CUDA Without Vendor Lock: SCALE lets Nvidia CUDA run on AMD GPUs
Spectral Compute’s SCALE compiler acts as a drop-in replacement for Nvidia’s NVCC, recompiling CUDA code for non-Nvidia GPUs (starting with AMD) so existing CUDA apps run on other hardware without rewrites. The London startup claims CUDA remains the de facto HPC standard and argues its approach preserves accuracy and can outperform HIPIFY-based porting on AMD GPUs, with some benchmarks nearing sixfold gains. Founded in 2018 and about 30 employees, Spectral is expanding toward additional accelerators and CUDA libraries (cuDNN, PyTorch integration) while continuing Nvidia support, and has tested SCALE on Frontier; the company stresses neutrality and collaboration rather than direct competition with Nvidia.
