CUDA has been one of the most successful weapons in NVIDIA’s arsenal; simply-put, it allows offloading tasks that are high-parallel in nature to the GPU, in order for applications to run faster and more efficiently without straining the system’s CPU. It’s drawback? It’s locked to NVIDIA GPUs. A previously unknown startup, Otoy, claims to have bypassed that vendor lock-in in order to run unmodified CUDA code in other GPUs, namely Radeons. Here’s the what Bit-Tech reports on the issue:
Start-up Otoy claims it has broken the lock-in cycle, however. In an interview with VentureBeat, Otoy chief executive Jules Urbach revealed a CUDA cross-compiler capable of running unmodified CUDA code on any GPU or CPU which he claims his company created in just nine weeks.
There’s a catch, of course: use of the compiler requires access to the original source code of the CUDA application in question, meaning it’s not something that end-users can apply to their systems in order to start running CUDA-accelerated applications on their CPU or third-party GPU. It’s also proprietary: Otoy plans to release it with version 3.1 of its Octane rendering engine and has not indicated that it will be available separately. For those who do pick it up, though, Otoy is claiming impressive results, with Urbach stating that any given application ‘runs on the other cards at the same speed as it runs on Nvidia cards.‘
Source: Bit Tech
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