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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'

#61

Post by rnk »

pjmlp wrote: 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.

Similar capabilities, similar performance and similar (actually better performance). They don't have any of these at this time. People don't want to buy slower and maybe cheaper computation on nvidia hardware - why would they want to do this on intel hardware? Your app will have to change, it just seems like an obvious non-starter.

I'm not an expert here, am I missing something? Saying the x86 industry is motivated to move away from what nvidia provides, intel needs to tick some of these 'better somehow' boxes.

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

#62

Post by UncleOxidant »

buildbot wrote: post #33

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…

This right here. Until Intel (and/or AMD) get serious about the software side and actually invest the money CUDA isn't going anywhere. Intel will make noises about various initiatives in that direction and then a quarter or two later they'll make big cuts in those divisions. They need to make a multi-year commitment and do some serious hiring (and they'll need to raise their salaries to market rates to do this) if they want to play in the CUDA space.

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

#63

Post by nemothekid »

jonahrd wrote: post #51

I absolutely understand why NVIDIA is incentivized to maintain CUDA dominance, and I absolutely understand that within these market parameters, AMD/Intel/others have dropped the ball. However it's worth noting that in the end, it's the consumer that loses out when these technical/capability moats maintain a de facto sort of monopoly on certain use cases.

>However it's worth noting that in the end, it's the consumer that loses out when these technical/capability moats maintain a de facto sort of monopoly on certain use cases.

I think in most cases you are right, but for CUDA, the consumer is winning. CUDA isn't some special secret complex algorithm just for nvidia GPUs. nvidia just spent a decade giving a fuck about the developer experience across a wide range of industries. CUDA isn't just AI, it's also physics, numerical modeling, cryptography, biology and more. They found a thousand use cases and spent time listening to customers and built a platform around it - it just turned out AI ended up being a huge money maker.

The problem is, and will continue to be, that Intel and AMD will only see the "AI" money bags and ignore every other part of platform, from debugging, compilers, language integration, GUIs, and even bug fixing. If Intel is saying here "we want to eliminate CUDA by investing billions into OpenCL and ensure OpenCL has a top of line developer experience and platform" than I'd be excited. But what I'm reading is "we will replace a few function calls for CUDA in Pytorch", which might be fun for a while up until you have to debug some performance issue and you realize you can get in touch with a CUDA engineer on github instead of emailing some dead Intel mailing list.

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

#64

Post by foobiekr »

buildbot wrote: post #33

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…

It's not just Intel. Open initiatives and consortiums (the phase two of the same) are always the losers ganging up hoping that it will give them the leg up they don't have. If you're older you'll have seen this play out over and over in the industry - the history of Unix vs. Windows NT from the 1990s was full of actions like this, networking is going through it again for the nth time (this time with UltraEthernet) and so on. OpenGl was probably the most successful approach, barely worked, and didn't help any of the players who were not on the road to victory already. Unix 95 didn't work, unix 98 didn't work, etc.

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

#66

Post by lacker »

buildbot wrote: post #33

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…

The funny thing to me is that so much of the "AI software ecosystem" is just PyTorch. You don't need to develop some new framework and make it popular. You don't need to support a zillion end libraries. Just literally support PyTorch.

If PyTorch worked fine on Intel GPUs, a lot of people would be happy to switch.

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

#67

Post by rafaelturk »

Intel's proposing the replacement of Nvidia CUDA across the entire industry is undeniably a bold move, yet it carries echoes of Steve Ballmer's dismissive stance towards the iPhone in its early days. At first glance, it might appear as a epic statement, but it seems to be of pure fear.

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

#68

Post by papichulo2023 »

buildbot wrote: post #33

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…

Wasnt Intel the biggest supporter of OpenCV? I dont know any open source heavely supported by Nvidia

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

#69

Post by pcwalton »

bartwr wrote: post #30
ttoinou wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with compute shaders ?

I shipped a dozen products with them (mostly video games), so there's nothing "wrong" that would make them unusable. But programming them and setting up the graphics pipe (and all the passes, structured buffers, compiling, binding, weird errors, and synchronization) is a huge PITA as compared to the convenience of CUDA. Compilers are way less mature, especially on some platforms cough . Some GPU capabilities are not…

These days, some game engines have done pretty well at making compute shaders easy to use (such as Bevy [1] -- disclaimer, I contribute to that engine). But telling the scientific/financial/etc. community that they need to run their code inside a game engine to get a decent experience is a hard sell. It's not a great situation compared to how easy it is on NVIDIA's stack.

[1]: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/blob/main/examples/shader...

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

#70

Post by lainga »

PeterisP wrote: post #50
bragr wrote: 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 lat…

Maybe the AMD device will just have to announce it's (KHTML, like Gecko).
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