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It’s Time to Open Up the GPU

gpuopen.com

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Re: It’s Time to Open Up the GPU

#41

Post by gnarbarian »

Market leaders tend to push proprietary stacks (because they can). While underdogs push open stacks (because they must). If the open standard is better it can win. This is how nvidia gained the upper hand over 3dfx by pushing opengl and directx alongside ATI. They surged ahead and glide died along with 3dfx.

Behold, history repeats itself.

I'm hoping that Vulcan will be that new competitive standard moving forward. I don't have much hope for open hardware and open drivers from market leaders (who are too concerned with losing their edge to competitors) but I would be happy with an open API that leads in performance across vendors.

Re: It’s Time to Open Up the GPU

#42

Post by cylinder714 »

appleflaxen wrote: post #25
cs702 wrote: post #21

This is an AMD project motivated by the fact that NVIDIA has become the de facto standard for GPU computation in deep learning and machine learning applications. TensorFlow, Torch, Theano, CNTK, CAFFE, and every other deep learning framework out there works out of the box with NVIDIA hardware via the CUDA stack, but not with AMD hardware, e.g., via the OpenCL stack. Which is a shame, because the entire NVIDIA hardwar…

I'm sad to say, but it's true. AMD has been claiming "this is the year we really open up" since at least 2007[1]. Well, I'm happy to hear them recommit, but I don't believe them anymore. Now that they are losing ground in the marketplace on the GPU side with deep learning, and their CPUs can't compete with intel on the performance side, their claims ring hollow. Imagine where we would be if they open sourced their dr…

Poke around the site and look at the code on Github, with what looks like ISC/BSD licenses.

Re: It’s Time to Open Up the GPU

#43

Post by Narishma »

appleflaxen wrote: post #25
cs702 wrote: post #21

This is an AMD project motivated by the fact that NVIDIA has become the de facto standard for GPU computation in deep learning and machine learning applications. TensorFlow, Torch, Theano, CNTK, CAFFE, and every other deep learning framework out there works out of the box with NVIDIA hardware via the CUDA stack, but not with AMD hardware, e.g., via the OpenCL stack. Which is a shame, because the entire NVIDIA hardwar…

I'm sad to say, but it's true. AMD has been claiming "this is the year we really open up" since at least 2007[1]. Well, I'm happy to hear them recommit, but I don't believe them anymore. Now that they are losing ground in the marketplace on the GPU side with deep learning, and their CPUs can't compete with intel on the performance side, their claims ring hollow. Imagine where we would be if they open sourced their dr…

I don't think they ever claimed they would open source their drivers. They've certainly released a ton of documentation for their GPUs over the years.

Re: It’s Time to Open Up the GPU

#44

Post by Narishma »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #11

First, nullify all the patents ... Seriously, back around the turn of the century I was pretty heavily into graphics and rendering and was frustrated by all the constraints on getting access to documentation. I finally figured out a way to pin down a vendor with all the necessary NDAs and all the necessary agreements so that I could actually get 100% access to the inner workings of the GPU. As long as I read the docu…

> That said, I think an open GPU is an excellent idea

This isn't what the article is about.

Re: It’s Time to Open Up the GPU

#45

Post by robbies »

ethbro wrote: post #36
robbies wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only speculate on this aspect (from inside the industry), but it's been plain to see that AMD has been hemorrhaging engineers (though they still have plenty of talent). This relates to your request about getting built-in support: I'm not sure AMD has the manpower to do that work, and they might be hoping the OSS community helps them with that...

I'd be interested in what the ROI on more deeply embedding with OSS devs is vs employing someone to contribute. From what I've seen, for years the OSS GPU driver crowd's response to "opened" specifications / docs seems to have been "That's nice, but these aren't the docs we need."

Oh, they have the docs they need. That's essentially what is shared with console devs. The problem is that to get up and running is pretty Herculean with just docs. They need good sample implementations to get kickstarted.

Re: It’s Time to Open Up the GPU

#46

Post by robbies »

mjhirn wrote: post #32
cs702 wrote: post #21

This is an AMD project motivated by the fact that NVIDIA has become the de facto standard for GPU computation in deep learning and machine learning applications. TensorFlow, Torch, Theano, CNTK, CAFFE, and every other deep learning framework out there works out of the box with NVIDIA hardware via the CUDA stack, but not with AMD hardware, e.g., via the OpenCL stack. Which is a shame, because the entire NVIDIA hardwar…

We are developing the Rust Machine Intelligence Framework Leaf[1] for which we created the portable High-Performance Computation Framework Collenchyma [2], which abstracts over CUDA, OpenCL and commen host CPU. Although we are ready to bring Machine Learning to OpenCL supported devices, the OpenCL ecosystem lacks the fundamental kernels, tooling and library that already exist for the CUDA ecosystem (e.g. cuDNN[3]). B…

I think SPIR-V + Vulkan would be the better path to follow, considering that NV doesn't really care that much about OpenCL.

Re: It’s Time to Open Up the GPU

#48

Post by k33n »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #11

First, nullify all the patents ... Seriously, back around the turn of the century I was pretty heavily into graphics and rendering and was frustrated by all the constraints on getting access to documentation. I finally figured out a way to pin down a vendor with all the necessary NDAs and all the necessary agreements so that I could actually get 100% access to the inner workings of the GPU. As long as I read the docu…

Nullify the patents? Why? A lot of R&D has gone into making the best GPU's what they are. What makes you feel entitled to that IP?

Re: It’s Time to Open Up the GPU

#49

Post by revelation »

I must be going stupid, show me the code?!

Where is any of this? I find a bunch of press releases, but.. there is no code, anywhere.

(Edit: for anyone else struggling, expand the arrow on the top left. Or go directly to e.g)

http://gpuopen.com/professional-compute/

(That said, a bunch of the repositories are just binary dumps. Like, this isn't what Git is for AMD.)

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