I'm trying to imagine something other than GPL. The fact that the GPL license is respected in the vast majority of cases, without a precedent being necessary is very exciting.
This is a crude but misguided attempt to bypass what I say which was "effective regulation." FGS only controls a minority of Somalia -- most of it is controlled by Somaliland, Puntland, Al-Shabaab, directly by xeer (customary) law, or only FGS hanging on by a thread.
Even in cases where FGS is in control -- even then xeer law on property rights and law often supersede written law of FGS. For instance, on occasion Somali population has straight up killed FGS soldiers/police and Somalian government has deferred to xeer courts and said "welp that is fine." Xeer law in particular has a very liberal free-market view on inter-familial entrepreneurism (although with a lot of intrafamilial and tribal dues which hinder it in practice) which is at odds with what outside law has tried to impose upon it.
NCA has rather limited influence in somalia, and definitely not of the sort that could break up a monopoly if one existed.
The Qualcomm laptops have various problems with Linux that have not been solved yet.
You have much better Linux support for an older Snapdragon from 2021 (with quadruple Cortex-A78 cores) which has been rebranded as "Dragonwing QCM6490" and which is sold by Qualcomm for use in embedded computers. Thus Qualcomm promises at least 10 years of support for it.
There are a few cheap single-board computers with it, e.g. Particle Tachyon 5G and Radxa Dragon Q6A.
Unfortunately, "cheap" means something very different today than last summer, due to the huge increase in the price of DRAM. Nevertheless, the SBCs with soldered LPDDR memory have been affected less by the price increase than the computers for which you have to buy SODIMM or DIMM memory modules, which may cost now more than a mini-PC in which you would want to install them.
In fairness; that decision predates the existence of Asahi. Unless Apple was working with the community before Apple Silicon dropped, this isn't much acknowledgement of their existence.
PlayStation and Xbox are two extremely low-margin, high volume customers. Winning their bid means shipping the most units of the cheapest hardware, which AMD is very good at.
I think you misunderstand what's fundamentally possible with AMD's architecture. They can't wave a magic wand for a CUDA compatibility layer any better than Apple or Qualcomm can, it's not low-hanging fruit like DirectX or Win32 translation. Investing billions into translating CUDA on raster GPUs is a dead end.
AMD's best option is a greenfield GPU architecture that puts CUDA in the crosshairs, which is what they already did for datacenter customers with AMD Instinct.
Let's say you put 50-100 seasoned devs on the problem, and within 2-3 years, probably get ZLUDA to the point where most mainstream CUDA applications — ML training/inference, scientific computing, rendering — run correctly on AMD hardware at 70-80% of the performance you'd get from a native ROCm port. Even if its not optimal due to hardware differences, it would be genuinely transformative and commercially valuable.
This would give them runway for their parallel effort to build native greenfield libraries and toolkits and get adoption, and perhaps make some tweaks to future hardware iterations that make compatibility easier.
And while compatibility layers aren't illegal, they ordinarily have to be a cleanroom design. If AMD knew that the ZLUDA dev was decompiling CUDA drivers to reverse-engineer a translation layer, then legally they would be on very thin ice.
ROCm is supported by the minority of AMD GPUs, and is accelerated inconsistently across GPU models. 70-80% of ROCm's performance is an unclear target, to the point that a native ROCm port would be a more transparent choice for most projects. And even then, you'll still be outperformed by CUDA the moment tensor or convolution ops are called.
Those billions are much better-off being spent on new hardware designs, and ROCm integrations with preexisting projects that make sense. Translating CUDA to AMD hardware would only advertise why Nvidia is worth so much.
> it would be genuinely transformative and commercially valuable.
Bullshit. If I had a dime for every time someone told me "my favorite raster GPU will annihilate CUDA eventually!" then I could fund the next Nvidia competitor out of pocket. Apple didn't do it, Intel didn't do it, and AMD has tried three separate times and failed. This time isn't any different, there's no genuine transformation or commercial value to unlock with outdated raster-focused designs.
This is a big part of AMD still not having a proper foothold in the space: AMD Instinct is quite different from what regular folks can easily put in their workstation. In Nvidia-land I can put anything from mid-range gaming cards, over a 5090 to an RTX 6000 Pro in my machine and be confident that my CUDA code will scale somewhat acceptably to a datacenter GPU.
This is where I feel like Khronos could contribute, making a Compute Capability-equivalent hardware standard for vendors to implement. CUDA's versioning of hardware capabilities plays a huge role in clarifying the support matrix.
...but that requires buy-in from the rest of the industry, and it's doubtful FAANG is willing to thread that needle together. Nvidia's hedged bet against industry-wide cooperation is making Jensen the 21st century Mansa Musa.
If lacking precedent is your main concern, there are no software licenses that are likely to fill your criterion.
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