[almostgotcaught]

> On the other hand you can take any CUDA binary even one that dates back to the original Tesla and run it on any modern NVIDIA GPU

This particular difference stems the fact that NVIDIA has PTX and AMD does not have any such thing. Ie this kind of backwards compatibility will never be possible on AMD.

[dogma1138]

Backward compatibility is one thing but not having a forward compatibility is a killer.

Having to create a binary that targets a very specific set of hardware and having no guarantees and in fact having a guarantee that it won’t on future hardware is what make ROCM unusable for anything you intend to ship.

What’s worse is that they also drop support for their GPUs faster than Leo drops support for his girlfriends once they reach 25…

So not only that you have to recompile there is no guarantee that your code would work with future versions of ROCM or that future versions of ROCM could still produce binaries which are compatible with your older hardware.

Like how is this not the first design goal to address when you are building a CUDA competitor I don’t fucking know.

[almostgotcaught]

> Like how is this not the first design goal to address when you are building a CUDA competitor I don’t fucking know.

The words "tech debt" do not have any meaning at AMD. No one understands why this is a problem.

[pjmlp]

Backwards compatibility, and polyglot ecosystem, thanks to the amount of compiler toolchains that support PTX.