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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

• fariszr 3y ago
  According to the article, AMD seems to have pulled the plug on this as they think it will hinder ROCMv6 adoption, which still btw only supports two consumer cards out of their entire line up[1] 1. https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ROCm-6.0-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ROCm-6.0-Released
  • bhouston 3y ago
    AMD should have the funds to push both of these initiatives at once. If the ROCM team has political reasons to kill the competition, it is because they are scared it will succeed. I've seen this happen in big companies. But management at AMD should be above petty team politics and fund both because at the company level they do not care which solution wins in the end.
    • imtringued 3y ago
      Why would they be worried about people using their product? Some CUDA wrapper on top of ROCM isn't going to get them fired. It doesn't get rid of ROCM's function as a GPGPU driver.
    • zer00eyz 3y ago
      If your AMD you don't want to be compatible till you have a compelling feature of your own. Good enough CUDA + New feature x gives them leverage in the inevitable court battle(S) and patten sharing agreement that everyone wants to see. AMD' already stuck its toe in the water: new CPU's with their AI cores built in. If you can get a AM5 socket to run with 196 gigs, that's a large (all be it slow) model you can run.
  • kkielhofner 3y ago
    With the most recent card being their one year old flagship ($1k) consumer GPU... Meanwhile CUDA supports anything with Nvidia stamped on it before it's even released. They'll even go as far as doing things like adding support for new GPUs/compute families to older CUDA versions (see Hopper/Ada and CUDA 11.8). You can go out and buy any Nvidia GPU the day of release, take it home, plug it in, and everything just works. This is what people expect. AMD seems to have no clue that this level of usability is what it will take to actually compete with Nvidia and it's a real shame - their hardware is great.
    • KingOfCoders 3y ago
      AMD thinks the reason Nvidia is ahead of them is bad marketing on their part, and good marketing (All is AI) by Nvidia. They don't see the difference in software stacks. For years I want to get off the Nvidia train for AI, but I'm forced to buy another Nvidia card b/c AMD stuff just doesn't work, and all examples work with Nvidia cards as they should.
      • fortran77 3y ago
        At the risk of sounding like Jeff Ballmer, the reason I only use NVIDIA for GPGPU work (our company does a lot of it!) is the developer support. They have compilers, tools, documentation, and tech support for developers who want to do any type of GPGPU computing on their hardware that just isn't matched on any other platform.
    • roenxi 3y ago
      You've got to remember that AMD are behind at all aspects of this, including documenting their work in an easily digestible way. "Support" means that the card is actively tested and presumably has some sort of SLA-style push to fix bugs for. As their stack matures, a bunch of cards that don't have official support will work well [0]. I have an unsupported card. There are horrible bugs. But the evidence I've seen is that the card will work better with time even though it is never going to be officially supported. I don't think any of my hardware is officially supported by the manufacturer, but the kernel drivers still work fine. > Meanwhile CUDA supports anything with Nvidia stamped on it before it's even released... A lot of older Nvidia cards don't support CUDA v9 [1]. It isn't like everything supports everything, particularly in the early part of building out capability. The impression I'm getting is that in practice the gap in strategy here is not as large as the current state makes it seem. [0] If anyone has bought an AMD card for their machine to multiply matrices they've been gambling on whether the capability is there. This comment is reasonable speculation, but I want to caveat the optimism by asserting that I'm not going to put money into AMD compute until there is some some actual evidence on the table that GPU lockups are rare. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA#GPUs_supported https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA#GPUs_supported
  • MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
    AMD truly deserves its misfortune in the GPU market.
  • incrudible 3y ago
    That is really out of touch. ROCm is garbage as far as I am concerned. A drop in replacement, especially one that seems to perform quite well, is really interesting however.
• iforgotpassword 3y ago
  Someone built the same a while ago for Intel gpus, I think even still the old pre-Xe ones. With arc/xe on the horizon, people had the same question: why isn't Intel sponsoring this or even building their own. It was speculated that this might get them into legal hot water with Nvidia, Google VS. Oracle was brought up, etc...
  • my123 3y ago
    They financed the prior iteration of Zluda: https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA?tab=readme-ov-file#faq https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA?tab=readme-ov-file#faq but then stopped
    • formerly_proven 3y ago
      > [2021] After some deliberation, Intel decided that there is no business case for running CUDA applications on Intel GPUs. oof
      • AtheistOfFail 3y ago
        > After two years of development and some deliberation, AMD decided that there is no business case for running CUDA applications on AMD GPUs. Oof x2
      • iforgotpassword 3y ago
        That's an oof indeed. Are AMD and Intel really that delusional, ie "once we get our own version of Cuda right everybody will just rewrite all their software to make use of it", or do they know something we mere mortals don't?
        • garaetjjte 3y ago
          Maybe their lawyers are afraid of another round of "are APIs copyrightable"?
        • Qwertious 3y ago
• geodel 3y ago
  Well simplest reason would be money. There are few companies rolling in kind of money like Nvidia and AMD is not one of them. Cloud vendors would care a bit for them it is just business if Nvidia cost a lot more they in turn charge their customers a lot more while keeping their margins. I know some people still harbors notion that competition will lower the price, and it may, just not in sense customers imagine.
• izacus 3y ago
  Why do you think running after nVidia for this submarket is a good idea for them? The AMD GPU team isn't especially big and the development investment is massive. Moreover, they'll have the opportunity cost for projects they're now dominating in (all game consoles for example). Do you expect them to be able to capitalize on the AI fad so much (and quickly enough!) that it's worth dropping the ball on projects they're now doing well in? Or perhaps continue investing into the part of the market where they're doing much better than nVidia?
  • jandrese 3y ago
    If the alternative it to ignore one of the biggest developing markets then yeah, maybe they should start trying to catch up. Unless you think GPU compute is a fad that's going to fizzle out?
    • izacus 3y ago
      One of the most important decisions a company can do, is to decide which markets they'll focus in and which they won't. This is even true for megacorps (see: Google and their parade of messups). There's just not enough time to be in all markets all at once. So, again, it's not at all clear that AMD being in the compute GPU game is the automatic win for them in the future. There's plenty of companies that killed themselves trying to run after big profitable new fad markets (see: Nokia and Windows Phone, and many other cases). So let's examine that - does AMD actually have a good shot of taking a significant chunk of market that will offset them not investing in some other market?
      • jandrese 3y ago
        AMD is literally the only company on the market poised to exploit the explosion in demand for GPU compute after nVidia (sorry Intel). To not even really try to break in is insanity. nVidia didn't grow their market cap by 5x over the course of a year because people really got into 3D gaming. Even as an also ran on the coat tails of nVidia with a compatibility glue library the market is clearly demanding more product.
• jandrese 3y ago
  AMD's management seems to be only vaguely aware that GPU compute is a thing. All of their efforts in the field feel like afterthoughts. Or maybe they are all just hardware guys who think of software as just a cost center.
  • giovannibonetti 3y ago
    Maybe they just can't lure in good software developers with the right skill set, either due to not paying them enough or not having a good work environment in comparison to the other places that could hire them.
    • captainbland 3y ago
      I did a cursory glance at Nvidia's and AMD's respective careers pages for software developers at one point - what struck me was they both have similarly high requirements for engineers in fields like GPU compute and AI but Nvidia hires much more widely, geographically speaking, than AMD. As a total outsider it seems to me that maybe one of AMD's big problems is they just aren't set up to take advantage of the global talent pool in the same way Nvidia is.
  • newsclues 3y ago
    They are aware, but it wasn’t until recently that they had the resources to invest in the space. They had to build Zen and start making buckets of money first
    • beebeepka 3y ago
      Exactly. AMD stock was like 2 dollars just eight years ago. They didn't have any money and, amusingly, it was their GPU business that kept them going on life support. Their leadership seems quite a bit more competent than random forum commenters give them credit for. I guess what they need, marketing wise, is a few successful halo GPU launches. They haven't done that in a while. Lisa acknowledged this years ago. It's marketing 101. I guess these things are easier said than done.
  • 3y ago
• hjabird 3y ago
  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.
  • slashdev 3y ago
    With Nvidia controlling 90%+ of the market, this is not a viable option. They'd better lean hard into CUDA support if they want to be relevant.
    • cduzz 3y ago
      A bit of story telling here: IBM and Microsoft made OS/2. The first version worked on 286s and was stable but useless. The second version worked only on 386s and was quite good, and even had wonderful windows 3.x compatibility. "Better windows than windows!" At that point Microsoft wanted out of the deal and they wanted to make their newer version of windows, NT, which they did. IBM now had a competitor to "new" windows and a very compatible version of "old" windows. Microsoft killed OS2 by a variety of ways (including just letting IBM be IBM) but also by making it very difficult for last month's version of OS/2 to run next month's bunch of Windows programs. To bring this back to the point -- IBM vs Microsoft is akin to AMD vs Nvidia -- where nvidia has the standard that AMD is implementing, and so no matter what if you play in the backward compatibility realm you're always going to be playing catch-up and likely always in a position where winning is exceedingly hard. As WOPR once said "interesting game; the only way to win is to not play."
      • panick21_ 3y ago
        IBM also made a whole bunch of strategic mistakes beyond that. Most importantly their hardware division didn't give a flying f about OS/2. Even when they had a 'better Windows' they did not actually use it themselves and didn't push it to other vendors. Windows NT wasn't really relevant in that competition for much longer, only XP was finally for end consumers. > where nvidia has the standard that AMD is implementing, and so no matter what if you play in the backward compatibility realm you're always going to be playing catch-up That's not true. If AMD starts adding their own features and have their own advantages, that can flip. It only takes a single generation of hardware, or a single feature for things to flip. Look at Linux and Unix. Its started out with Linux implementing Unix, and now the Unix are trying to add compatibility with with Linux. Is SGI still the driving force behind OpenGL/Vulcan? Did you think it was a bad idea for other companies to use OpenGL? AMD was successful against Intel with x86_64. There are lots of example of the company making something popular, not being able to take full advantage of it in the long run.
• imtringued 3y ago
  This feels like a massive punch in the gut. An opensource project, not ruined by AMD's internal mismanaged gets shit done within two years and AMD goes "meh"?!? There are billions of dollars on the line! It's like AMD actively hates it's customers. Now the only thing they need to do is make sure ROCm itself is stable.
  • varelse 3y ago
    [dead]
• largbae 3y ago
  It certainly seems ironic that the company that beat Intel at its own compatibility game with x86-64 would abandon compatibility with today's market leader.
  • rob74 3y ago
    The situation is a bit different: AMD got its foot in the door with the x86 market because IBM back in the early 1980s forced Intel to license the technology so AMD could act as a second source of CPUs. In the GPU market, ATI (later bought by AMD) and nVidia emerged as the market leaders after the other 3D graphics pioneers (3Dfx) gave up - but their GPUs were never compatible in the first place, and if AMD tried to make them compatible, nVidia could sue the hell out of them...
• alberth 3y ago
  DirectX vs OpenGL. This brings back memories of late 90s / early 00s of Microsoft pushing hard their proprietary graphic libraries (DirectX) vs open standards (OpenGL). Fast forward 25-years and even today, Microsoft still dominates in PC gaming as a result. There's a bad track record of open standard for GPUs. Even Apple themselves gave up on OpenGL and has their own proprietary offering (Metal).
  • incrudible 3y ago
    To add to that, Linux gaming today is dominated by a wrapper implementing DirectX.
    • Zardoz84 3y ago
      Vulkan running an emulation of DirectX and being faster
  • Keyframe 3y ago
    Let's not forget the Fahrenheit maneuver by Microsoft that left SGI stranding and not forward OpenGL.
    • pjmlp 3y ago
      Yeah, it never mattered to game consoles either way.
  • okanat 3y ago
    OpenGL was invented at SGI and it was closed source until it was given away. It is very popular in its niche i.e. CAD design because the original closed source SGI APIs were very successful. DirectX was targetted at gaming and was a much more limited simpler API which made programming games in it easier. It couldn't do everything that OpenGL can which is why CAD programs didn't use it even on Windows. DirectX worked because it chose its market correctly and delivered what the customers want. Window's exceptional backwards compatibility helped greatly as well. Many simple game engines still use DX9 API to this day. It is not so much about having an open standard, but being able to provide extra functionality and performance. Unlike the CPU-dominated areas where executing the common baseline ISA is very competitive, in accelerated computing using every single bit of performance and having new and niche features matter. So providing exceptional hardware with good software is critical for the competition. Closed APIs have much more quick delivery time and they don't have to deal with multiple vendors. Nobody except Nvidia delivers good enough low level software and their hardware is exceptionally good. AMD's combination is neither. The hardware is slower and it is hard to program so they continuously lose the race.
• owlbite 3y ago
  Code portability isn't performance portability, a fact that was driven home back in the bad old OpenCL era. Code is going to have to rewritten to be efficient on AMD architectures. At which point why tie yourself to the competitor's language. Probably much more effective to just write a well optimized library that serves the MLIR/whatever is popular API in order to run big ML jobs.
• modeless 3y ago
  I've been critical of AMD's failure to compete in AI for over a decade now, but I can see why AMD wouldn't want to go the route of cloning CUDA and I'm surprised they even tried. They would be on a never ending treadmill of feature catchup and bug-for-bug compatibility, and wouldn't have the freedom to change the API to suit their hardware. The right path for AMD has always been to make their own API that runs on all of their own hardware, just as CUDA does for Nvidia, and push support for that API into all the open source ML projects (but mostly PyTorch), while attacking Nvidia's price discrimination by providing features they use to segment the market (e.g. virtualization, high VRAM) at lower price points. Perhaps one day AMD will realize this. It seems like they're slowly moving in the right direction now, and all it took for them to wake up was Nvidia's market cap skyrocketing to 4th in the world on the back of their AI efforts...
  • matchagaucho 3y ago
    But AMD was formed to shadow Intel's x86?
    • modeless 3y ago
      ISAs are smaller and less stateful and better documented and less buggy and most importantly they evolve much more slowly than software APIs. Much more feasible to clone. Especially back when AMD started.
      • paulmd 3y ago
        PTX is just an ISA too. Programming languages annd ISA representations are effectively fungible, that’s the lesson of Microsoft CLR/Intermediate Language and Java too. A “machine” is a hardware and a language.
        • modeless 3y ago
          PTX is not a hardware ISA though, it's still software and can change more rapidly.
• chem83 3y ago
  To be fair to AMD, they've been trying to solve ML workload portability at more fundamental levels with the acquisition of Nod.ai and de-facto incorporation of Google's IREE compiler project + MLIR.
• whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  > Why would this not be AMD’s top priority among priorities? Same reason it wasn't when it was obvious Nvidia was taking over this space maybe 8 years ago now when they let OpenCL die then proceeded to do nothing till it's too late. Speaking to anyone working in general purpose GPU coding back then they all just said the same thing, OpenCL was a nightmare to work with and CUDA was easy and mature compared to it. Writing was on the wall where things were heading the second you saw a photon based renderer running on GPU vs CPU all the way back then, AMD has only themselves to blame because Nvidia basically showed them the potential with CUDA.
  • btown 3y ago
    One would hope that they've learned since then - but it could very well be that they haven't!
• phero_cnstrcts 3y ago
  Because the two CEOs are family? Like literally.
  • CamperBob2 3y ago
    That didn't stop World War I...