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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'

#111

Post by AnthonyMouse »

latchkey wrote: post #109
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

RX570 is going to do ML faster than a typical desktop CPU. That's all you need for the person who has one to want to use it for Llama or Stable Diffusion, and then want to improve the software for the thing they're now using.

Not everything is a huge datacenter.

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

#112

Post by latchkey »

PeterisP wrote: post #47
latchkey wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

They did recently add support for 7900xt

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Radeon-RX-7900-XT-ROCm-PyTorch

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

#113

Post by AnthonyMouse »

julienfr112 wrote: post #110
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

Profit is revenue minus costs. Investment is costs. If you're reinvesting everything you take in your current-year profit would be zero because you're making large investments in the future.

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

#114

Post by spacemanspiff01 »

singhrac wrote: post #106
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.

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 see…

They could compete on ram, if the software was there. Just having a low cost alternative to the 4060ti would allow them to break into the student/hobbies/open source market.

I tried the a770, but returned it. Half the stuff does not work. They have the CPU side and GPU development on different branches (GPU seems to be ~6 months behind CPU) and often you have to compile it yourself, (if you want torchvision or torchaudio) it also currently on 2.0.1 of pytorch so somewhat lagging, and does not have most of the performance analysis software available. You also, do need to modify your pytorch code, often more than just replacing cuda for xpu as the device. They are also doing all development internally, then pushing intermittently to public. A lot of this would not be as bad if there was a better idea of feature timeline, or if they made their CI public. (Trying to build it myself involved a extremely hacky bash script, that inevitably failed halfway through.)

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

#115

Post by pjmlp »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #96
foobiekr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wan…

> It's rare to find an operating system that doesn't implement the POSIX API.

Except that it has barelly improved beyond CLI and daemons, still thinks terminals are the only hardware, everything else that matters isn't part of it, not even more modern networking protocols that aren't exposed in socket configurations.

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

#117

Post by pjmlp »

Figs wrote: post #105
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.

It was called Larrabee and XeonPhi, they botched it, and the only thing left from that effort is AVX.

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

#118

Post by latchkey »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #111
latchkey wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

RX570 is going to do ML faster than a typical desktop CPU. That's all you need for the person who has one to want to use it for Llama or Stable Diffusion, and then want to improve the software for the thing they're now using. Not everything is a huge datacenter.

What is nonsense is that you think that AMD should dedicate limited resources to supporting a 6 year old card with only 4-8gb of ram (the ones I ran had 8).

I didn't say they are bad cards... they are just outdated at this point.

If you really want to put your words to action... let me know. I'll put you in touch with someone to buy 130,000 of these cards, and you can sell them to every college kid out there... until then, I wouldn't hold AMD over the coals for not wanting to put effort into something like that when they are already lagging behind on their AI efforts as it is. I'd personally rather see them catch up a bit first.

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

#119

Post by pjmlp »

mschuetz wrote: post #75
ttoinou wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ironically, most people use HLSL with Vulkan, because Khronos doesn't have a budget nor the people to improve GLSL.

So yet another thing where Khronos APIs are dependent on DirectX evolution.

It used to be that AMD and NVidia would first implement new stuff on DirectX in collaboration with Microsoft, have them as extensions in OpenGL, and eventually as standard features.

Now even the shading language is part of it.

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

#120

Post by _7il4 »

latchkey wrote: post #77
UncleOxidant wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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