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But claude will not be able to debug the whole stack? I have no experience in the domain. But as an outsider, it seems to me, that if the rate of progress is maintained, i don't see why agents wouldn't be able to do it in a couple of years

If your stack is open source, why not? I’ve had good results with pointing an LLM to a debug build of the GPU compiler when I saw it crash. It just seems you need to periodically remind them that gdb exists to prevent it from littering your drivers with printfs.

If that is your standard, I do have an idea what I’m talking about.

Ya? do tell us about your experience that leads you to believe mere translation is the bottleneck in the market...

I’m too old to participate in internet pissing contests.

this isn't a "pissing contest"? you made a speculative claim in a public forum and i'm challenging your authority to make such a claim. a "pissing contest" would be if i had said i've shipped hundreds of thousands of lines of shader code into prod and thus you clearly have no idea what you're talking about because you haven't (which is also true).

I could post the GitHub URLs of all the shader code I wrote that’s running on countless GPUs right now, but what would it change? I’m still just a random guy on the internet with an opinion that happens to be different from your opinion.

You can simply disagree with me, regardless of my experience (or lack thereof).

> You can simply disagree with me

that's exactly what i did and made an argument for why i think you're wrong. in response you provided exactly zero substantive remarks other than "i've written shaders" and then accused me of pissing.

also FYI it's clear from your profile that you've only worked on graphics (embree, blender, etc) and not compute. so i'll repeat: you're an outsider and you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

Outsider to what?

to the domain you presume to have authority to comment on

What domain do you think I was talking about?

You can't know if he is an outsider so your argument runs into nothing. If you kept explaining why AI won't remove the CUDA moat and doubled down on that, then swerner would have kept silent, meanwhile your comments would stay so your current strategy is one blunder after the other.

If it helps you at all:

“if you've never debugged a GPU synchronization error or kernel panic due to some GPU firmware bug or fought absolute shit profilers hunting for perf”

I have done all of those things. As part of my full time job, for years.

Now that we’ve put all of that aside, can we stop talking about me and go back to discussing moats? What do you think are top three things that are holding customers back from buying AMD GPUs instead of Nvidia GPUs?

I could be misremembering, but I think Jensen Huang himself once called CUDA or the CUDA ecosystem their moat, and it certainly seems to be accepted narrative in the tech press. They may be wrong there, and you sharing your first hand experience here would be helpful to many of us readers here.

amd consumer gpus don't support rocm. That is basically the entire reason for Nvidia dominance. All Nvidia cards support cuda even the crappy ones

That’s not strictly true, they officially support some of them.

My 7900XTX is supported, I run local models via rocm all the time recently, mostly to play with/experiment on, Vulcan works as well and for some models works better (or the trade offs are better for that use case).

Their mistake was simply not picking and going all in earlier, they let nvidia become the defacto standard without even contesting it on both the hardware side and software side and that’s a hard though not impossible comeback to make.

Long term I think they’ll catch up in capability if not market share because simply too much money on the table not to.

https://rocm.docs.amd.com/_/downloads/radeon-ryzen/en/docs-6...

some of them... lol.

Not useful. A crap NVIDIA card can get you started with CUDA. You have to reach students. Without students, there's no future

Most modern graphics is compute. Pixar, Dreamworks, Sony, etc do not use Vulkan to render their movies. It’s CPUs or CUDA.

“graphics people do not (and cannot) write CUDA kernels/shaders” is just not true at all. All it would take to verify that would be things like reading the introduction of the OptiX documentation, a small sample of SIGGRAPH GPU papers or the Blender/Cycles source code.

Wait, I have an idea: What is your qualification for talking about graphics programming? If you cannot provide credentials, I will have no other choice than to claim you don’t know what you’re talking about, based on the criteria by which you judged my comments so far.