Chrome ships WebGPU • Hacker News Board

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#11

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

The MDN docs can also be found here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebGPU_API

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#12

Post by erk__ » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 9:04 AM UTC

I think Firefox aims to have this in Firefox 113, WebGPU was just enabled by default in nightly last week. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1746245

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#13

Post by AbuAssar » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 9:04 AM UTC

can this be used in fingerprinting?

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#14

Post by nwienert » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 9:05 AM UTC

echelon wrote: post #7

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.

> storyteller.ai

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#15

Post by j-pb » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 9:07 AM UTC

I lost all hope for WebGPU after they decided to roll their own ad-hoc shader language that kinda looks like, but is totally not rust.

At least with WebGL you had C.

Without SPIR-V support this spec is just another tire on the fire that is the modern web.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#16

Post by rockdoe » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 9:09 AM UTC

erk__ wrote: post #12

I think Firefox aims to have this in Firefox 113, WebGPU was just enabled by default in nightly last week. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1746245

"Firefox's implementation is based on the wgpu Rust crate, which is developed on GitHub and widely used outside Firefox."

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#17

Post by NiekvdMaas » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 9:09 AM UTC

AbuAssar wrote: post #13

can this be used in fingerprinting?

Short answer: yes

https://gpuweb.github.io/gpuweb/#privacy-considerations

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#18

Post by NiekvdMaas » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 9:09 AM UTC

mike_hock wrote: post #9

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?

I'm afraid it's the latter: https://gpuweb.github.io/gpuweb/#privacy-considerations

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#19

Post by amrb » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 9:10 AM UTC

Seriously I'm looking forward to running ML inference on the web!

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#20

Post by phh » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 9:15 AM UTC

mike_hock wrote: post #9

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?

Someone mean would say that this is not a bug, but a feature for the people who are paying for Chrome.