
The Metronomic Cadence of Chippery from AMD - rbanffy
https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/03/09/the-metronomic-cadence-of-chippery-from-amd/
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MrRadar
I think the most interesting bit of this article is this:

> So will expanding the use of the Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) development
> environment, which is the analog to Nvidia’s CUDA environment. But across
> the $1.2 billion allocated for the Frontier and El Capitan systems, about
> $220 million of that is for non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs that will
> largely be focused on making OpenMP and OpenACC play well with ROCm, which
> is open source. These HPC centers, and presumably more than a few
> hyperscalers and cloud builders as well as the Cray unit of HPC that is
> building the systems and their Linux environment for them, will be kicking
> into the ROCm software work better and scale further than it does. CUDA may
> be freely distributed, but it is not open source and neither are Nvidia’s
> drivers – and in the end, couple to better price/performance for both CPU
> and GPU compute, the openness of the software may have tipped the balance in
> AMD’s favor.

The GPU vendors were very reluctant to release open documentation for their
products for a very long time (and Nvidia _still_ is) because they were afraid
it would harm their market position. AMD decided to take that risk (probably
helped by already being in a poor market position with Linux deployments) and
now they are reaping a reward for their investment in open source software.

~~~
dragontamer
Indeed.

Anyone who has worked with ROCm knows that its... well... rough around the
edges. But there's something to be said about "documentation is code", I can
pull up Clang and straight up see the parser for ROCm -> AMD GPU compiler, as
well as pull up the AMD Vega ISA document ([https://developer.amd.com/wp-
content/resources/Vega_Shader_I...](https://developer.amd.com/wp-
content/resources/Vega_Shader_ISA_28July2017.pdf)) and learn the assembly
language.

ROCm is rough around the edges, but it is documented and open source. If all
else fails, I can write in assembly and get what I need done.

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With that being said, NVidia's CUDA is somewhat open too, since their CUDA ->
PTX compiler stuff is also in clang, and PTX is also very well documented.

I guess people are liking AMD's other open-source parts of ROCm. In
particular, ROCm getting upstreamed to the Linux kernel proper for better
support.

\-------

Based on how ROCm has evolved in the past year, they've become more focused.
They've cut back on some features (I did like HCC / C++Amp... RIP), and
refocused their efforts on what seems to matter.

NVidia CUDA continues to march forward of course, but there's clearly a need
for a 2nd player, at very least to compete against the sore-spots of NVidia
licensing issues and hardware costs.

