> AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat
I really wish they would, and properly, as in: fully open solution to match CUDA.
CUDA is a cancer on the industry.
I really wish they would, and properly, as in: fully open solution to match CUDA.
CUDA is a cancer on the industry.
I wish there was an open alternative, but NVIDIA did several things right that others, especially Khronos, do not: The UX is top-notch. It makes the common cases easy yet still fast, and from there you can optimize to your hearts content. Khronos, however, usually completely over-engineers things and makes the common case hard and cumbersome with massive entry barriers.
Read on
> it's proprietory
Yes indeed, proprietary
> Now I'm hooked
There you go.
> I wish there was an open alternative
So does the rest of the industry.
Specifically, it forces you to run your stuff on NVidia hardware and gives you exactly zero guarantee of future support.
Good luck trying to reproduce whatever research you are currently conducting in 10 years time.
Vendor lock-in + no forward compatibility guarantee = surefire recipe for getting milked to the bone by NVidia.
As I said, I avoided it for years because of the reasons you mentioned. Turns out I could not avoid it any longer because it's the only (meaningful) option that could do what I needed, has serious support, and great UX. And NVIDIA is hardly to blame because they simply made sure to build a good product. It can't stop AMD, Intel or Khronos from creating a competitive alternative, but so far they haven't.
And regarding support, so far NVIDIA has shown excellent continuous support for CUDA, whereas OpenCL and OpenGL are the ones that went down. And I've chosen CUDA over rocm precisely due to support reasons, because AMD has always treated it as some kind of side gig with uncertain future.