this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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Programming

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Can anybody explain why CUDA and Rocm are necessary and why OpenCL isn't the solution? (self.programming)
submitted 4 days ago by onlinepersona to c/programming
18 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I've read multiple times that CUDA dominates, mostly because NVIDIA dominates. Rocm is the AMD equivalent, but OpenCL also exists. From my understanding, these are technologies used to program graphics cards - always thought that shaders were used for that.

There is a huge gap in my knowledge and understanding about this, so I'd appreciate somebody laying this out for me. I could ask an LLM and be misguided, but I'd rather not 🤣

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'd imagine it's as simple as Nvidia doesn't want to support OpenCL because CUDA forces people into their market, and AMD doesn't want to support OpenCL because Rocm forces people into their market. Open/free standards are great for smaller players in a market, but in the graphics space I don't think a smaller player in the market exists, and if they do, no one seems interested in them.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 days ago

rocm is open source as well. amd have historically been the ones pushing for open standards in these things, probably because they've never been market leaders.