Comment by dlewis1788
3 days ago
CUDA is an entire ecosystem - not a single programming language extension (C++) or a single library, but a collection of libraries & tools for specific use cases and optimizations (cuDNN, CUTLASS, cuBLAS, NCCL, etc.). There is also tooling support that Nvidia provides, such as profilers, etc. Many of the libraries build on other libraries. Even if AMD had the decent, reliable language extensions for general-purpose GPU programming, they still don't have the libraries and the supporting ecosystem to provide anything to the level that CUDA provides today, which is a decade plus of development effort from Nvidia to build.
The counter point is they could make a higher level version of CUDA which wouldn't necessitate all the other supporting libraries. The draw of cuBLAS is that CUDA is a confusing pain. It seems reasonable to think they could write a better, higher level language (in the same vein as triton) and not have to write as many support libraries
100% valid - Nvidia is trying to address that now with cuTile and the new Python front-end for CUTLASS.
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