Wouldn't it funny and sad if a bunch of enthusiasts pulled off what AMD couldn't :)
Supporting CUDA on AMD would only build a bigger moat for NVidia; there's no reason to cede the entire GPU programming environment to a competitor and indeed, this was a good gamble; as time goes on CUDA has become less and less essential or relevant.
Also, if you want a practical path towards drop-in replacing CUDA, you want ZLUDA; this project is interesting and kind of cool but the limitation to a C subset and no replacement libraries (BLAS, DNN, etc.) makes it not particularly useful in comparison.
The primary competitors are Google's TPU which are programmed using JAX and Cerebras which has an unrivaled hardware advantage.
If you insist on an hobbyist accessible underdog, you'd go with Tenstorrent, not AMD. AMD is only interesting if you've already been buying blackwells by the pallet and you're okay with building your own inference engine in-house for a handful of models.
When it comes to GPUs, AMD just has the vibe of a company that basically shrugged and gave up. It's a shame because some competition would be amazing in this environment.
In performance even the aging Zen2 would demolish the best Tegra you could get at the time.
You should note that the Switch, the only major handheld console for the last 10 years, is the only one using a Tegra.
And from everything I've heard Nvidia is a garbage hardware partner who you absolutely don't want to base your entire business on because they will screw you. The consoles all use custom AMD SOCs, if you're going to that deep level of partnering you'd want a partner who isn't out to stab you.
Specifically:
CuBLAS (limited/partial scope), cuBLASLt (limited/partial scope), cuDNN (limited/partial scope), cuFFT, cuSPARSE, NVML (very limited/partial scope)
Notably Missing: cuSPARSELt, cuSOLVER, cuRAND, cuTENSOR, NPP, nvJPEG, nvCOMP, NCCL, OptiX
I'd estimate it's around 20% of CUDA library coverage.
What sucks is that such projects at some point become too big, and make so much noise forcing big techs to buy them and everybody gets fuck all.
All it requires to beat proprietary walled garden, is somebody with knowledge and a will to make things happen. Linus with git and Linux is the perfect example of it.
Fun fact, BitKeeper said fuck you to the Linux community in 2005, Linus created git within 10 days.
BitKeeper make their code opensource in 2016 but by them, nobody knew who they were lol
So give it time :)
It all ended up good because of one mans genius but let's not rewrite history.
More like wouldn't* most of the time.
Well isn't that the case with a few other things? FSR4 on older cards is one example right now. AMD still won't officially support it. I think they will though. Too much negativity around it. Half the posts on r/AMD are people complaining about it.
They're working the problem, but slandering them over it isn't going to make it come out any faster.
It works fine.
> They're working the problem, but slandering them over it isn't going to make it come out any faster.
You have insider info everyone else doesn't? They haven't said any such thing yet last I checked. If that were true, they should have said that.
That is incorrect, and the FP8 issue is both the officially stated reason and the reason that the community has independently verified.
> You have insider info everyone else doesn't?
AMD has been rather open about it.
That is incorrect. It works fine. It could be better, but it works.
> AMD has been rather open about it.
Maybe you're right, but everyone else I've been in contact with (includding r/AMD and r/radeon) and everyone I've watched videos from on this subject say the complete opposite. Google also contradicts you "AMD has not officially released or confirmed plans to bring FSR 4 to older graphics cards. AMD has stated they have 'no updates to share' regarding support for older Radeon." It sounds like you may have imagined that.