[kimixa]

CUDA of 18 years ago is very different to CUDA of today.

Back then AMD/ATI were actually at the forefront on the GPGPU side - things like the early brook language and CTM lead pretty quickly into things like OpenCL. Lots of work went on using the xbox360 gpu in real games for GPGPU tasks.

But CUDA steadily improved iteratively, and AMD kinda just... stopped developing their equivalents? Considering a good part of that time they were near bankruptcy it might have not have been surprising though.

But saying Nvidia solely kicked off everything with CUDA is rather a-historical.

[dagw]

AMD kinda just... stopped developing their equivalents?

I wasn't so much that they stopped developing, rather they kept throwing everything out and coming out with new and non backwards compatible replacements. I knew people working in the GPU Compute field back in those days who were trying to support both AMD/ATI and NVidia. While their CUDA code just worked from release to release and every new release of CUDA just got better and better, AMD kept coming up with new breaking APIs and forcing rewrite and rewrite until they just gave up and dropped AMD.

[userabchn]

> CUDA of 18 years ago is very different to CUDA of today.

I've been writing CUDA since 2008 and it doesn't seem that different to me. They even still use some of the same graphics in the user guide.

[yvdriess]

Yep! I used BrookGPU for my GPGPU master thesis, before CUDA was a thing. AMD lacked followthrough on yhe software side as you said, but a big factor was also NV handing out GPUs to researchers.