Our great sponsors
-
cuda-api-wrappers
Thin C++-flavored header-only wrappers for core CUDA APIs: Runtime, Driver, NVRTC, NVTX.
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
As a person making a living from being the "GPU guy" - I definitely agree.
The ecosystem around AMD GPUs is quite small - and now that they seem to have abandoned OpenCL (possibly not their own fault though) - even that is put into question.
But things are bad even on the NVIDIA side. Example of how bad: I had to write my own C++ bindings for the CUDA runtime API (https://github.com/eyalroz/cuda-api-wrappers/). You'd think they would have that after 13 years of CUDA being available, right? Wrong. I repeatedly tried to pitch this to them, but they seem to suffer from the "Not Invented Here" syndrome (https://learnosity.com/not-invented-here-syndrome-explained/). This despite me having a lot of respect for people like Mark Harris, Bryce Lelbach, Duane Merrill et alia, and their work.
You're also rights about the "two kinds of brains" - or rather, it's not clear to me that the brains creating the silicon and the brains creating the software are in close enough cooperation.
By the way - it is possible to extract a pretty distribution of CUDA to justify run 20 lines of GPGPU code, from their installer. But they won't be bothered to package this nicely for you.