There seems to be some confusion here on what PTX is – it does not bypass the CUDA platform at all. Nor does this diminish NVIDIA’s monopoly here. CUDA is a programming environment for NVIDIA GPUs, but many say CUDA to mean the C/C++ extension in CUDA (CUDA can be thought of as a C/C++ dialect here.) PTX is NVIDIA specific, and sits at a similar level as LLVM’s IR. If anything, DeepSeek is more dependent on NVIDIA than everyone else, since PTX is tightly dependent on their specific GPUs. Things like ZLUDA (effort to run CUDA code on AMD GPUs) won’t work. This is not a feel good story here.
I don’t think anyone is saying CUDA as in the platform, but as in the API for higher level languages like C and C++.
PTX is a close-to-metal ISA that exposes the GPU as a data-parallel computing device and, therefore, allows fine-grained optimizations, such as register allocation and thread/warp-level adjustments, something that CUDA C/C++ and other languages cannot enable.
Some commenters on this post are clearly not aware of PTX being a part of the CUDA environment. If you know this, you aren’t who I’m trying to inform.
aah I see them now
What is amazing in this case is that they achieved spending a fraction of the inference cost that OpenAI is paying.
Plus they are a lot cheaper too. But I am pretty sure that the American government will ban them in no time, citing national security concerns, etc.
Nevertheless, I think we need more open source models.
Not to mention that NVIDIA also needs to be brought to earth.
They said this is close to metal. Wake me up when they’ve achieved metal.
I thought everyone liked to hate on Metal.
Reminds me of the Bitcoin mining and how askii miners overtook graphic card mining practically overnight. It would not surprise me if this goes the same way.
This is why Nvidia stock has been hit so hard. CUDA is their moat