My guess is it’s just incompetence. Imagine you’re in charge of ROCm and your boss asks you how it’s going. Do you say good things about your team and progress? Do you highlight the successes and say how you can do all the major things CUDA can? I think many people would. Or do you say to your boss “the project I’m in charge of is a total disaster and we are a joke in the industry”? That’s a hard thing to say.
Intel was never famous for good GPUs, and they are basically the only ones still trying to make something out of OpenCL, with most of the tooling going beyond what Khronos offers.
one API is much more than a plain old SYCL distribution, and still.
I'd argue Intel fell is large part because of Intel's own complacency and incompetence. If Intel had taken AMD seriously, they'd probably still be a serious competitor today.
