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by BitwiseFool
469 days ago
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AMD's competitor to CUDA is ROCm. Historically, AMD has been hobbled by the quality of their drivers and because they sold less performant hardware. AMD has traditionally been the budget option for both CPUs and GPUs. Things have changed in the CPU space because of Ryzen, but sadly AMD has not been able to realize an equivalent competitive advantage in the GPU space. Intel has also entered the GPU market, but they are even farther behind than AMD. The same problems I am about to describe apply to them as well, to a higher degree. Rewriting CUDA programs to run using ROCm is expensive and time consuming. It is difficult to justify this expense when in all likelihood the ROCm version will be less efficient, less performant, and less stable than the original. In the grand scheme of things, AMD hardware is indeed cheaper but it's not that much cheaper. From a business standpoint, it's just not worth it. Knowing what I know about how management thinks, even if AMD managed to make an objectively superior product at a much better price, institutional momentum alone would keep people on CUDA for a long time. |
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Given the way nVidia is printing money, surely it absolutely cannot be a lack of motivation on AMD's part?
This is a very uninformed thought as I have no experience writing drivers, nor am I familiar with the various things supported by CUDA and ROCm. But how is AMD struggling with ROCm compute drivers, when their game drivers have been plenty stable as far as I have experienced? Surely the surface area of functionality needed for the graphics drivers is larger and therefore the compute drivers should be a relatively easier task? Or am I wrong and CUDA has a bunch of higher-level stuff baked into it and this is what AMD struggles to match?
Does anybody have and insight into specifically what part of compute performance AMD is struggling to match? Did AMD bet on the wrong architectural horse entirely? Are they unable to implement really basic compute primitives as efficiently as they want because nVidia holds key patents? Did nVidia lock down the entire pool of engineers who can implement this shit in a performant way?I mean, aside from GPU compute stuff, it sure looks to me like AMD is executing well. It doesn't seem like they're a bunch of dunces over there. Quite the opposite?