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Intel CEO: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'

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Re: Intel CEO: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'

#41
post #24
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with compute shaders ?

CUDA = C++ on GPUs. Compute shader - subset of C with a weird quirks.

There are existing efforts to compile SYCL to Vulkan compute shaders. Plenty of "weird quirks" involved since they're based on different underlying varieties of SPIR-V ("kernels" vs. "shaders") and seem to have evolved independently in other ways (Vulkan does not have the amount of support for numerical computation that OpenCL/SYCL has) - but nothing too terrible or anything that couldn't be addressed by future Vulkan extensions.

Re: Intel CEO: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'

#42

As another commenter said, it's CUDA. Intel and AMD and whoever can turn out chips reasonably fast, but nobody gets that it's the software and ecosystem. You have to out-compete the ecosystem. You can pick up a used Mi100 that performs almost like an A100 for 5x less money on eBay for example. Why is it 5x less? Because the software incompatibilities mean you'll spend a ton of time getting it to work compared to an N…

I agree. That’s what MS didn’t understand with cloud and Linux at first.

There is more than just a hardware layer to adoption.

CUDA is a platform is an ecosystem is also some sort of attitude. It won’t go away. Companies invested a lot into it.

Re: Intel CEO: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'

#43

Fun fact: More than half of all engineers at NVIDIA are software engineers. Jensen has deliberately and strategically built a powerful software stack on top of his GPUs, and he's spent decades doing it. Until Intel finds a CEO who is as technical and strategic, as opposed to the bean-counters, I doubt that they will manage to organize a successful counterattack on CUDA.

Yeah, they should get someone who actually architected a successful chip, like the 486. Maybe a boomerang who used to be CTO. Get rid of this beancounter and hire someone like that!!

/S

Re: Intel CEO: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'

#44
post #4
post #2

Funny, because the entire industry is motivated to move away from x86 too. I wonder if he'd like that to happen.

While we are at it, why not both? Also, can we move away from Windows and Office as well? And SharePoint, please? And add good search capabilities to Confluence.

I've got bad news for you. AD, Office, SharePoint, Teams, BI, etc. are becoming unified in the cloud around Power Platform.

Any new business problem in a Microsoft shop is going to go with a Power Platform/Teams/SharePoint Online solution as first prize.

Personally, I like it, even if it has some annoying challenges. I've not seen anything else come close in terms of rapid application development, integration and deployment; there's very little to license and what there is left falls under existing procurement relationships for most big enterprises that rely on Microsoft already.

Re: Intel CEO: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'

#46

Fun fact: More than half of all engineers at NVIDIA are software engineers. Jensen has deliberately and strategically built a powerful software stack on top of his GPUs, and he's spent decades doing it. Until Intel finds a CEO who is as technical and strategic, as opposed to the bean-counters, I doubt that they will manage to organize a successful counterattack on CUDA.

Are you saying they able to develop without a PM every 5 engineers? Insane.

Re: Intel CEO: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'

#47
post #3

Intel and AMD have had years to provide similar capabilities on top of OpenCL. Maybe they should look into their own failures first.

AMD definitely has and is doubling down on ROCm.

Perhaps they're doubling down, but even doubling down is not enough to say that they're serious about it since they've been so neglectful for so many years - for example, right now they explicitly say that many of AMD GPUs are not supported by ROCm; if they're not willing to put their money where their mouth is and do the legwork to ensure support for powerful cards they sold just a few years ago, how can they say you should rely on their platform?

Unless a random gamer with a random AMD GPU can go to amd.com and download pre-packaged, officially supported tools that work out of the box on their machine and after a few clicks have working GPU-accelerated pytorch (which IMHO isn't the case, but admittedly I haven't tried this year) then their "doubling down" isn't even meeting table stakes.

Re: Intel CEO: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'

#49

Fun fact: More than half of all engineers at NVIDIA are software engineers. Jensen has deliberately and strategically built a powerful software stack on top of his GPUs, and he's spent decades doing it. Until Intel finds a CEO who is as technical and strategic, as opposed to the bean-counters, I doubt that they will manage to organize a successful counterattack on CUDA.

This was true for Intel for at least 10 years and I’m pretty sure for much longer than that. It was probably true for nvidia for about as long as they exist.

Hardware without software is just expensive sand. Every semiconductor company knows this. Intel was the one to perfect the whole package with x86 in the first place…

In the GPU compute space CUDA is x86. It’s ubiquitous, de facto standard and will be disrupted. Question is if it takes a year or a decade.

Re: Intel CEO: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'

#50
post #34

People don't seem particularly motivated to move away from CUDA to me. I've been poking around various models and tooling over the last couple months, and they pretty much all have something like device = "cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu" and I've yet to see a single one implement the AMD NN middleware: https://www.amd.com/en/developer/zendnn.html

This is a bit of a chicken and egg problem, because the developers of these projects probably don't even have relevant AMD devices to test that, because why would they?

The only reasonable way to break the cycle would be proactive intervention by AMD to contribute code and testing and easy "works out of the box" installation to all the major popular projects to add AMD support so they can sell more their hardware later, but I'm not seeing AMD doing that.

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