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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'

#101

Post by AnthonyMouse »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #91
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…

> 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.

AMD and Intel together have more revenue than Nvidia, even without considering any other player in the industry or any community contributions they get from being open source.

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

#102

Post by ilaksh »

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…

Nvidia is probably ten times more scared of this guy https://github.com/ggerganov than Intel or AMD.

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

#103

Post by singhrac »

shihab wrote: post #83
lacker wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But you can't support Pytorch without a proper foundation in place. They don't need to support zillion _end_ libraries, sure, but they do need to have at least a very good set of standard libraries, equivalent of Cublas, Curand etc. And they don't. My work recently had me working with rocRAND (Rocm's answer to Curand). It was frankly pretty bad- the design, performance (50% slower in places that don't make any sense…

Generating random numbers is a bit complicated! I wrote some of the samplers in Pytorch (probably replaced by now) and some of the underlying pseudo-random algorithms that work correctly in parallel are not exactly easy... running the same PRNG with the same seed on all your cores will produce the same result, which is probably NOT what you want from your API.

But, to be honest, it's not that hard either. I'm surprised their API is 2x slower, Philox is 10 years old now and I don't think there's a licensing fee?

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

#104

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Now, but that isn't how it started after the OpenCL 3.0 reboot, where 3.0 == 1.0.

Also some of that work, we have to thank Codeplay for, before their acquistion from Intel.

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

#105

Post by Figs »

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…

I wish AMD or Intel would just ship a giant honking CPU with 1000s of cores that doesn't need any special purpose programming languages to utilize. Screw co-processors. Screw trying to make yet another fucked up special purpose language -- whether that's C/C++-with-quirks or a half-assed Python clone or whatever. Nuts to that. Just ship more cores and let me use real threads in regular programming languages.

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

#106

Post by singhrac »

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.

Just to point out it does, kind of: https://github.com/intel/intel-extension-for-pytorch

I've asked before if they'll merge it back into PyTorch main and include it in the CI, not sure if they've done that yet.

In this case I think the biggest bottleneck is just that they don't have a fast enough card that can compete with having a 3090 or an A100. And Gaudi is stuck on a different software platform which doesn't seem as flexible as an A100.

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

#107

Post by AnthonyMouse »

latchkey wrote: post #81
PeterisP wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

People argue for ROCm to support older cards because that is all they have accessible to them. AMD has lagged on getting expensive cards into the hands of end users because they've focused only on building super computers. I predict that access to the newer cards is a more likely scenario. Right now, you can't rent a MI250 or even MI300x, but that is going to change quickly. Azure is going to have them, as well as ot…

> People argue for ROCm to support older cards because that is all they have accessible to them.

What they really need is to support the less expensive cards, of which the older cards are a large subset. There are a lot of people who will make contributions and fix bugs if they can actually use the thing. Some CS student at the university has to pay tuition and therefore only has an old RX570, and that isn't going to change in the next couple years, but that kind of student could fix some of the software bugs currently preventing the company from selling more expensive GPUs to large institutions. If the stack supported their hardware.

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

#108

Post by nineteen999 »

hmottestad wrote: post #8
znpy wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not move away from confluence as well?

Didn't we all do that when they discontinued on-premise and then followed that up with a massive data loss in their hosted instance.

That's the way we do SaaS over here in Australia. Kicks tyres. She'll be right mate.

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

#109

Post by latchkey »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #107
latchkey wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People argue for ROCm to support older cards because that is all they have accessible to them. AMD has lagged on getting expensive cards into the hands of end users because they've focused only on building super computers. I predict that access to the newer cards is a more likely scenario. Right now, you can't rent a MI250 or even MI300x, but that is going to change quickly. Azure is going to have them, as well as ot…

> People argue for ROCm to support older cards because that is all they have accessible to them. What they really need is to support the less expensive cards, of which the older cards are a large subset. There are a lot of people who will make contributions and fix bugs if they can actually use the thing. Some CS student at the university has to pay tuition and therefore only has an old RX570, and that isn't going to…

I ran 130,000 RX470-580 cards, so I know them quite well. Those cards aren't going to do anything useful with AI/ML. That technology is just too old and things are moving too quickly. It isn't just the card, but the mobo, disks, ram, networking...

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

#110

Post by julienfr112 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #101
amadeuspagel wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

AMD and Intel together have more revenue than Nvidia, even without considering any other player in the industry or any community contributions they get from being open source.

it's not about revenue, it's about investment. It is closely related to future profit. Not so much to current revenue ...
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