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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'

#91

Post by amadeuspagel »

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…

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

How many programmers one can employ is determined by profits, and Nvidia has monopoly profits thanks to CUDA, while "the entire industry" can at best hope to create some commiditized alternative to CUDA. Companies with real market power can beat entire industries of commodity manufacturers, Apple is the prime example.

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

#92

Post by hjabird »

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...

SYCL is gaining traction, especially in the HPC community since it can target AMD, Nvidia and Intel hardware with one codebase. A fun fact is the GROMACS (a major application for molecular dynamics, and big consumer of HPC time) recommends SYCL for running on AMD hardware!

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

#93

Post by bragr »

kaelinl wrote: post #87
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

I haven't used it personally, but my understanding is that AMD/ROCm-accelerated backends for PyTorch overload the "cuda" device and module so that ROCm shows up as CUDA for feature testing. They want to make a transition seamless, and lots of existing code checks for CUDA, so they do what's necessary to make that existing code run.

Which tools actually pull down those packages though? If anything that's a counter point to the Intel CEO: industry is adopting CUDA as the defacto standard.

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

#94

Post by zozbot234 »

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.

PyTorch includes some Vulkan compat already (though mostly tested on Android, not on desktop/server platforms), and they're sort of planning to work on OpenCL 3.0 compat, which would in turn lead to broad-based hardware support via Mesa's RustiCL driver.

(They don't advertise this as "support" because they have higher standards for what that term means. PyTorch includes a zillion different "operators" and some of them might be unimplemented still. Besides performance is still lacking compared to CUDA, Rocm or Metal on leading hardware - so only useful for toy models.)

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

#95

Post by hjabird »

pjmlp wrote: post #28
sorenjan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

SYCL builds on top of OpenCL, it is basically the reboot of OpenCL C++, after OpenCL 2.0 SPIR failure. Yet another example on how Intel and AMD failed to take up on CUDA.

SYCL isn't based on OpenCL.

SYCL (SYCL-2020 spec) supports multiple backends, including Nvidia's CUDA, AMD's HIP, OpenCL, Intel's Level-zero, and also running on the host CPU. This can either be done with Intel's DPC++ w/ Codeplay's plugins, or using AdaptiveCpp (aka. hipSYCL, aka openSYCL). OpenCL is just another backend.

It is also a very long way from OpenCL C++. The code is a single C++ file, and you don't need to write any special kernel language. The vast majority of SYCL is just C++, so -if you avoid a couple of features- you can use SYCL in library-only form without even any special compiler! This is possible for instance with AdaptiveCpp.

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

#96

Post by AnthonyMouse »

foobiekr wrote: post #64
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) an…

You're just listing the ones that didn't knock it out of the park.

TCP/IP completely displaced IPX to the point that most people don't even remember what it was. Nobody uses WINS anymore, even Microsoft uses DNS. It's rare to find an operating system that doesn't implement the POSIX API.

The past is littered with the corpses of proprietary technologies displaced by open standards. Because customers don't actually want vendor-locked technology. They tolerate it when it's the only viable alternative, but make the open option good and the proprietary one will be on its way out.

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

#98

Post by zozbot234 »

hjabird wrote: post #95
pjmlp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SYCL builds on top of OpenCL, it is basically the reboot of OpenCL C++, after OpenCL 2.0 SPIR failure. Yet another example on how Intel and AMD failed to take up on CUDA.

SYCL isn't based on OpenCL. SYCL (SYCL-2020 spec) supports multiple backends, including Nvidia's CUDA, AMD's HIP, OpenCL, Intel's Level-zero, and also running on the host CPU. This can either be done with Intel's DPC++ w/ Codeplay's plugins, or using AdaptiveCpp (aka. hipSYCL, aka openSYCL). OpenCL is just another backend. It is also a very long way from OpenCL C++. The code is a single C++ file, and you don't need t…

It's pretty much based on the same underlying featureset. Which is why trying to target Vulkan Compute from it is messy enough, whereas OpenCL is a natural target.

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

#99

Post by roenxi »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #71
roenxi wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I actually find that a really interesting question with a really interesting answer - the scaling properties of large groups of people are unintuitive. In this case, my guess would be high market complexity, and the entire userbase to ignore that complexity in favour of 1-2 vendors with simple and cheap options. So the market overall will just settle on de-facto standards.

Of course, based on what we see right now that standard would be Nvidia's CUDA; but while CUDA is impressive I don't think running neural nets requires that level of complexity. We're not talking about GUIs which are one of the stickiest and most complicated blocks of software we know about, or complex platform-specific operations. I'd expect that the need for specialist libraries to do inference to go away in time and CUDA to be mainly useful for researching GPU applications to new problems. Training will likely just come down to raw ops/second in hardware rather than software.

It isn't like this stuff can't already run on other cards. AMD cards can run stable diffusion or LLMs. The issue is just that AMD drivers tend to crash. That is simultaneously a huge and a tiny problem - if they focus on it it won't be around for long. CUDA is an advantage, but not a moat.

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

#100

Post by CamperBob2 »

TuringNYC wrote: post #85

I can imagine Steve Ballmer say something like that about Linux

If history is any guide, Ballmer would dismiss it as communism or something random like that, and then go on the Today Show and yuk it up, and then, inexplicably, he would still have a job when he got back to Redmond.
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