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The cuda api is essentially open... Hip is basically a copy. CUDA is such a misnomer. Amd doesn't have tensorRT, cuDNN, cutlass, etc. Forcing Nvidia to make th

The cuda api is essentially open... Hip is basically a copy. CUDA is such a misnomer. Amd doesn't have tensorRT, cuDNN, cutlass, etc. Forcing Nvidia to make these work on AMD is like forcing Microsoft to make windows work on apple hardware... Not going to happen.

wmf 3y ago
They did force Microsoft to make Office work on Mac though... (Office for Mac already existed but I think MS agreed to not cancel it.)
- pjmlp 3y ago
  It was more like Microsoft had the anti-trust stuff going on, and Apple was on the verge of going bankrupt.
alphabeta567 3y ago
CUDA is not open. See what happened with ZLUDA.
- coryrc 3y ago
  I'm not sure your implication. My understanding of the project is AMD didn't want to invest in it anymore.
  - sgift 3y ago
    IMHO there's reason to believe that was what was discussed here plays a role in that decision: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39592689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39592689 - namely NVidia trying to forbid such APIs.
    - paulmd 3y ago
      that’s literally old news, it’s from ‘20 or ‘21 and just got noticed iirc
    - anon291 3y ago
      That has nothing to do with the API. The restriction there is you cannot use nvcc to generate nvidia bytecode, take that bytecode, decompile it, and translate it to another platform. This means that, if you use cuDNN, you cannot intercept the already-compiled neural network kernels and then translate those to AMD. You can absolutely use the names of the functions and the programming model. Like I said, HIP is literally a copy. Llama.cpp changes to HIP with a #define, because llama.cpp has its own set of custom kernels. And this is what I've said before, CUDA is hardly a moat. The API is well-known and already implemented by AMD. It's all the surrounding work: the thousands of custom (really fast!) kernels. The ease-of-use of the SDKs. The 'pre-built libraries for every use case'. You can claim that CUDA should be made open-source for competition, but all those libraries and supporting SDKs represent real work done by real engineers, not just designing a platform, but making the platform work. I don't see why NVIDIA should be compelled to give those away anymore than Microsoft should be compelled to support device driver development on linux.

wmf 3y ago

They did force Microsoft to make Office work on Mac though... (Office for Mac already existed but I think MS agreed to not cancel it.)

pjmlp 3y ago
It was more like Microsoft had the anti-trust stuff going on, and Apple was on the verge of going bankrupt.

alphabeta567 3y ago

CUDA is not open. See what happened with ZLUDA.

coryrc 3y ago
I'm not sure your implication. My understanding of the project is AMD didn't want to invest in it anymore.
- sgift 3y ago
  IMHO there's reason to believe that was what was discussed here plays a role in that decision: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39592689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39592689 - namely NVidia trying to forbid such APIs.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    that’s literally old news, it’s from ‘20 or ‘21 and just got noticed iirc
  - anon291 3y ago
    That has nothing to do with the API. The restriction there is you cannot use nvcc to generate nvidia bytecode, take that bytecode, decompile it, and translate it to another platform. This means that, if you use cuDNN, you cannot intercept the already-compiled neural network kernels and then translate those to AMD. You can absolutely use the names of the functions and the programming model. Like I said, HIP is literally a copy. Llama.cpp changes to HIP with a #define, because llama.cpp has its own set of custom kernels. And this is what I've said before, CUDA is hardly a moat. The API is well-known and already implemented by AMD. It's all the surrounding work: the thousands of custom (really fast!) kernels. The ease-of-use of the SDKs. The 'pre-built libraries for every use case'. You can claim that CUDA should be made open-source for competition, but all those libraries and supporting SDKs represent real work done by real engineers, not just designing a platform, but making the platform work. I don't see why NVIDIA should be compelled to give those away anymore than Microsoft should be compelled to support device driver development on linux.