[Aromasin]

I work for one of their big competitors, and all my conversations with customers tend to follow the same string; "NVIDIA is milking us dry, we want an alternative, but all the alternatives require significant redesign in languages and tools people are unfamiliar with and we can't afford that overhead". It tends to be very cut and dry.

Until university labs get people working in open frameworks and not CUDA, every student joining the industry will default to NVIDIA GPUs until they're forced otherwise. The few people I've managed to convert have been forced by supply constraints, not any desire to innovate or save themselves money. As long as NVIDIA can keep the market satiated with a critical mass of compute, they'll sit on their throne for a long ol' while.

[einpoklum]

> but all the alternatives require significant redesign in languages and tools people are unfamiliar with and we can't afford that overhead

Where I work, we've made it a principle to stay OpenCL-compatible even while going with NVIDIA due to their better-performing GPUs. I even go as far as writing kernels that can be compiled as either CUDA C++ or OpenCL-C, with a bit of duct-tape adapter headers:

https://github.com/eyalroz/gpu-kernel-runner/blob/main/kerne...

https://github.com/eyalroz/gpu-kernel-runner/blob/main/kerne...

of course, if you're working with higher-level frameworks then it's more difficult, and you depend on whether or not they provided different backends. So, no thrust for AMD GPUs, for example, but pytorch and TensorFlow do let you use them.

[joe_the_user]

Yeah - which is to say that that competitors and other competitors aren't actually going to create a CUDA replacement any time soon. And, correct me if I'm wrong, it would be quite possible to create such a thing - AMD had a system which had a tool to do conversion a while back but I recall them not supporting it seriously.

The problem is that when a company has done serious capital investment to advance a market, anyone who invested equivalently wouldn't reap the same rewards - competition would just eat away each company's profits so no one will challenge that.

[latchkey]

> AMD had a system which had a tool to do conversion a while back but I recall them not supporting it seriously.

They are supporting it seriously now. It is being actively developed and improved.

https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIPIFY

[zozbot234]

It's being done. The Mesa project has drivers for OpenCL (RustiCL) and Vulkan under development on any hardware that can provide the underlying facilities for that kind of support. This provides the basic foundation (together with other projects like SYCL) for a high-level alternative that can be properly supported across vendors (minus the expected hardware-specific quirks).

[ralfd]

The second mover advantage though is that you can just copy the first company and avoid blind alleys.