• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

ZLUDA Allows CUDA Binaries to Run on AMD GPUs

AMD and Intel don’t want more development on CUDA libraries.
There’s an absolute shitload of CUDA libraries out there to do virtually anything and over the decades they have been meticulously optimized and curated.
It’s to the point where CUDA can do some things 2-3x faster than their non CUDA counterparts, but it locks you to Nvidia. But it lets you get more done with less.

Projects like Zulda that work with native CUDA only spur more CUDA development, because why translate the library to anything else? But even with Zulda it still runs better on Nvidia than it does on AMD or Intel. It becomes an "I’ll use this card for now and when I can I’ll replace it with an Nvidia card later for max performance" situation.

That’s obviously something AMD and Intel don’t want.
So they develop tools that translate CUDA into something more optimized for their platforms, and that’s where the Intel and AMD tools differ, the resulting code does to some degree work on other platforms but performance varies.

So where CUDA is essentially a hard lock to Nvidia hardware, the Intel and AMD solutions are a soft lock. You could move to another platform, but you would need to evaluate and re-optimize your code libraries, that’s expensive and complex so why do it unless you really need to, but you could….
 
Last edited:
This reinforces that anything you can do in CUDA, you can do in one of the Open equivalents.
Somebody just needs to build those libraries, and I find it very funny that a LOT of effort is going into making those CUDA libraries work on non-NVIDIA GPUs, instead of just replacing them entirely.

All that does is reinforce the Nvidia moat, because the takeaway is "you can't replace those CUDA libraries." You can only work to make them work for you.

And Nvidia's big selling point for CUDA and their hardware is, "Why do that work when we've done it for you?"
 
Lakados said:
This reinforces that anything you can do in CUDA, you can do in one of the Open equivalents.
Click to expand...

There's two issues with that:

1) AMD has been hot garbage about supporting any sort of open compute shit. They don't have good tools, and half the time they don't even support things until way after nVidia does. OpenCL is a great example, OpenCL 2 was really problematic and OpenCL 3 fixed a lot of that. nVidia supported it almost right away, AMD only got to supporting it recently. Some software moved off OpenCL because of issues, particularly on AMD cards. Vegas Pro used to use OpenCL for acceleration, they switched to CUDA.

2) There's lots of CUDA code out there now, because it became the defacto way of doing things, that people don't wanna port.


I do with AMD was less shit about the GPGPU situation, but they have been for a long time, and nVidia is now REALLY entrenched.
 
Sycraft said:
There's two issues with that:

1) AMD has been hot garbage about supporting any sort of open compute shit. They don't have good tools, and half the time they don't even support things until way after nVidia does. OpenCL is a great example, OpenCL 2 was really problematic and OpenCL 3 fixed a lot of that. nVidia supported it almost right away, AMD only got to supporting it recently. Some software moved off OpenCL because of issues, particularly on AMD cards. Vegas Pro used to use OpenCL for acceleration, they switched to CUDA.

2) There's lots of CUDA code out there now, because it became the defacto way of doing things, that people don't wanna port.


I do with AMD was less shit about the GPGPU situation, but they have been for a long time, and nVidia is now REALLY entrenched.
Click to expand...
ROCm/HIP which ZLUDA is using is open source and OpenCL comes with ROCm. The more AMD improves ROCm, the more they improve OpenCL. AMD is still terrible at supporting any kind of compute, but this does give hope that Nvidia's CUDA advantage could come to an end.
 
DukenukemX said:
ROCm/HIP which ZLUDA is using is open source and OpenCL comes with ROCm. The more AMD improves ROCm, the more they improve OpenCL. AMD is still terrible at supporting any kind of compute, but this does give hope that Nvidia's CUDA advantage could come to an end.
Click to expand...
It's a hard road because nVidia has already built such an installed base and AMD has built a bad reputation. I'm hopeful too, but I'm not optimistic.
 
DukenukemX said:
ROCm/HIP which ZLUDA is using is open source and OpenCL comes with ROCm. The more AMD improves ROCm, the more they improve OpenCL. AMD is still terrible at supporting any kind of compute, but this does give hope that Nvidia's CUDA advantage could come to an end.
Click to expand...
I mean yes….
But the other side of it is, how bad is AMD’s library set if you can see significant performance increases translating Nvidia’s libraries to work on AMD rather than just using AMDs.

Sure in some cases it’s because there is no AMD equivalent library. But still it’s a sad state of things.

I really think that AMD and Intel need to burry their respective hatchets and work on a joint plan because unless something dramatically crashes in a spectacularly catastrophic way, I only see Nvidia’s moat growing at this rate and I don’t want that.

I really dislike Monopolies regardless of which company it is.
 
Lakados said:
I mean yes….
But the other side of it is, how bad is AMD’s library set if you can see significant performance increases translating Nvidia’s libraries to work on AMD rather than just using AMDs.

Sure in some cases it’s because there is no AMD equivalent library. But still it’s a sad state of things.

I really think that AMD and Intel need to burry their respective hatchets and work on a joint plan because unless something dramatically crashes in a spectacularly catastrophic way, I only see Nvidia’s moat growing at this rate and I don’t want that.

I really dislike Monopolies regardless of which company it is.
Click to expand...
couldn’t they use AI to go through their code base and optimize it?
 
I would think Cuda will eventually become irrelevant as AI is used internally, like in Google and Microsoft to write TPU/TCU kernels internally. Cuda is just a method to hide the architecture behaviors behind an API/Programming model so Nvidia keeps an advantage or keep secrets. AI can generate all of the libraries, just they will need exact behaviors, port mapping, latencies, microcode and so on. AI can't do this now since the hardware is hidden to it. Nvidia hand toon, 20 years' worth of libraries would be replicated and probably improved upon if AI had access to the hardware models.
 
This thread sometimes mixes up source compatibility (you can recompile CUDA source code for AMD) and binary compatibility.
 
  • Like
Reactions: erek
like this
noko said:
I would think Cuda will eventually become irrelevant as AI is used internally, like in Google and Microsoft to write TPU/TCU kernels internally. Cuda is just a method to hide the architecture behaviors behind an API/Programming model so Nvidia keeps an advantage or keep secrets. AI can generate all of the libraries, just they will need exact behaviors, port mapping, latencies, microcode and so on. AI can't do this now since the hardware is hidden to it. Nvidia hand toon, 20 years' worth of libraries would be replicated and probably improved upon if AI had access to the hardware models.
Click to expand...
Nvidia does use AI to tune their own libraries too.
And they also patent formulas and algorithms associated with specific aspects.
Nvidia holds more than 600 patents for Ray Tracing alone, most of which are mathematical in nature, and not hand wavey concepts.
 
Lakados said:
Nvidia does use AI to tune their own libraries too.
And they also patent formulas and algorithms associated with specific aspects.
Nvidia holds more than 600 patents for Ray Tracing alone, most of which are mathematical in nature, and not hand wavey concepts.
Click to expand...
Yes, your right, one reason why Nvidia libraries can be 2x to 3x faster. AMD could do the same with ROCm, while AMD for some reason thinks it has to be totally open and not Open ROCm software with AMD AI optimized libraries for AMD hardware.
 
noko said:
Yes, you’re right, one reason why Nvidia libraries can be 2x to 3x faster. AMD could do the same with ROCm, while AMD for some reason thinks it has to be totally open and not Open ROCm software with AMD AI optimized libraries for AMD hardware.
Click to expand...
I really don’t understand AMD’s position on so many things….
I can’t tell if they just like to half ass everything or they have 2 major camps internally one who loves open source and another that hates it and they both need to fight on weekends for next weeks budget.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top