The software 'ZLUDA' that connects NVIDIA's 'CUDA' and Intel's GPU is revived for AMD, but future development is hopeless
The software ``
AMD Quietly Funded A Drop-In CUDA Implementation Built On ROCm: It's Now Open-Source - Phoronix
https://www.phoronix.com/review/radeon-cuda-zluda
Software allows CUDA code to run on AMD and Intel GPUs without changes — ZLUDA is back but both companies ditched it, nixing future updates | Tom's Hardware
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/software-allows-cuda-code-to-run-on-amd-and-intel-gpus-without-changes-zluda-is-back-but- both-companies-ditched-it-nixing-future-updates
ZLUDA is a software that first appeared in 2020. ZLUDA was responsible for making Intel GPUs compatible with CUDA, but it was removed from GitHub in February 2021.
Developer Andrzej Janik was a person who developed ZLUDA while working at Intel, and has been involved in various activities behind the scenes, such as lobbying for the official adoption of ZLUDA, but Intel said that ``Intel's GPU There is no business case for running CUDA applications on ZLUDA,'' he said, and requested that the project be made private while Intel evaluates the ZLUDA project.
After that, Mr. Janik left Intel and contacted AMD and signed a contract for ZLUDA development. However, like Intel, AMD also took time to evaluate ZLUDA and requested that ZLUDA be made private. In the end, AMD came to the same conclusion as Intel that ``there is no business case for running CUDA applications on AMD's GPUs'' and terminated the contract with Janik.
As a result of the contract being canceled, ZLUDA was revived in 2024, but it has been switched to support AMD instead of Intel. ZLUDA is based on the software ``
Technology media Tom's Hardware points out that Intel and AMD clearly have no interest in making their GPUs compatible with NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem, and would rather compete head-on. However, although ROCm and Intel's similar product 'oneAPI' are still new and development is delayed, we evaluated them as having the advantage of being open source.
Technology media Phoronix welcomes the return of ZLUDA and is actually using it for benchmark testing with the help of Janik.
The benchmark results conducted by Phoronix on Linux are as follows. When we compared the performance of several RDNA2 and RDNA3 compatible Radeon graphics cards with NVIDIA RTX 30/40 series graphics cards, we found that Radeon via ZLUDA demonstrated performance comparable to NVIDIA's GPU in Blender etc. was shown.
For more intensive Classroom scenes, using ZLUDA with the Radeon RX 6000/7000 series CUDA backend resulted in slightly faster performance than the native Radeon HIP code path.
Phoronix points out that ``NVIDIA OptiX is not fully supported and some features, such as software that does not use PTX assembly code, are not currently handled, so it is not 100% secure.'' For the most part, this implementation is surprisingly competent for a single developer's effort.''
Please note that at the time of article creation, it only targets ROCm 5.x API, and there are some limitations such as not being compatible with the newly released ROCm 6.x release. . In addition, since the ROCm 5.7 series is the latest, even if you use the ROCm DKMS module, it cannot be built with the Linux 6.5 kernel installed in the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS HWE stack. It is hoped that there will be sufficient support from the
Phoronix 'works well other than the device selection issues mentioned above and some software applications like OctaneBench not working due to limitations. Apparently it's a business decision on AMD's part to support ZLUDA. It seems that ROCm/HIP has been discontinued, which is a shame.In a sense, it is understandable since there are more software packages that natively support ROCm/HIP in 2024 than there were a few years ago. Given the popularity of NVIDIA CUDA over the years, legacy software that targets CUDA but is unmaintained or deprecated, or software that does not natively target AMD GPUs due to lack of developer resources. It is inevitable that ZLUDA will continue to exist, so ZLUDA's efforts still have value,' he said, calling ZLUDA's existence 'amazing.'
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