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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'

#71

Post by droopyEyelids »

roenxi wrote: post #55
brindlejim wrote: post #15

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.

Gelsinger is saying "the entire industry" and that seems likely to be a simple fact. Every single player, other than Nvidia, has an incentive to minimise the importance of CUDA as a proprietary technology. That is a lot more programmers than Nvidia can afford to employ. Even if Intel falls over its own feet, the incentives to bring in more chip manufacturers are huge. It'll happen, the only question is whether the ti…

I'm not an expert here, but with:

> That is a lot more programmers than Nvidia can afford to employ

How do you account for the increased complexity those developers have to deal with in an environment where there are multiple companies with conflicting incentives working on the standard?

My gut reaction is to worry if this is one of those problems like "9 people working together can't have a baby in one month".

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

#72

Post by shihab »

sorenjan wrote: post #10
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.

SYCL is a better analog to Cuda than OpenCL, and Intel have their own implementation of that. Don't really see anyone writing anything in SYCL though, and when I looked into trying it out it was a bit of a mess with different implementations, each supporting their own subset of OSs and hardware. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/tools/onea...

> Don't really see anyone writing anything in SYCL though

My work involves writing software that runs on many GPU platforms at once. So far we have been going through the Kokkos route, but SYCL is looking pretty good to me recent days. There is some consolidation happening in this space (Codeplay gave up working on their own implementation and merged with Intel). It was pretty easy to setup on my Linux machine for Nvidia card. Documentation is very good and professional, unlike AMD's, which can be frankly horrible at times. And Intel has a good track record with software.

I genuinely believe if someone is going to dethrone CUDA, at this point SYCL (oneAPI) is a far more likely candidate than Rocm/HIP.

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

#73

Post by drexlspivey »

mi_lk wrote: post #26
brindlejim wrote: post #15

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.

You don't know Pat Gelsinger do you?

or Lisa Su

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

#74

Post by latchkey »

lacker wrote: post #66
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.

This is a big reason why AMD did this deal with PyTorch...

https://pytorch.org/blog/experience-power-pytorch-2.0/

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

#75

Post by mschuetz »

ttoinou wrote: post #19
bartwr wrote: post #16

If they create a better tool chain, ecosystem, and programming experience than CUDA and compatible with all computational platforms at their peak performance - awesome! Everyone wins! Until then, it's a bit funny claim, especially considering what a failure OpenCL was (programmer's experience and fading support). Or trying to do GPGPU with compute shaders in DX/GL/Vulkan. Are they really "motivated"? Because they had…

What's wrong with compute shaders ?

It's kinda like building Legos vs building actual Skyscrapers. The gap between compute shaders and CUDA is massive. At least it feels massive because CUDA has some key features that compute shaders lack, and which make it so much easier to build complex, powerful and fast applications.

One of the features that would get compute shaders far ahead compared to now would be pointers and pointer casting - Just let me have a byte buffer and easily cast the bytes to whatever I want. Another would be function pointers. These two are pretty much the main reason I had to stop doing a project in OpenGL/Vulkan, and start using CUDA. There are so many more, however, that make life easier like cooperative groups with device-wide sync, being able to allocate a single buffer with all the GPU memory, recursion, etc.

Khronos should start supporting C++20 for shaders (basically what CUDA is) and stop the glsl or spirv nonsense.

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

#76

Post by ActionHank »

mi_lk wrote: post #26
brindlejim wrote: post #15

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.

You don't know Pat Gelsinger do you?

We're in 2023, he's been in the CEO seat for 2 years already. He's had plenty of time to show the world his intent and where they are going. All that has happened is they launched a very mid GPU and have yielded more ground to AMD. Meanwhile AMD continue to eat away at Intel's talent pool, market share, and still managed to push into the AI space.

He should be sweating.

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

#77

Post by latchkey »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #62
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 th…

Literally, every single announcement (and action) coming out of AMD these days is that they are serious about the software. I don't see any reason at this point to doubt them.

The larger issue is that they need to fix the access to their high end GPUs. You can't rent a MI250... or even a MI300x (yet, I'm working on that myself!). But that said, you can't rent an H100 either... there are none available.

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

#78

Post by Keyframe »

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…

Guys need to do ye olde embrace, extend maneuver. What wine did, what Javas of the world did. CUDA driver API and CUDA runtime API either translation or implementation layer that offers compatibility and speed. I see no way around it at this point, for now.

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

#79

Post by mschuetz »

fluxem wrote: post #24
ttoinou wrote: 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.

A subset that lacks pointers, which makes compute shaders a toy language next to CUDA.

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

#80

Post by MangoCoffee »

It's Intel. I take whatever Intel says with a grant of salt.

Intel pushed 14nm to 14nm+++ and used backhand tactics to push OEMs not to use AMD. how long did Intel stay on some trend until it fizzled for Intel?

while Nvidia has been working on CUDA forever?

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