An AMD executive said his company is taking an open-source approach as it challenges Nvidia in the chip wars.
Ramine Roane, corporate vice president of data center, cloud and AI at AMD, addressed the GPU shortage and the company’s approach on stage at Reuters’ Momentum AI conference in San Jose, California, on Tuesday.
Both AMD and Nvidia make GPUs, or graphics processing units, used in video games and AI development because of their ability to handle large amounts of calculations. Nvidia controls more than 70% of the AI chip market, according to an estimate by Mizuho Securities, and has major customers such as Meta, Google, Amazon and OpenAI.
Demand for generative AI and powerful chips to grow training models has outstripped supplies. Roane said GPU availability is a big issue within the chip industry and that AMD is “shipping all the GPUs [it] can do now.”
“In terms of vendor lock-in, we know what’s going on right now. There’s a very strong vendor with software that’s completely closed and locked,” Roane said, referring to Nvidia’s CUDA computing platform, which helps developers build applications using Nvidia GPUs.
Launched in 2006, CUDA is only compatible with Nvidia GPUs. The company’s early development of CUDA effectively set an industry standard that gave it a competitive advantage, while alternative programming models have struggled to gain traction.
Roane says AMD took a different approach with its open-source ROCm software for GPU programming. Since ROCm is available as open source, it is free for anyone to use, download or modify.
“We went the other way and our software called ROCm is completely open,” Roane said.
The tides are shifting. Meta and Microsoft announced plans last year to buy AMD chips, moving away from dependence on Nvidia graphics processors. The AMD vice president added that customers are converting CUDA programs to HIP, ROCm’s programming language, which can be compatible with other GPUs. Microsoft is now deploying OpenAI’s GPT-4 AI model to AMD feeds, Roane said.
Alvin Nguyen, senior analyst at Forrester, noted that AMD’s open source approach could help it gain market favor.
“Their open source approach makes sense as creating a community with minimal barriers to adoption is their best chance to get more market share,” Nguyen told Business Insider. “It requires less support on their end than providing an in-house developed solution and will help keep costs down.”
While this approach can keep costs down, Nguyen said that providing CUDA compatibility to allow customers to convert to other GPU suppliers will still require continued support from AMD to make it worthwhile.
“The problem is that changes to CUDA can create compatibility issues that will take time to resolve, but will leave users of non-NVIDIA products frustrated,” Nguyen said.
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