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There's a massive financial incentive (billions) to allow existing CUDA code to run on non-NVidia hardware. Not saying it's easy, but is implementation difficul
by lukev 1y ago
There's a massive financial incentive (billions) to allow existing CUDA code to run on non-NVidia hardware. Not saying it's easy, but is implementation difficulty really the blocker?
- ivell 1y agoModular is trying with Mojo + Max offering. It has taken quite a bit of effort to target NVidia and get parity. They are now focusing on other hardware.
- saagarjha 1y agoYes. See: AMD
- lukev 1y agoAMD has never implemented the CUDA API. And not for technical reasons.
- gpm 1y agoThey did, or at least they paid someone else to. https://www.techpowerup.com/319016/amd-develops-rocm-based-solution-to-run-unmodified-nvidias-cuda-binaries-on-amd-graphics https://www.techpowerup.com/319016/amd-develops-rocm-based-s...
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoBut I think then there was some lawsuit and the rocm guy/team had gone really ahead but amd dropped it because of either fear of lawsuit or lawsuit in general. Then, now they had to stop working on some part of the source code and had to rewrite a lot of things again, they are still not as close to as they were before amd lawyer shenanigan
- pjmlp 1y agoPartially, the CUDA C++ API, not CUDA APIs.
- lmm 1y agoI think it's ultimately a project management problem, like all hard problems. Yes it's a task that needs skilled programmers, but if an entity was willing to pay what programmers of that caliber cost and give them the conditions to let them succeed they could get it done.
- fooker 1y agoExisting high performance cuda code is almost all first party libraries, written by NVIDIA and uses weird internal flags and inline ptx. You can get 90% of the way there with a small team of compiler devs. The rest 10% would take hundreds of people working ten years. The cost of this is suspiciously close to the billions in financial incentive you mentioned, funny how efficient markets work.
- lcnielsen 1y ago> funny how efficient markets work. Can one really speak of efficient markets when there are multiple near molopolies at various steps in the production chain with massive integration, and infinity amounts of state spending in the process?
- bigyabai 1y agoSure they can. CUDA used to have a competitor, sponsored by Apple. It's name is OpenCL.
- dannyw 1y agoAnd after Apple dropped NVIDIA, they stopped caring about openCL performance on their GPUs.
- pjmlp 1y agoIt was never really a competitor, as the other two sponsors Intel and AMD, never deliverd anything great with it. Additionally the tooling is horrendous, plain old C, with the same compilation model as OpenGL. It took getting a hard beating from CUDA, to finally add a bytecode format (SPIR), and at least support C++ as well. Additionally the other mobile OS big name never cared about OpenCL, rather pushed their own thing, Renderscript.
- bigyabai 1y agoSo, to reiterate: Apple used to have a CUDA competitor that was so bad you guys get mad when I call it competition.
- int_19h 1y agoFrom the market perspective, it's down to whether the amount of money needed to get there and stay there (keeping in mind that this would have to be an ongoing effort given that CUDA is not a static target) is more or less than the amount of money needed to just buy NVIDIA GPUs.