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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'

#161

Post by tester756 »

brindlejim wrote: post #158
tester756 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>finds a CEO who is as technical and strategic, as opposed to the bean-counters Did you just call Gelsinger a "non-technical"? wow, how out of touch with reality >Gelsinger first joined Intel at 18 years old in 1979 just after earning an associate degree from Lincoln Tech.[9] He spent much of his career with the company in Oregon,[12] where he maintains a home.[13] In 1987, he co-authored his first book about program…

Intel spent more than a decade under Otellini, Krzanich and Swan. Bean counters. Gelsinger was appointed out of desperation, but the problem runs much deeper. I doubt that culture is gone. It has already cost Intel many opportunities.

>Intel spent more than a decade under Otellini, Krzanich and Swan. Bean counters.

It still doesn't change mistake in your original message.

>Gelsinger was appointed out of desperation, but the problem runs much deeper.

How much "much deeper"? VPs? middle level managers? engineers?

The example goes from the top, so if he can change the culture at the top, it will eventually get deeper.

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

#162

Post by jorvi »

pgeorgi wrote: post #88
ActionHank wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> for 2 years already ... All that has happened is they launched a very mid GPU Hardware development cycles are closer to 5 years. So while he might have gotten some adjustments done on the designs so far, if he turned the ship around it'll take a while longer to materialize. The software side is more agile, so any tea leave reading to discern what Gelsinger's strategy looks like is best done over there.

Not only that, for a “first” (not sure how much of Larrabee was salvaged) discrete GPU attempt, Intel Arc is fantastic. Look at the first GPUs Nvidia and ATI launched.

It’s only when you put them up against Nvidia and AMDs comes-with-decades-of-experience offerings that Intel’s GPUs seem less than stellar.

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

#163

Post by singhrac »

spacemanspiff01 wrote: post #114
singhrac wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 torcha…

This is pretty disappointing to hear. I’m really surprised they can’t even get a clean build script for users, let alone integrate into the regular Pytorch releases.

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

#164

Post by lvl102 »

Intel has not done anything in the past ten years. They wasted billions on barely functional GPUs. They sat on CPU monopoly and slowed innovations while churning out profit.

At least Nvidia built something to facilitate advances in AI. They made a bold bet that paid off.

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

#165

Post by ndneighbor »

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.

OneAPI isn't bad for PyTorch, the performance isn't there yet but you can tell it's an extremely top priority for Intel.

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

#166

Post by frognumber »

latchkey wrote: post #130
_7il4 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What _7il4 removed were these two comments: "AMD is not serious, and neither is Intel for that matter. Their software are piles of proprietary garbage fires. They may say they are serious but literally nothing indicates they are." "Yes, and ROCm also doesn't work on anything non-AMD. In fact it doesn't even work on all recent AMD gpus. T"

It's not too polite to repost what people removed. Errors on the internet shouldn't haunt people forever.

However, my experience is that the comments about AMD are spot-on, with the exception of the word "proprietary."

Intel hasn't gotten serious yet, and has a good track record in other domains (compilers, numerical libraries, etc.). They've been flailing for a while, but I'm curious if they'll come up with something okay.

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

#167

Post by jauntywundrkind »

raphlinus wrote: post #156
mschuetz wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Vulkan 1.3 has pointers, thanks to buffer device address[1]. It took a while to get there, and earlier pointer support was flawed. I also don't know of any major applications that use this. Modern Vulkan is looking pretty good now. Cooperative matrix multiplication has also landed (as a widely supported extension), and I think it's fair to say it's gone past OpenCL. Whether we get significant adoption of all this I t…

Is IREE the main runtime doing Vulkan or are there others? Who should we be listening to (oh wise @raphlinus)?

It's been awesome seeing folks like Keras 3.0 kicking out broad Intercompatibility across JAX, TF, Pytorch, powered by flexible executuon engines. Looking forward to seeing more Vulkan based runs getting socialized benchmarked & compared. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38446353

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

#168

Post by lvl102 »

alecco wrote: post #89

It looks like both Pat Gelsinger and Lisa Su have no clue about software and can't even delegate this. They expect "the community" to do the software for their extremely complicated hardware. If you see the presentations by Nvidia's Bill Daly [1] it shows they've been evolving hardware and software together. The CUDA programming model was a massive bet a long time ago. And they deservedly won ML/AI. Unless Intel and…

It’s not that they don’t understand the problem. It’s just that there’s a massive land grab right now and no one wants to waste resources reinventing the wheels (of parallel computing) which is actually a lot harder than people make it out to be.

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

#169

Post by Const-me »

raphlinus wrote: post #157
Const-me wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have recently published an AI-related open-source project entirely based on compute shaders https://github.com/Const-me/Cgml and I’m super happy with the workflow. Possible to implement very complicated things without compiling a single line of C++, the software is mostly in C#. > setting up the graphics pipe I’ve picked D3D11, as opposed to D3D12 or Vulkan. The 11 is significantly higher level, and much easier to…

I understand why you've picked D3D11, but people have to understand that comes with serious limitations. There are no subgroups, which also means no cooperative matrix multiplication ("tensor cores"). For throughput in machine learning inference in particular, there's no way D3D11 can compete with either CUDA or a more modern compute shader stack, such as one based on Vulkan 1.3.

> no subgroups

Indeed, in D3D they are called “wave intrinsics” and require D3D12. But that’s IMO a reasonable price to pay for hardware compatibility.

> no cooperative matrix multiplication

Matrix multiplication compute shader which uses group shared memory for cooperative loads: https://github.com/Const-me/Cgml/blob/master/Mistral/Mistral...

> tensor cores

When running inference on end-user computers, for many practical applications users don’t care about throughput. They only have a single audio stream / chat / picture being generated, their batch size is a small number often just 1, and they mostly care about latency, not throughput. Under these conditions inference is guaranteed to bottleneck on memory bandwidth, as opposed to compute. For use cases like that, tensor cores are useless.

> there's no way D3D11 can compete with either CUDA

My D3D11 port of Whisper outperformed original CUDA-based implementation running on the same GPU: https://github.com/Const-me/Whisper/

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

#170

Post by dheera »

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…

Both AMD and Intel (and Qualcomm to some degree) just don't seem to get how you beat NVIDIA.

If they want to grab a piece of NVIDIA's pie, they do NOT need to build something better than an H100 right away. There are a million consumers who are happy with a 4090 or 4080 or even 3080 and would love for something that's equally capable at half price, and moreover, actually available for purchase, from Amazon/NewEgg/wherever, and without a "call for pricing" button. AMD and Intel are much better at making their chips available for purchase than NVIDIA. But that's not enough.

What they DO need to do to take a piece of NVIDIA's pie is to build "intelcc", "amdcc", and "qualcommcc" that accept the EXACT SAME code that people feed to "nvcc" so that it compiles as-is, with not a single function prototype being different, no questions asked, and works on the target hardware. It needs to just be a drop-in replacement for CUDA.

When that is done, recompiling PyTorch and everything else to use other chips will be trivial.

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