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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'

#131

Post by vkazanov »

pjmlp wrote: post #117
Figs wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I used to play with these toys 7-8 years ago. We tried everything, and it was bad at it all.

Traditional compute? The cores were too weak.

Number crunching? Okay-ish but gpus were better.

Useless stuff.

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

#132

Post by JonChesterfield »

baq wrote: post #49
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.

This was true for Intel for at least 10 years and I’m pretty sure for much longer than that. It was probably true for nvidia for about as long as they exist. Hardware without software is just expensive sand. Every semiconductor company knows this. Intel was the one to perfect the whole package with x86 in the first place… In the GPU compute space CUDA is x86. It’s ubiquitous, de facto standard and will be disrupted.…

The stereotype is hardware engineers all think software is easy. So while semiconductor firms know software is important, they're often optimistic about the ease of creating it.

Cuda is enormous, very complicated and fits together relatively well. All the semiconductor startups have a business plan about being transparent drop in replacements for cuda systems, built by some tens of software engineers in a year or two. That only really makes sense if you've totally misjudged the problem difficulty.

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

#133

Post by ebb_earl_co »

ilaksh wrote: post #102
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.

Can you expand on this? This is my first time seeing this guy’s work

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

#134

Post by gmueckl »

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…

You might argue for forking off from glsl and SPIR-V for complex compute workloads, but lightweight, fast compilers for a simple language like glsl do solve issues for graphics. Some graphics use cases don't get around shipping a shader compiler to the user. The number of possible shader configurations is often either insanely large or just impossible to enumerate, so on the fly compilation is really the only thing you can do.

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

#135

Post by JonChesterfield »

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.

Well, that is what a GPU is. Cuda / openmp etc are attempts at conveniently programming a mixed cpu/gpu system.

If you don't want that, program the GPU directly in assembly or C++ or whatever. A kernel is a thread - program counter, register file, independent execution from the other threads.

There isn't a Linux kernel equivalent sitting between you and the hardware so it's very like bare metal x64 programming, but you could put a kernel abstraction on it if you wanted.

Core isn't very well defined, but if we go with "number of independent program counters live at the same time" it's a few thousand.

X64 cores are vaguely equivalent to GCN compute units, 100 or so if either in a 300W envelope. X64 has two threads and a load of branch prediction / speculation hardware. GCN has 80 threads and swaps between them each cycle. Same sort of idea, different allocation of silicon.

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

#136

Post by signatoremo »

ActionHank wrote: post #76
mi_lk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

His intent is “5 nodes in 4 years” - [0]. The goal is to reclaim the node leadership from TSMC by 2025.

They announced the first chips based on Intel 4 today, which is more or less equivalent to TSMC’s 5nm.

They may fail, but the goal is clear and ambitious.

[0] - https://www.xda-developers.com/intel-roadmap-2025-explainer/

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

#137

Post by nvm0n2 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #121
pjmlp wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Its purpose was to create compatibility between Unix vendors so developers could write software compatible with different flavors. The primary market for Unix vendors is servers, which to this day are still about CLI and daemons, and POSIX systems continue to have dominant market share in that market.

Arguably the dominant APIs in the server space are the cloud APIs not POSIX.

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

#138

Post by JonChesterfield »

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.

They've both implemented opencl. Nvidia has too. The industry could have built on that common language. Instead, it built on cuda, and complains that the other hardware vendors don't have cuda.

I attribute this to opencl being the common subset a bunch of companies could agree could be implemented. I wrote some code that compiles as cuda, opencl, C++ and openmp, and the entire exercise was repeatedly "what, opencl can't do that either? damn it".

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

#139

Post by pbronez »

ebb_earl_co wrote: post #133
ilaksh wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Can you expand on this? This is my first time seeing this guy’s work

He’s the main developer of Llama.cpp, which allows you to run a wide range of open-weights models on a wide range of non-NVIDIA processors.

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

#140

Post by AnthonyMouse »

paulddraper wrote: post #128
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think OP's point was less that the tech didn't work (e.g. OpenGL was fantastically successful) and that it didn't produce a good outcome for the "loser" companies that supported it.

The point of the open standard is to untether your prospective customers from the incumbent. That means nobody is going to monopolize that technology anymore, but that works out fine when it's not the thing you're trying to sell -- AMD and Intel aren't trying to sell software libraries, they're trying to sell GPUs.

And this strategy regularly works out for companies. It's Commoditize Your Complement.

If you're Intel you support Linux and other open source software so you can sell hardware that competes with vertically integrated vendors like DEC. This has gone very well for Intel -- proprietary RISC server architectures are basically dead, and Linux dominates much of the server market in which case they don't have to share their margins with Microsoft. The main survivor is IBM, which is another company that has embraced open standards. It might have also worked out for Sun but they failed to make competitive hardware, which is not optional.

We see this all over the place. Google's most successful "messaging service" is Gmail, using standard SMTP. It's rare to the point of notability for a modern internet service to use all proprietary networking protocols instead of standard HTTP and TCP and DNS, but many of them are extremely successful.

And some others are barely scraping by, but they exist, which they wouldn't if there wasn't a standard they could use instead of a proprietary system they were locked out of.

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