Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU • Hacker News Board

Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU

#121

Post by adev_ » Thu, May 14, 2020, 4:27 PM UTC

fluffything wrote: post #94

wegs wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. That's been my general problem with adopting NVidia for anything. They make good hardware, but there's a lot of lock-in, and not a lot of transparency. That introduces business risk. I'm not in a position where I need GPGPU, but if there wasn't that risk, and generally there were mature, open standards, I'd definitely use it. The major breakpoint would be when libraries like Numpy do it natively, and better yet…

> They make good hardware, but there's a lot of lock-in, and not a lot of transparency. This sounds like you'd like NVIDIA to open-source all their software. I see this type of request a lot, but I don't see it happening. NVIDIA's main competitive advantage over AMD and Intel is its software stack. AMD could release a 2x powerful GPGPU tomorrow for half the price and most current NVIDIA users wouldn't care because wh…

> AMD could release a 2x powerful GPGPU tomorrow for half the price and most current NVIDIA users wouldn't care because what good is that if you can't program it?.

Correction: Nobody will be able to use the AMD hardware (outside of computer graphics) because everybody has been locked-in with CUDA on Nvidia. They can not even change even if they want to: it is pure madness to reprogram an entire GPGPU software stack every 2 years just to change your hardware provider.

And I think it will remain like that until NVidia get sued for anti-trust.

> ARM and Intel make great software [..] doesn't open-source any of that either for the same reasons as NVIDIA.

That's propaganda and it's wrong.

Intel and ARM contribute a lot to OSS. Most of the software they release nowadays is Open Source. This includes compiler support, drivers, libraries and entire dev environment: mkl-dnn, TBB, BLIS, ISPC, "One", mbedTLS.... ARM has even an entire foundation only to contribute to OSS (https://www.linaro.org/) .

Near to that, NVidia does close to nothing.

There is no justification to NVidia's attitude related to OSS. It reminds me the one of Microsoft at its darkest days.

The only excuse I can see to this attitude is greed.

I hope at least they do not contaminate Mellanox with their toxic policies. Mellanox was an example of successful Open Source contributor/company (up to now) with OFabric (https://www.openfabrics.org/). It would be dramatic if this disappear.

Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU

#122

Post by wegs » Thu, May 14, 2020, 4:28 PM UTC

bigdict wrote: post #52

wegs wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. That's been my general problem with adopting NVidia for anything. They make good hardware, but there's a lot of lock-in, and not a lot of transparency. That introduces business risk. I'm not in a position where I need GPGPU, but if there wasn't that risk, and generally there were mature, open standards, I'd definitely use it. The major breakpoint would be when libraries like Numpy do it natively, and better yet…

Have you heard about CuPy?

Yes. I won't bet my business on a one-vendor solution with a medium-sized community which might disappear at some point.

If CuPy supported NVidia and AMD, and was folded into Numpy, I'd buy the biggest, beefiest GPU I could find overnight.

Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU

#123

Post by jefft255 » Thu, May 14, 2020, 4:29 PM UTC

dannyw wrote: post #90

dijit wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like that people downvoted you for asking a question. If someone thinks the question is stupid or not doesn't mean that a downvote is warranted. (nor an upvote, answer the question and move on.) To answer though; it's just a coincidence, as you might already know Nvidia uses famous scientists (especially in the field of electricity) as the names of their microarchitectures. * Volta (Alessandro Volta, inventor…

I'm sure Nvidia is paying a nice licensing fee to Ampere for the registered trademark. Otherwise it'd be sheer stupidity.

I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic, but trademarking a famous scientist’s name seems legally dubious at best. Is that allowed? I.e. Tesla the car company and nvidia Tesla’s GPUs; is there a gentleman’s agreement between these two or is such a name simply not trademarkable?

Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU

#124

Post by santoshalper » Thu, May 14, 2020, 4:29 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #18

drewg123 wrote: post #10

I'm confused. Is there any relationship between the recent Ampere Arm64 servers ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22475036 ) and Nvidia's "Ampere Architecture", or is it just a case of them using the same name?

I don't like that people downvoted you for asking a question. If someone thinks the question is stupid or not doesn't mean that a downvote is warranted. (nor an upvote, answer the question and move on.) To answer though; it's just a coincidence, as you might already know Nvidia uses famous scientists (especially in the field of electricity) as the names of their microarchitectures. * Volta (Alessandro Volta, inventor…

Also, that's not a dumb question! That's a very specific name, and two products coming out in a window of time both using the same name is enough to cause some confusion. I found the question and answer to be very useful.

Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU

#125

Post by stagger87 » Thu, May 14, 2020, 4:33 PM UTC

dadarepublic wrote: post #112

dijit wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like that people downvoted you for asking a question. If someone thinks the question is stupid or not doesn't mean that a downvote is warranted. (nor an upvote, answer the question and move on.) To answer though; it's just a coincidence, as you might already know Nvidia uses famous scientists (especially in the field of electricity) as the names of their microarchitectures. * Volta (Alessandro Volta, inventor…

Thank you for calling out the downvote issue. I've refrained from asking questions for this exact reason. People should be encouraged to ask questions, even if from a position of lesser knowledge of the matter at hand. Those that do answer are probably not only helping the person asking the question, but those who may not ask the question even if it is one in their mind. How many others refrain from enriching the dia…

Commenting about voting is discouraged in the HN guidelines.

Also, questions that could be answered with a quick internet search don't make good discussion.

Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU

#126

Post by FpUser » Thu, May 14, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #18

drewg123 wrote: post #10

I'm confused. Is there any relationship between the recent Ampere Arm64 servers ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22475036 ) and Nvidia's "Ampere Architecture", or is it just a case of them using the same name?

I don't like that people downvoted you for asking a question. If someone thinks the question is stupid or not doesn't mean that a downvote is warranted. (nor an upvote, answer the question and move on.) To answer though; it's just a coincidence, as you might already know Nvidia uses famous scientists (especially in the field of electricity) as the names of their microarchitectures. * Volta (Alessandro Volta, inventor…

If someone thinks the question is stupid or not doesn't mean that a downvote is warranted. (nor an upvote, answer the question and move on.)

The type of questions being downvoted sometimes makes me question sanity. In general I believe that downvoting is probably one of the most poisonous thing invented in newsgroups.

Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU

#127

Post by aswanson » Thu, May 14, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #18

drewg123 wrote: post #10

I'm confused. Is there any relationship between the recent Ampere Arm64 servers ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22475036 ) and Nvidia's "Ampere Architecture", or is it just a case of them using the same name?

I don't like that people downvoted you for asking a question. If someone thinks the question is stupid or not doesn't mean that a downvote is warranted. (nor an upvote, answer the question and move on.) To answer though; it's just a coincidence, as you might already know Nvidia uses famous scientists (especially in the field of electricity) as the names of their microarchitectures. * Volta (Alessandro Volta, inventor…

Pedantic, but electromagnetic radiation's "founding" precedes Mr. Maxwell. :)

Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU

#128

Post by rrss » Thu, May 14, 2020, 4:40 PM UTC

trsohmers wrote: post #119

person_of_color wrote: post #72

Still waiting for Wave Computing to ship.

Well considering they are filing for bankruptcy you are going to be waiting a while...

Speaking of vapor, still waiting for rex computing to ship...

Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU

#129

Post by lliamander » Thu, May 14, 2020, 4:41 PM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #104

johncalvinyoung wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say they failed. I'd say they gave up on it before product maturity.

I'd say they aimed for the wrong market (graphics processing, where they were competing against very specialized and experienced competitors) and failed to partner. Maybe Intel ~1998 could have solo-launched a new architecture, but the only way they'd get uptake now is something in cooperation with AMD. And maybe the AMD partnership bridge is burnt from previous shenanigans, but it seems like both AMD and Intel would…

> I'd say they aimed for the wrong market (graphics processing, where they were competing against very specialized and experienced competitors)

Also, the game they were using to validate the performance of their hardware (Doom, I think?) ended up being so different from other software in how it used the GPU that their optimizations didn't really transfer.

Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU

#130

Post by solidasparagus » Thu, May 14, 2020, 4:41 PM UTC

wegs wrote: post #113

solidasparagus wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't seen e.g. GPU-based databases reach broad adoption Because it's very questionable whether GPU-based databases are generally valuable. GPUs accelerate compute, not all of the other things that databases do and often GPUs are not cost effective. > I dabble in GPU, but never beyond prototypes, for those reasons And I bet if you dabbled a little further you still wouldn't use it because it isn't cost-effectiv…

You're making a lot of lousy assumptions. As a few points of reference: * My list comprehensions run over gigabytes of data (but sometimes 3 orders of magnitude bigger or smaller). Stream processing of big data. It's not deep learning, but it's slow and potentially deeply parallel. It would move to MIMD trivially, and SIMD with just a little bit of work. * There are programming languages which support models almost e…

You're right about my assumptions, I apologize. Without knowing specifically what you do, I can't say if GPUs would make sense.

But I don't agree that many workloads could be moved to GPUs cost effectively. It's very hard to feed work in fast enough to keep the GPU busy enough to be cost effective given the limited amount of GPU memory you have to work with.