Comment by bigyabai

12 hours ago

> there's OpenCL and Vulkan as well

OpenCL is chronically undermaintained & undersupported, and Vulkan only covers a small subset of what CUDA does so far. Neither has the full support of the tech industry (though both are supported by Nvidia, ironically).

It feels like nobody in the industry wants to beat Nvidia badly enough, yet. Apple and AMD are trying to supplement raster hardware with inference silicon; both of them are afraid to implement a holistic compute architecture a-la CUDA. Intel is reinventing the wheel with OneAPI, Microsoft is doing the same with ONNX, Google ships generic software and withholds their bespoke hardware, and Meta is asleep at the wheel. All of them hate each other, none of them trust Khronos anymore, and the value of a CUDA replacement has ballooned to the point that greed might be their only motivator.

I've wanted a proper, industry-spanning CUDA competitor since high school. I'm beginning to realize it probably won't happen within my lifetime.

The modern successor to OpenCL is SYCL and there's been some limited convergence with Vulkan Compute (they're still based on distinct programming models and even SPIR-V varieties under the hood, but the distance is narrowing somewhat).