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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'

#311

Post by vkazanov »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #204
aseipp wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some observations: - Very bad performance at existing x86 workloads, so a major selling point was basically not there in practice, because extracting any meaningful performance required a software rewrite anyway. This was an important adoption criteria; if they outright said "All your existing workloads are compatible, but will perform like complete dogshit", why would anyone bother? Compatibility was a big selling p…

I don't disagree anywhere but I don't think any of these statements actually condemn Xeon Phi outright. It didn't work at the time, and doing it with so little software support to tile out workloads well was a big & possibly bad gambit, but I'm so unsure we can condemn the architecture. There seems to be so few folks who made good attempts and succeeded or failed & wrote about it. I tend to think there was tons of un…

I don't thing anybody seriously considered Phi's for generic compute or something.

Most experimenters saw it as a way to have something GPU-like in terms of raw power but with no limitations charateristic of SIMT's. Like, slightly different code paths for threads doing number crunching or something.

But it turns out that it's easier to force everything into a matrix. Or a very big matrix. Or a very-very-very big matrix.

And then see what sticks.

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

#312

Post by bell-cot »

selimthegrim wrote: post #243
alexey-salmin wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Otellini wasn't an engineer but still he made the historical x86-mac deal, pushed like crazy for x86-android and owned the top500 with xeon phi. The downfall began with Krzanich who had no goal besides raising the stock price and no strategy other than cutting long-term projects and other costs that got in the way. What a shame.

Krzanich started out as an engineer

"Optimize for Wall Street" is a disease to which even the seemingly-best minds can succumb.

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

#313

Post by rini17 »

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.

AVX might be going the right direction, even if the AVX512 was stretch too far. I was impressed by llama.cpp performance boost when AVX1 support was added.

There's no intrinsic reason why multiplying matrices requires massive parallelism, in principle it could be done on few cores plus good management of ALUs/memory bandwidth/caches.

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

#314

Post by epolanski »

seanalltogether wrote: post #299
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.

Nvidia GPU moat has always been their software. Game ready drivers are a big deal for each AAA game launch and they always help to push their fps numbers on reviewers charts. I feel like for 20 years I've been reading people online complain about ATI/AMD drivers and how they want to go back to an Nvidia card the next chance they get.

This hasn't been true for more than a decade at this point, and in fact AMD tends to have the better driver support, especially long term.

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

#315

Post by bartimus »

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 would summarize it as follows: Nvidia has taken the bottom-up approach. From (parallel processing) hardware to their development environment developed upon it. The competition (Intel) appears to be attempting to break into the market using a top-down approach. Hoping to get some share of the inference market (using their sequential processing hardware). Basically leveraging on the innovations happening at Nvidia. CUDA will always remain one step ahead.

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

#316

Post by pas »

seanhunter wrote: post #251
ndneighbor wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But this is the the thing. Speaking as someone who dabbles in this area rather than any kind of expert, it’s baffling to me that people like Intel are making press releases and public statements rather than (I don’t know) putting in the frikkin work to make performance of the one library that people actually use decent. You have a massive organization full of gazillions of engineers many of whom are really excellent.…

You know how it works. The same busybodies who are putting out this useless noise releases are the ones who squandered Intel's lead, and now are patting themselves on the back for figuring out that with this they'll again be on top for sure!

There was a post on HN a few months ago about how Nvidia's CEO still has meetings with engineers in the trenches. Contrast that with what we know of Intel, which is not much good, and a lot of bad. (That they are notoriously not-well-paying, because they were riding on their name recognition.)

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

#317

Post by codetrotter »

rightbyte wrote: post #306
shihab wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can't support Pytorch without a proper foundation in place. They don't need to support zillion _end_ libraries, sure, but they do need to have at least a very good set of standard libraries, equivalent of Cublas, Curand etc. And they don't. My work recently had me working with rocRAND (Rocm's answer to Curand). It was frankly pretty bad- the design, performance (50% slower in places that don't make any sense…

> generating random numbers You can't bench implementations of random numbers against each other purely on execution speed. A better algorithm (better statistical properties) will be slower.

I have the fastest random number generator in the world. And it works in parallel too!

https://i.stack.imgur.com/gFZCK.jpg

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

#318

Post by imtringued »

raphlinus wrote: post #178
zozbot234 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How feasible would it be to target Vulkan 1.3 or such from standard SYCL (as first seen in Sylkan, for earlier Vulkan Compute)? Is it still lacking the numerical properties for some math functions that OpenCL and SYCL seem to expect?

That's a really good question. I don't know enough about SYCL to be able to tell you the answer, but I've heard rumblings that it may be the thing to watch. I think there may be some other limitations, for example SYCL 2020 depends on unified shared memory, and that is definitely not something you can depend on in compute shader land (in some cases you can get some of it, for example with resizable BAR, but it depend…

Unified shared memory is an intel specific extension of OpenCL.

SYCL builds on top of OpenCL so you need to know the history of OpenCL. OpenCL 2.0 introduced shared virtual memory, which is basically the most insane way of doing it. Even with coarse grained shared virtual memory, memory pages can transparently migrate from host to device on access. This is difficult to implement in hardware. The only good implementations were on iGPUs simply because the memory is already shared. No vendor, not even AMD could implement this demanding feature. You would need full cache coherence from the processor to the GPU, something that is only possible with something like CXL and that one isn't ready even to this day.

So OpenCL 2.x was basically dead. It has unimplementable mandatory features so nobody wrote software for OpenCL 2.x.

Khronos then decided to make OpenCL 3.0, which gets rid of all these difficult to implement features so vendors can finally move on.

So, Intel is building their Arc GPUs and they decided to create a variant of shared virtual memory that is actually implementable called unified shared memory.

The idea is the following: All USM buffers are accessible by CPU and GPU, but the location is defined by the developer. Host memory stays on the host and the GPU must access it over PCIe. Device memory stays on the GPU and the host must access it over PCIe. These types of memory already cover the vast majority of use cases and can be implemented by anyone. Then finally, there is "shared" memory, which can migrate between CPU and GPU in a coarse grained matter. This isn't page level. The entire buffer gets moved as far as I am aware. This allows you to do CPU work then GPU work and then CPU work. What doesn't exist is a fully cache coherent form of shared memory.

https://registry.khronos.org/OpenCL/extensions/intel/cl_inte...

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

#319

Post by baq »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #181
brindlejim wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Otellini wasn't an engineer but still he made the historical x86-mac deal, pushed like crazy for x86-android and owned the top500 with xeon phi. The downfall began with Krzanich who had no goal besides raising the stock price and no strategy other than cutting long-term projects and other costs that got in the way. What a shame.

Otellini also made the historical decision to pass on the iPhone chip...

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

#320

Post by baq »

rightbyte wrote: post #309
ac29 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel has over 15,000 software engineers, per their website. I couldn't find a number for NVIDIA, but it looks like they have a bit above 26k total employees. So, its very likely Intel has more software engineers than NVIDIA. Intel has far more products than NVIDIA though, so NVIDIA almost certainly has more software engineers working on GPU.

I would say that over a certain number of devs the output decreases. I think it was 500 people working on Windows XP? A hundred for Windows 95. Etc.

Intel's/NVidia's/AMD's GPU drivers alone are probably more LOC at this point than the whole of XP...
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