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Comment by deaddodo | Hacker News Reader

They have a competitor, it's just less popular than CUDA:

https://www.amd.com/en/products/software/rocm.html

Before that, they were pushing heavily for standard OpenCL, but that failed because the hardware wasn't as competitive and the ecosystem/tooling barren.

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ROCm is not just unpopular, it is so boilerplate-ridden, it is nearly unusable. It takes about 5x more code to do things there compared to CUDA.

Yes, “just use libraries”. But as Andrej Karpathy used to say, “I don't need some library holding my hand and providing abstractions. Real men command GPUs with their own raw kernel code”.

(And, incidentally, there are much less libraries for ROCm, for this reason. Somebody should write them, and why do that with something that takes 5x more code to do the same thing?)

Why? I understand the framework setup may not be as polished as CUDA, but I was under the impression HIP is the primary kernel language supported by ROCm and at first glance it's basically a 1:1 CUDA clone.

Hm, apparently, in the last years, HIP became much integrated into ROCm as the principal way of doing things. I was referring to the situation as of 2-3 years ago, when plain ROCm was a chore to write.

OK, I retract my statement.

Where do you get the 5x code idea from? Hip and cuda are almost regex-equivalent, openmp is the same language on each.

OP was talking about plain ROCm, not HIP. HIP is an “almost API-compatible CUDA”.

That was a year ago. AMD is changing their software ecosystem at a rapid pace with AI software as a #1 priority.

To get a picture of the current state which has changed a lot this MS Ignite presentation may be of interest. https://youtu.be/7jqZBTduhAQ?t=61

Thanks. Indeed, things became much better than I remembered them.

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