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dragandjtoday at 11:55 AM1 replyview on HN

FWIW Back in 2015 OpenCL 2.0 performance was quite good on then-current AMD GPUs (IMO), but the problem was that 1. You had to implement everything yourself, from scratch, since AMD's GPU BLAS was barely compilable, and 2. They abandoned OpenCL that year, and switched to HIP (or whatever their copy of CUDA was called) which didn't even compile (in practice) for quite some time, and 3. Even with HIP, you were on your own when it comes for any BLAS and other standard library implementations because AMD provided nothing of the sorts for a long time.

All in all, it's not that the drivers performance was poor per se, but AMD did nothing about providing a software ecosystem, which amount to its hardware wasn't realistically usable unless your pockets were so big that you can do AMD's job and fund the re-development of the whole ecosystem from scratch.

In other words, it made MUCH better ROI to just use Nvidia, pay a little bit more for the hardware, and save millions on software :)


Replies

sorenjantoday at 12:13 PM

Cuda also compiles to PTX, which makes it much easier to distribute and therefore also easier for users to actually use. Doesn't matter that much when you're writing code for specific hardware like MI300X, but it's part of the developer story.