AMD has no chance until there's broad support for Cuda. Cuda is so deeply entrenched at this point that trying to fragment the space and compete against it is a non-starter.
The consumer/gaming market is nothing compared to the GPGPU market today.
The consumer/gaming market is nothing compared to the GPGPU market today.
Unless AMD can provide a toolchain which takes cuda code and generates whatever it takes to run it with performance parity to Nvidia cards, it'll never take off.
ROCm is a decade too late to simply coexist with cuda and battle for market/mind share. Unless they can offer a massive perf/cost advantage, there is no incentive for anyone to invest in porting their code.
They have this. It's called HIP.
Khronos did a big mistake to keep pushing C as the only compute language for so long, and it remains to be seen how much adoption SPIR-V is able to actually take from PTX.
So unless HIP actually matches PTX, it is a non-starter.
I guess I'm staying with NVIDIA with developer laptops for a long time, and maybe using AMD for ultrabook.
So if HIP will only work with LLVM, that is also a non-starter.
"HIP is designed to ease the porting of existing CUDA code into the HIP environment."
Not even close an drop-in swappable alternative.
https://github.com/nixos-rocm/nixos-rocm
The last time we purchased GPUs, we bought two Radeon VIIs besides RTX 5000s. For training transformers in Tensorflow and PyTorch, they were a steal, because the training is only marginally slower than the RTXes at a fraction of the price.
For LSTMs, we have found performance regressions compared to NVIDIA, but it's largely because it was hard to hit the optimized MIOpen code paths.
Even at the peak of Bitcoin mining, Gaming GPU is still by far the largest source of revenue for GPU market.
We're in the age of serverside GPGPU on the cloud.
"Looking at the GPU segment, the revenues have almost doubled over the past two years. This can primarily be attributed to Nvidia’s foray into data centers, expanding in both High Performance Computing and the cloud. The data center revenues were up a solid 133% in 2017, led by continued growth in its CUDA platform, and increased acceptance of its Volta architecture. "
https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2018/06/27/wh...
Doubling GPGPU market from 2017 -2018 doesn't mean "he consumer/gaming market is nothing compared to the GPGPU market today" And even they managed to grow in 2019 again, it is still no where near close.
Nvidia's revenue has been consistent over the years that their Gaming revenue is still the most important source of income and over 50% [1] of their revenue source.
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15111/nvidia-announces-q3-fy-...