Ask HN: Why hasn’t AMD made a viable CUDA alternative?

Article note: It's a surprisingly deep question, there are many answers, and almost all of them are sad. The whole Brook/CTM/Stream generation (which largely predates CUDA) basically getting memory-holed means they lost an entire generation of development and momentum. OpenCL being a legitimate standard but an ergonomic nightmare stole some more momentum. Their hardware support being spotty and poorly documented is a serious source of discouragement. CUDA already having ecosystem effects (and not having a standard) means making compatible stuff will always be behind and take a performance penalty.