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 🤣
Because CUDA and ROCm/HIP are far easier to program.
The Khronos competitor to CUDA/ROCm is SYCL not OpenCL.
SYCL vs these other options is a fun theoretical problem, but only Intel seems to be pushing SYCL at all. OpenCL got stuck in OCL1.2 (the 2.0 release was dead. 3.0+ OpenCL ignores OCL2.0 but it’s too late, OpenCL is seen as a dead end tech these days).
The biggest issue is that OpenCL is a different language, while CUDA/HIP/SYCL are ‘just’ C++ extensions. This means that if you ever shared data between CPU and GPU in OpenCL (or DirectX or Vulkan for that matter), you have to carefully write and rewrite structs{} to line up between the two languages.
Meanwhile, CUDA/HIP support passing structs, classes and more between CPU and GPU (subject to conditions of course. GPUs can’t do function pointers or vtables for example, but cpu-only classes can have vtables)