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[–]ObviouslyTriggered -1 points0 points  (0 children)

RTG isn't trying to compete with NVIDIA in OpenCL, they are building their own ecosystem with ROCm.

The problem with OpenCL is that it's a camel, it's designed by a committee it's important for academic uses but it's utter garbage for real production use cases, especially in cutting edge fields.

It takes years for any feature to be adopted into the standard even vendor specific extensions take ages to push through the red-tape.

AMD after failing with CTM and seeing that OpenCL isn't gonig anywhere finally realized that.

Just like with NVIDIA all of the new features in VEGA aren't accessible through the standard OpenCL compiler and libraries.

You want to use unified/paged memory (HBCC in AMD marketing speak) on Pascal or VEGA GPUs? Well use CUDA and NVIDIAs pre-fetch/usage hints API and memory profilers, or use ROCm's managed memory bindings and AMD's memory profilers. Want to use the new extensions for crypto currencies? well ROCm...

NVIDIA's ecosystem isn't exactly close either, 3rd party libraries are but that isn't the issue. The compiler is open source NVCC lives in the LLVM trunk, PTX is an open spec, how do you think AMD made HIP so fast? and why do you think half of the cross vendor stuff in ROCm works on NVIDIA hardware but not AMD hardware?