Comment by btown
3 days ago
AMD was investing in a drop-in CUDA compatibility layer & cross-compiler!
Perhaps in keeping with the broader thread here, they had only ever funded a single contract developer working on it, and then discontinued the project (for who-knows-what legal or political reasons). But the developer had specified that he could open-source the pre-AMD state if the contract was dissolved, and he did exactly that! The project is active with an actively contributing community, and is rapidly catching up to where it was.
https://www.phoronix.com/review/radeon-cuda-zluda
https://vosen.github.io/ZLUDA/blog/zludas-third-life/
https://vosen.github.io/ZLUDA/blog/zluda-update-q4-2024/
IMO it's vital that even if NVIDIA's future falters in some way, the (likely) collective millennia of research built on top of CUDA will continue to have a path forward on other constantly-improving hardware.
It's frustrating that AMD will benefit from this without contributing - but given the entire context of this thread, maybe it's best that they aren't actively managing the thing that gives their product a future!
ZLUDA is built on HIP which is built on ROCm. Both of the latter are significant efforts that AMD is pouring significant resources into.