[rektide]

The paradox I identify in your comments is the start & where you end. The start is that AMD's only choice is to re-embark & re-do the years & years of hard work, to catch up.

The end is decrying how impossible & hard it is to imagine anyone ever reproducing anything like CUDA in Vulkan:

> Sure these are all feasible, but who has the incentive to put in the time to do it?

To talk to the first though: what choice do we have? Why would AMD try to compete by doing it all again as a second party? It seems like, with Nvidia so dominant, AMD and literally everyone else should realize their incentive is to compete, as a group, against the current unquestioned champion. There needs to be some common ground that the humble opposition can work from. And, from what I see, Vulkan is that ground, and nothing else is remotely competitive or interesting.

I really appreciate your challenges, thank you for writing them out. It is real hard, there are a lot of difficulties starting afresh, with a much harder to use toolkit than enriched spiced up C++ (CUDA) as a starting point. At the same time, I continue to think there will be a sea-change, it will happen enormously fast, & it will take far less real work than the prevailing pessimist's view could ever have begin to encompassed. Some good strategic wins to set the stage & make some common use cases viable, good enough technics to set a mold, and I think the participatory nature will snowball, quickly, and we'll wonder why we hadn't begun years ago.

[BadInformatics]

Saying all the underdog competitors should team up is a nice idea, but as anyone who has seen how the standards sausage is made (or, indeed, has tried something similar) will tell you, it is often more difficult than everyone going their own way. It might be unintuitive, but coordination is hard even when you're not jockeying for position with your collaborators. This is why I mentioned the silver bullet part: a surface level analysis leads one to believe collaboration is the optimal path, but that starts to show cracks real quickly once one starts actually digging into the details.

To end things on a somewhat brighter note, there will be no sea change unless people put in the time and effort to get stuff like Vulkan compute working. As-is, most ML people (somewhat rightfully) expect accelerator support to be handed to them on a silver platter. That's fine, but I'd argue by doing so we lose the right to complain about big libraries and hardware vendors doing what's best for their own interests instead of for the ecosystem as a whole.