Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by HarHarVeryFunny 14 days ago
These efforts to support CUDA on non-Nvidia hardware seem to me misguided. If all you want is to be able to easily use non-NVidia hardware then high level tools like PyTorch already let you do that (and torch.compile uses Triton for target-specific optimization). OTOH if you want to be programming close to the metal to achieve top performance then you are probably not using CUDA in the first place, and using some CUDA translation layer on non-NVidia hardware would be an even worse idea.
2 comments

We actually support NVIDIA hardware, too.

In some benchmarks, SCALE beats nvcc, and we have compiler optimizations in the pipeline that will improve those numbers over time.

> If all you want is to be able to easily use non-NVidia hardware then high level tools like PyTorch already let you do that

Somewhat true, but, CUDA is significantly larger than PyTorch and there's more to Accelerated Computing than just those types of applications supported there.

> OTOH if you want to be programming close to the metal to achieve top performance then you are probably not using CUDA in the first place, and using some CUDA translation layer on non-NVidia hardware would be an even worse idea.

SOTA mlperf submissions use CUDA to achieve their high levels of performance.

It's not a "translation layer", it's a native, ahead-of-time compiler that makes full use of the native hardware features. Here's an example of a feature (Shuffles) being compiled to take advantage of native hardware instructions, resulting in speedups: https://scale-lang.com/posts/2026-01-19-optimizing-cuda-shuf...

I've played with your compiler. It's not very robust yet to production code that leans into all the libraries in the ecosystem. Solve that and you've got a killer app IMO.
We'd love to know which libraries your production code falls over on!

Feel free to ping us on discord (https://discord.com/invite/KNpgGbTc38) or you can find my e-mail in my profile if that's preferable

On the contrary, it's great. Cuda is the single sane compute API and system, so I'll use it even if it means being vendor-locked. If my CUDA programs start running elsewhere without much intervention, that'd be amazing