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Comment by missosoup | Hacker News Reader

Tensorflow is only a small subset of the massive engineering investment that has been done into cuda by various orgs and open source projects. We have GPU databases, GPU accelerated analytics packages, GPU accelerated DSP, etc. All with hand-written cuda kernels.

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.

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> 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.

They have this. It's called HIP.

https://rocm-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Programm...

"HIP is designed to ease the porting of existing CUDA code into the HIP environment."

Not even close an drop-in swappable alternative.

Of course not, and some things would never be ported. But if they had a massive cost advantage for a year or two in data centers, a lot of things would get ported, quickly.

Does HIP support all the programming languages that are able to target CUDA, like Julia, Numba, .NET, Java, Haskell, Fortran, C++?

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.

In theory HIP is a modified LLVM, but as far as I know Julia uses a modified LLVM as well, so unless they are upstreamed, we can't use them together :(

I guess I'm staying with NVIDIA with developer laptops for a long time, and maybe using AMD for ultrabook.

Except that some of the languages that target CUDA do so via PTX, not by migrating their compiler backends into LLVM.

So if HIP will only work with LLVM, that is also a non-starter.

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