Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Correction: Nobody will be able to use the AMD hardware (outside of computer graphics) because everybody has been locked-in with CUDA on Nvidia. NVIDA open-sourced their CUDA implementation to the LLVM project 5 years ago, which is why clang can compile CUDA today, and why Intel and PGI have clang forks compiling CUDA to multi-threaded and vectorized x86-64 using OpenMP. That you can't compile CUDA to AMD GPUs isn'…
>Intel and PGI have clang forks compiling CUDA to multi-threaded and vectorized x86-64 using OpenMP. Where are these forks?
Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU
281–290 of 347 posts
Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
People who are into RISC-V and other side projects/open stacks obviously have not worked on mission critical problems. When you have a Jet engine hoisted up for a test rig, and something fails in your DSP library, you don't hesitate to call Matlab engineering support to help on within next 30 mins. Try that with some python library. People give a lot of flak to Matlab for being closed source but there is a reason the…
> People who are into RISC-V and other side projects/open stacks obviously have not worked on mission critical problems. "People who are into RISC-V" nowadays includes folks like Chris Lattner, who has worked on more mission-critical problems than most everyone here.
Yes, and not all of them were turned into gold. I don't have any hopes on Swift for Tensorflow.
Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU
#283In my experience, Jensen Huang's keynotes are unprofessional in the best possible way. I remember thinking during an entire GTC presentation "Wait, this guy is the CEO?" He seemed like an excited engineer who happened to stumble onto stage.
I rather watch him than those fake converstations on stage done by professional CEOs, or those guys in fancy suits that feel like someone from a TV sales channel.
Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
And even before that there was: * GeForce (for Andrea Geforce, the first to use the color electric green) * Riva (for Jose Riva, the discoverer that you can use TNT to generate electricity.)
Who is Andrea Geforce? I can't find any information about him/her.
Because he was not a famous scientist, like Alexander Ball, inventor of round inflatable objects.
Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't underestimate the complexity. But I do claim that the complexity can and should be hidden behind programming language constructs. I've worked both on the design of MIMD hardware, back when I was a graduate student, and on programming languages. These aren't easy problems, but they are solvable. The reason for openness isn't abstract. I don't think NVidia will solve these problems alone. NVidia can make really…
I'm not making a claim about the necessity of experimentation. I spent years (and working a paid job) doing programming language work, and also design hardware these days in my spare time, so I'm not against that. I'm specifically addressing the claim that "GPU databases haven't taken off because of lack of open source CUDA" or whatnot. Database tech is one of the most R&D heavy engineering subfields, almost all majo…
Yes and no.
I wouldn't do mid/low storage tiers in a GPU b/c indeed, drinking through a straw. When it's all I/O, even the insane GPU bandwidth still assumes enough compute to go with it. A couple of GPU vendors pitch themselves as GPU DBs, and that's tough positioning when the assumption is all the data lives in the DB. From what I can tell, that only works for But if you're doing a lot of Spark/Impala/Druid style compute, where storage is probably separate anyways (parquets in HDFS/S3 -> ...) and there is increasingly math to go along with it (analytics, ML, neural nets, data viz, ...), different story. Now that stuff like regex is pretty easy with RAPIDS, instead of doing pandas -> spark or pandas -> rapids, I try to start with cudf to beginwith. (But definitely still not quite there.) We partner a bunch with BlazingSQL here, and they've always been chasing the out-of-core story here. A couple of the lesser-known GPU 'DB's do as well, such as FastData focusing explicitly on replacing spark/flint wrt both batch & streaming.
A few trends you may want to reexamine the #s on:
-- CPU perf/watt (~= perf/$) vs GPU perf/watt (~= perf/$), especially in cloud over last 10 years: GPU is steadily dropping while CPU isn't
-- CPU-era Spark and friends are increasingly bound by network I/O, while GPU boxes go for thicker. You can also do Spark on a thicker box, but at that point, might as well go shared GPU and keep it there (RAPIDS)
-- Nvidia & cloud providers have been pushing on direct-to-gpu and direct gpugpu, including at commodity levels. Mellanox used to be a problem there, and now they control them. My guess is the bigger challenge in ~2yr will be rewriting RAPIDS for streaming & serverless & more transparent multi-GPU; the HW is hard but seems more predictable and much better staffed.
GPU isn't an end-all, but when a lot of CPU data libs are going data parallel / columnar, and Nvidia is improving more than Intel for perf/watt (= perf/$), the choice between multicore x SIMD vs GPU keeps tilting in Nvidia's favor.
Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wanted to do GPU PCI passthrough in a VM (run Linux host, then for gaming run a Windows VM with the GPU passed through to get good performance). Nvidia disabled this for their consumer GPUs; the Nvidia drivers in the Windows VM will block this from working. It was a purely software thing; there was no reason for this aside from nvidia wanting companies to pay more for the Quadro/etc. GPUs. In addition to that, ther…
GPU passthrough is also doable pretty easily on NVidia nowadays. See here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM... /r/VFIO on Reddit is also pretty helpful. That being said, I fully support you buying and using AMD. But no need to throw out perfectly fine hardware in case you still have NVidia lying arround.
> GPU passthrough is also doable pretty easily on NVidia nowadays.
By actively working against Nvidia who could break it again at any time if they wanted to:
> Starting with QEMU 2.5.0 and libvirt 1.3.3, the vendor_id for the hypervisor can be spoofed, which is enough to fool the Nvidia drivers into loading anyway.
If you already have Nvidia, fine, but to me this reads as a strong reason to not buy Nvidia if you can help it.
Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU
#287Earlier 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…
Tesla was also the name of a Czechoslovak elektronics company, known among other thing for their electron microscopes. Even though this Tesla is long gone, it has a lasting legacy here in Brno due to many electron microscope manufacturers (Delong, FEI, Thermo Fisher, etc.) being present and often libking their origin or many employees to the old Tesla company.
Ha, my cousin works in one of those electron microscope companies. Thought it was some one-off company saving some costs maybe due to good graduates coming out of Brno technical university, good to know there is more to it!
Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that I hardly saw any clone vendors other than AMD, I really doubt that they had any influence on Intel's market share. What worked out was IBM not being able to prevent PC clones, but given the wide adoption of laptops, tablets and phones that hardly matters nowadays.
Maybe not recently, but in the years that cemented Intel dominance, there were many clones on the market.
Yeah, but never in an amount that was actually meaningful, only by a couple of non branded PC OEMs.
Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
And even before that there was: * GeForce (for Andrea Geforce, the first to use the color electric green) * Riva (for Jose Riva, the discoverer that you can use TNT to generate electricity.)
Who is Andrea Geforce? I can't find any information about him/her.
you just need to create its wikipedia entry and it will exist soon.
Re: Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of Nvidia's advantage comes from building the hardware and software side by side. No one was seriously tackling GPGPU until Nvidia created Cuda, and if you look at the rest of the graphics stack Nvidia is the one driving the big innovations. GPUs are sufficiently specialized in both interface and problem domain that GPU enhanced software is unlikely to appear without a large vendor driving development, and it wo…
Would you agree that that your observations somewhat imply that a competitive free market is not a fit for all governable domains (and don't mistake governable for government there, we're still talking about shepherding of innovation)?
Early tech investments are risky, but if your competition has tech 10 years more advanced than yours, there is probably no amount of money that would allow you to catch up, surpass, and make enough profits to recover the investment, mainly because you can't buy time, and your competitor won't stop to innovate, they are making a profit and you aren't, etc.
So to me the main realization here is that in tech, if one competitor ends up with tech that's 10 years more advanced than the competition, it is basically a divergence-type of phenomenon. It isn't worth it for the competition to even invest in trying to catch up, and you end up with a monopoly.