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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

#81

Post by yuhong »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #80
yuhong wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, reminds me of the original Altair and IBM PC and how both was cloned with profit margins on the boxes falling over time. Unfortunately I think ANSI/ISO and other standard committees was probably poorly suited to setting standards in this area. The right way back then would probably be to design a reference system and release schematics and other design information.

> The right way back then would probably be to design a reference system and release schematics and other design information. The interesting choice is to release a fully open design with a solid implementation for your own hardware but also one for the competitor's hardware that meets every part of the spec but you've spent no effort to optimize. Then everyone starts with your API because it gives support for the la…

I am not talking about APIs.

Re: It’s Time to Open Up the GPU

#82

Post by wallacoloo »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #80
yuhong wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, reminds me of the original Altair and IBM PC and how both was cloned with profit margins on the boxes falling over time. Unfortunately I think ANSI/ISO and other standard committees was probably poorly suited to setting standards in this area. The right way back then would probably be to design a reference system and release schematics and other design information.

> The right way back then would probably be to design a reference system and release schematics and other design information. The interesting choice is to release a fully open design with a solid implementation for your own hardware but also one for the competitor's hardware that meets every part of the spec but you've spent no effort to optimize. Then everyone starts with your API because it gives support for the la…

This doesn't happen for the same reason that open source developers have such a difficult time implementing open standards for closed, proprietary hardware - how do you add support for a low-level protocol to a competitor's product when their product is essentially a black box?

Re: It’s Time to Open Up the GPU

#83

Post by uxcn »

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…

Video encoding also might also be worth putting effort toward. There are probably a lot fewer people using GPUs for video encoding than for linear algegra, but it's still something nobody is currently doing with open operating systems or otherwise really. If AMD did it, I think people would take notice. nVidia started adding APIs.

Video encoding on CPUs is extremely inefficient and essentially precludes on-demand encoding.

Re: It’s Time to Open Up the GPU

#84

Post by witty_username »

broodbucket wrote: post #71
Narishma wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which is probably why the open source driver is pretty good. radeon is light years ahead of nouveau.

Yep, HW decode, works for games (FPS is 10-20% less, depends on game). Might even be better than the intel driver, I had a few problems with that, but I haven't had any problem with radeon.

Re: It’s Time to Open Up the GPU

#85

Post by AnthonyMouse »

wallacoloo wrote: post #82
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The right way back then would probably be to design a reference system and release schematics and other design information. The interesting choice is to release a fully open design with a solid implementation for your own hardware but also one for the competitor's hardware that meets every part of the spec but you've spent no effort to optimize. Then everyone starts with your API because it gives support for the la…

This doesn't happen for the same reason that open source developers have such a difficult time implementing open standards for closed, proprietary hardware - how do you add support for a low-level protocol to a competitor's product when their product is essentially a black box?

Create an abstraction layer on top of their public API. This is the part where you don't really care if the performance is great.

Re: It’s Time to Open Up the GPU

#86

Post by voltagex_ »

ethbro wrote: post #76
dcposch wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even FPGAs and older-process ASICs are unusable for Bitcoin today. The network hashpower just broke 1 exahash/second

Side question: does anyone have links on some power bounds for what the Bitcoin network is currently consuming? Understand it would be a very rough estimate, but seems like it would be possible to arrive at some kind of number given electricity prices as a ceiling and state of the art efficiency as a floor. Curious on what the magnitude is in relation to other things...

The power/monetary cost of 1 megahash is going to be different in Australia than it is in China.

Re: It’s Time to Open Up the GPU

#88

Post by pjmlp »

gnarbarian wrote: post #56
nothis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame how Nvidia is able to close up the market, there has, traditionally, been great competition between AMD and Nvidia in that space.

I think it will bite them in the ass the same way glide did for 3dfx. Vulcan/SpirV may end up as the openGL of heterogeneous computing. Nvidia has the momentum at the moment with a focus on GPGPU, but if we can get an open API that leads in performance across vendors for both CPU and GPU we'll see that competition again. We just have to hope that nvidia doesn't nerf their implementation like they did with openCL.

It is not only performance.

NVidia was clever to see that no one wants to code GPGPU code in C, rather leverage their C++ source code and the Fortran libraries with decades of investment.

So CUDA has been language agnostic from the first day.

Khronos has realized their error by creating SPIR, but it might be too late already.

Also the debugging experience for CUDA has always been quite good.

Re: It’s Time to Open Up the GPU

#89

Post by Nullabillity »

jethro_tell wrote: post #73
Nullabillity wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried the open AMD radeon drivers lately?

I have not. Care to give us some insite? It's kind of an expensive experiment. It's not like trying out emacs for a week. Unfortunately, I know that an nvidea will work, so I buy that even though it's not open

Huge improvement over what they used to be, and these days I get way better performance with it than fglrx.
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