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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'

#211

Post by icelancer »

eyegor wrote: post #196
selfhoster11 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of VRAM is the absolute killer USP for the current large AI model hobbyist segment. Something that had just as much VRAM as a 3090 but at half the speed and half the price would sell like hot cakes.

You are describing the ebay market for used nvidia tesla cards. The k80, p40, or m40 are widely available and sell for ~$100 with 24gb vram. The m10 even has 32gb! The problem for ai hobbyists is it won't take long to realize how many apis use the "optical flow" pathways and so on nvidia they'll only run at acceptable speeds on rtx hardware, assuming they run at all. Cuda versions are pinned to hardware to some exten…

Yep. I have a fleet of P40s that are good at what they do (Whisper ASR primarily) but anything even remotely new... nah. fp16 support is missing so you need P100 cards, and usually that means you are accepting 16GB of VRAM rather than 24GB.

Still some cool hardware.

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

#212

Post by Qwertious »

frognumber wrote: post #166
latchkey wrote: post #130

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 somethin…

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

IMO the comment deletion system handles deleting your own comment wrong - it should grey out the comment and strikethrough it, and label it "comment disavowed" or something with the username removed, but it shouldn't actually delete the comment.

Deleting the comment damages the history, and makes the comment chain hard to follow.

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

#213

Post by kelipso »

tormeh wrote: post #194
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…

Open source generally wins once the state of the art has stopped moving. When a field is still experiencing rapid change closed source solutions generally do better than open source ones. Until we somehow figure out a relatively static set of requirements for running and training LLMs I wouldn’t expect any open source solution to win.

That doesn't really make sense. Pretty much all LLMs are trained in pytorch, which is open source. LLMs only reached the state it is now because many academic conferences insisted that paper submissions have open source code attached to it. So much of the ML/AI ecosystem is open source. Pretty much only CUDA is not open source.

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

#214

Post by roenxi »

raincole wrote: post #208
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…

> 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. I mean, this statement is technically true, but it's true for any proprietary technology. If things work like this then we won't have any industry…

I suppose, but it is a practical matter here. CUDA is a library for memory management and matrix math targeted at researchers, hyper-productive devs and enthusiasts. It looks like it'll be highly capital intensive, requiring hardware that runs in some of the biggest, nastiest, OSS-friendliest data-centres in the world who all design their own silicon. The generations of AMD GPU that matter - the ones out and on people's machines - aren't supported for high quality GPGPU compute right now. Alright, that means CUDA is a massive edge right now. But that doesn't look like a defensible moat.

I was interested in being part of this AI thing, what stopped me wasn't lack of CUDA, it was that my AMD card reliably crashes under load doing compute workloads. Then when I see George Hotz having a go, the problem isn't lack of CUDA; it was that his AMD card crashed under compute workloads (technically I think it was running the demo suite). That is only anecdata, but 2 for 2 is almost a significant number of people with the small number of players and lack of big money in AI historically.

Lacking CUDA specifically might be a problem here, but I've never seen AMD fall down at that point. I've only ever see them fall down at basic driver bugs. And I don't see how CUDA would matter all that much because I can implement most of what I need math-wise in code. If I see a specific list of common complaints maybe I'll change my mind, but I'm just not detecting where the huge complexity is. I can see CUDA maintaining an edge for years because it is convenient, but I really don't see how it can stay essential. The card can already do the workload in theory and in practice assuming the code path doesn't bug out. I really don't need CUDA, all I want rocBLAS to not crash. I suspect that'd go a long way in practice.

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

#215

Post by ksec »

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.

>Gelsinger was appointed out of desperation,

You will need to observe Intel more closely. It was not out of desperation. And Gelsinger is more technical and strategic than you implies.

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

#216

Post by dopeboy »

nemothekid wrote: post #63
jonahrd wrote: post #51

I absolutely understand why NVIDIA is incentivized to maintain CUDA dominance, and I absolutely understand that within these market parameters, AMD/Intel/others have dropped the ball. However it's worth noting that in the end, it's the consumer that loses out when these technical/capability moats maintain a de facto sort of monopoly on certain use cases.

> However it's worth noting that in the end, it's the consumer that loses out when these technical/capability moats maintain a de facto sort of monopoly on certain use cases. I think in most cases you are right, but for CUDA, the consumer is winning. CUDA isn't some special secret complex algorithm just for nvidia GPUs. nvidia just spent a decade giving a fuck about the developer experience across a wide range of ind…

Well said. It sounds like NVIDIA went through the hard work of listening and building for years (decades!). I can imagine some top level execs looking at that success and looking to replicate the tech, studying the use cases that customers want.

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

#217

Post by ksec »

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.

>All that has happened is they launched a very mid GPU and have yielded more ground to AMD.

And you dont blame that to Raja Koduri but to Gelsinger?

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

#218

Post by dopeboy »

hedgehog wrote: post #56
PeterisP wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, can you elaborate on what exactly you observed/felt from Intel that makes you skeptical about these claims?

Across the semi industry the prevailing attitude is that the chip is the important part and software is a nice add-on that you build as a one-off or that "the community" will support. This has changed much more slowly than I thought it would given NVIDIA's demonstration of what is possible when software is viewed as a core part of the product. Claiming the CUDA moat is weak suggests that it's business as usual over t…

Does the solution lie in genuinely investing in a CUDA alternative?

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

#219

Post by joe_the_user »

TheAlchemist wrote: post #149

Can anybody with a deep knowledge of the AI space, explain to me what's the real moat of CUDA ? It's clear to everybody that it's not the hardware but the software - which is the CUDA ecosystem. I've played a bit in the past with ML, but at the level of understanding I had - training some models, tweaking things, I was using higher level libraries and as far as I know, it's pretty much an if statement in those librar…

I see the situation as a lot like the original IBM PC wars. Originally you had the IBM PC and a bunch of "compatibles" that weren't drop-in compatible but half-assed compatible - many programs needed to be re-compiled to run on them. And other large American companies made these - they didn't expect to commodify the PC, they just wanted a small piece of a big market.

The actual PC clones, pure drop-in compatibles, were made in Taiwan and they took over the market. Which is to say that large companies don't want a commodified market where prices are low and everyone competes on a level playing field - which is what "seamless transition" gets you. So that's why none of these companies are working to create that.

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

#220

Post by tw04 »

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…

> but nobody gets that it's the software and ecosystem.

Really? Because I’m confident Intel knows exactly what it’s about. Have you looked at their contributions to Linux and open source in general? They employ thousands of software developers.

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