Chrome ships WebGPU

#1

Post by itsuka » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 8:22 AM UTC

Chrome ships WebGPU
developer.chrome.com

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#2

Post by teruakohatu » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 8:56 AM UTC

In case you confused this with webgl as I did:

> WebGPU is a new API for the web, which exposes modern hardware capabilities and allows rendering and computation operations on a GPU, similar to Direct3D 12, Metal, and Vulkan. Unlike the WebGL family of APIs, WebGPU offers access to more advanced GPU features and provides first-class support for general computations on the GPU.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#3

Post by BulgarianIdiot » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 8:57 AM UTC

Now I want to see someone figure out a way to performantly distribute a trillion parameter model on a million smartphones looking at a web page.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#4

Post by TheAceOfHearts » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 8:59 AM UTC

Can this be used to mine cryptocoins by malicious actors?

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#5

Post by puttycat » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 9:01 AM UTC

So, making it easier to directly harvest unsuspecting GPUs for mining?

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#6

Post by tormeh » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 9:01 AM UTC

This is HUGE news. Webgpu solves the incentives problem where all actors tries to lock you in to their graphics/compute ecosystem by abstracting over them. It's already the best way to code cross-platform graphics outside the browser. This release in Chrome ought to bring lots more developer mindshare to it, which is an awesome thing.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#7

Post by echelon » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 9:01 AM UTC

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #4

Can this be used to mine cryptocoins by malicious actors?

I doubt there's as much effort being put into crypto these days.

The folks hustling on crypto are now in the AI space.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#8

Post by senttoschool » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 9:01 AM UTC

It's good to know that Apple, MS, Firefox, and Google are all onboard. It's great that browsers are finally taking advantage of the underlying hardware.

Next up for browsers should be NPUs such as Apple's neural engine.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#9

Post by mike_hock » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 9:02 AM UTC

teruakohatu wrote: post #2

In case you confused this with webgl as I did: > WebGPU is a new API for the web, which exposes modern hardware capabilities and allows rendering and computation operations on a GPU, similar to Direct3D 12, Metal, and Vulkan. Unlike the WebGL family of APIs, WebGPU offers access to more advanced GPU features and provides first-class support for general computations on the GPU.

And to prevent device fingerprinting, all the operations are specified to deterministically produce the same bit-exact results on all hardware, and the feature set is fixed without any support for extensions, right?

Or is this yet another information leak anti-feature that we need to disable?

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#10

Post by frankjr » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 9:03 AM UTC

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #4

Can this be used to mine cryptocoins by malicious actors?

The spec touches on this, but the short answer is "yes".

https://gpuweb.github.io/gpuweb/#security-abuse-of-capabilit...