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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'

#261

Post by _7il4 »

latchkey wrote: post #188
frognumber wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Normally, I wouldn't do that, but this time I felt like both comments were intentionally inflammatory and then the context for my response was lost. "literally nothing" is also wrong given that they just had a large press announcement on Dec 6th (yt as part of my response below), where they spent 2 hours saying (and showing) they are serious. The second comment was made and then immediately deleted, in a way that was…

I deleted it because I was in an extremely bad mood and later realized it was simply wrong of me to post it and vent my unrelated frustration in those comments. I think it's in extremely bad taste to repost what I wrote when I made the clear choice to delete it.

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

#262

Post by flamedoge »

dheera wrote: post #170
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/whe…

thats what hip is though. a recompiler for cuda code. its not good enough for ptx assembly to amdgpu yet

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

#263

Post by flamedoge »

roenxi wrote: post #214
raincole wrote: post #208

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. 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 peopl…

AMD could use testers(cough clients i mean) like you. Jokes aside, please report bugs to rocm github..

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

#264

Post by goldenshale »

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…

Seriously, why don't they just dedicate a group to creating the best pytorch backend possible? Proving it there will gain researcher traction and prove that their hardware is worth porting the other stuff over to.

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

#265

Post by dahart »

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.

Apple might be sort-of trying to build the honking CPU, but it still requires different language extensions and a mix of different programming models.

And what you suggest could be done, but it would likely flop commercially if you made it today, which is why they aren’t doing it. SIMD machines are faster on homogenous workloads, by a lot. It would be a bummer to develop a CPU with thousands of cores that is still tens or hundreds of times slower than a comparably priced GPU.

SIMD isn’t going away anytime soon, or maybe ever. When the workload is embarrassingly parallel, it’s cheaper and more efficient to use SIMD over general purpose cores. Specialized chiplets and co-processors are on the rise too, co-inciding with the wane of Moore’s law; specialization is often the lowest hanging fruit for improving efficiency now.

There’s going to be plenty of demand for general programmers but maybe worth keeping in mind the kinds of opportunities that are opening up for people who can learn and develop special purpose hardware and software.

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

#266

Post by fnbr »

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…

You need performance in the high level libraries to match, on a flops/$ basis. That’s “it”. That’s easier said than done, though. Even google’s TPUs still struggle to match H100s at flops/$, and they’re really annoying to use unless you’re using Jax.

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

#267

Post by [deleted] »

lmm wrote: post #175
latchkey wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. They're having to announce it so much because people are rightly sceptical. Talk is cheap, and their software has sucked for years. Have they given concrete proof of their commitment, e.g. they've spent X dollars or hired Y people to work on…

[deleted]

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

#268

Post by viewtransform »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #62
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…

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…

AMD made a presentation on their AI software strategy at Microsoft Ignite two weeks ago. Worth a watch for the slides and live demo

https://youtu.be/7jqZBTduhAQ?t=61

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

#269

Post by _8j50 »

anon291 wrote: post #259
_8j50 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel/amd create a cuda compatible api, for cheaper.

Cuds api and language are easy. Nvidia has dozens of cuda offshoot projects that are harder.

If it's easy why don't they support it instead of watch billions of dollars fly away I wonder. If whatever cuda program you build would run the same on intel or amd, do those offshoot projects really matter?

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

#270

Post by ilaksh »

fl0id wrote: post #202
pbronez wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

but it's all inference, and most of Nvidias moat is in training afaik.

There is an example of training https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/tree/1f0bccb27929e261...

But that's absolutely false about the Nvidia moat being only training. Llama.cpp makes it far more practical run inference on a variety of devices. Including ones with or without Nvidia hardware.

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