

0xcde4c3db 3y ago
I don't disagree with your general impression, but the flip-side of it (combined with the fact that the stack is open-source) is that they're not in a position to execute some exquisitely bullshit market segmentation strategy, and there are at least some wins to be had if you put in a bit of legwork (like making Stable Diffusion run on the GPU I've owned for years instead of spending an indefensible amount of money on the rough Nvidia equivalent).
- chaostheory 3y ago
  HIP is a good start since it has CUDA compatibility and open source from the beginning. The issue is that developers still might not invest in it until AMD shows that they’re willing to commit to it unlike their past projects. A lot of them have been burned on this front by AMD, but the open source designation should help a lot.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    It's not even AMD's unwillingness to commit. They were among the first to implement Vulkan and OpenCL, and have a decent legacy of GPU hardware support. Their open-source kernel drivers on Linux are cream-of-the-crop, and their raster APIs are so good that they truly rival Nvidia. The biggest issue is frankly that other stakeholders are doing their own thing, and pretending it's okay. Long-term, I think this will be Nvidia's real coup-de-grace; letting local devices do inferencing, while selling their GPUs to larger deployments and training applications. Stuff like CoreML and ROCm are nice, but don't directly threaten CUDA. If their competitors want to be rid of CUDA, then they have to gang up on them and offer a better alternative. Until then, Nvidia will have a market. It's true what they say, nice guys really do finish last in this economy.
- paulmd 3y ago
  > they're not in a position to execute some exquisitely bullshit market segmentation strategy nevertheless that is exactly what they spent the last decade trying, with ROCm not even officially supporting the consumer-card variants of the handful of radeon pro cards that actually got support. AMD's GPGPU software support was almost entirely segmented to the CDNA cards for the HPC market until literally a month ago, and still completely ignores any sort of binary compatibility story (they really want you to distribute as source and compile in-situ, which really makes it a non-starter for end-user software or commercial distribution).