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Can anybody explain why CUDA and Rocm are necessary and why OpenCL isn't the solution? (programming.dev)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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] 3 points 3 days ago

CUDA can (depending on circumstances) give slightly better performance than OpenCL. So if you know that your target hosts will have Nvidia GPUs ( for example ML in your own data centers) that might be beneficial.

OpenCL will run on multiple platforms so if you don't know the target hosts (for example consumer hardware for gaming) this makes life easier for the developer.

The frameworks and libraries around the different specs differ, so if there is a library that is useful for your use case, that will effect your decision to pick one over the other