Hacker News Reader

Comment by simplyinfinity | Hacker News Reader

Is there any reason why there isn't any AMD GPU? Mantle?

My guess is that while AMD GPUs would likely be better raw performance/$, my understanding is that their version of CUDA is sorely lacking compared to nVidia's offering.

AMD GPU's have no CUDA support, if someone wants to do some computing on it, usually OpenCL is the way to go.

Sorry, when I say "version of CUDA" I meant "whatever the hell they have on AMD" :)

Last I heard CUDA will outperform OpenCL on nVidia vs AMD at the same price point generally as a result of CUDA being in house and closer to hardware. As a result if you just care about compute performance you would go nVidia. If AMD offered their own Mantle based compute offering it would probably shift the other way.

There isn't really anything fundamentally that would make CUDA faster that OpenCL. There aren't any huge semantic differences between them.

The computing model, no, not really anything fundamentally different. It comes to tooling and profiling under Linux. Also, NVidia has slightly beefer cores and fewer ones, where as AMD has more cores (as I heard). Thus, for me, CUDA is a more complete tool-chain with proper compiler (nvcc), profiler (nvprof, nvvp) and libraries (cublas, cudnn, cufft).

There is an OpenCL profiler for AMD, and library equivalents for those in clBLAS / clFFT

Is there a a comparable of cuBLAS for OpenCL?

clBLAS

Reply on news.ycombinator.com