Comment by dragontamer
22 days ago
The Linux bets were OpenCL 2.0 and later Vulkan.
Remember that NVidia basically stalled out on OpenCL 1.2, purposefully to encourage CUDA adoption. AMD actually moved forward, though their OpenCL2.0 wasn't that good either... it at least existed.
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AMD's APUs culminated in XBox One / PS4 APIs, which actually have a substantial market share in the console market.
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Vulkan on Linux is working out pretty well today. I don't think anyone would have picked that as the strongest API 10 years ago. Remember that in 2010s, "Vulkan" was known as "AMD Mantle" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantle_(API)).
Even as AMD was going bankrupt in the early 2010s, they had plenty of software investments. Some of these investments (Mantle/Vulkan) even worked out.
Except neither AMD, nor Intel, or Google, ever delivered anything with OpenCL that could match CUDA tooling, libraries, or choice of programming languages.
Additionally their drivers were never great.
IIRC Mantle was co-developed by DICE, I think DICE may have even had the initial idea and done the prototyping.
Here's a video where John Carmack, Tim Sweeney, and Johan Andersson (from Dice) talks about AMD Mantle in 2013: https://youtu.be/MH2hjhcfWic?t=4975 Carmack is sceptical, Sweeney likes it but doesn't want yet another API.
And here's another video where Andersson talks about the motivation behind Mantle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KApdf4P2Iak