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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'

#351

Post by latchkey »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #350
latchkey wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Growing the community is how you catch up. Agreed 100%. > That doesn't happen if people can't afford the only GPUs you support. On this part, we are going to have to agree to disagree. I feel like being able to at least affordably rent time on the high end GPUs is another alternative to buying them. As I mentioned above, that is something I'm actively working on.

> I feel like being able to at least affordably rent time on the high end GPUs is another alternative to buying them. There are two problems with this. The first is high demand. GPU time on a lot of cloud providers is sold out. The second is that this costs money at all, vs. using the GPU you already have. "Need for credit card" is a barrier to hobbyists and you want hobbyists, because they become contributors or get…

> The first is high demand. GPU time on a lot of cloud providers is sold out.

Something I'm trying to help with. =) Of course, I'm sure I'll be sold out too, or at least I hope so, cause that means buying more GPUs! But at least I'm actively putting my own time/energy toward this goal.

> The second is that this costs money at all, vs. using the GPU you already have.

As much as I'd love to believe in some utopia that there is a world where every single GPU can be used for science, I don't think we are ever going to get there. AMD, while large, isn't an infinite resource company. We're talking about a speciality level of engineering too.

> You want the barrier to adoption to be level with the ground.

100% agreed, it is a good goal, but that's a much larger problem than just AMD supporting their 6-7 year old cards.

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

#352

Post by whomst »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #296
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…

Gelsinger is a typical hardware engineer out of his depth competing against what is effctively a software play. This is a recurring theme in the industry where you have successful hardware companies with strong hardware focused leadership fail over time because they don't get software. I used to work at Nokia Research. The problem was on full display during the period Apple made it's entry into mobile. We had plenty…

My brother in Christ he was literally the CEO of VMware

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

#353

Post by AnthonyMouse »

natbennett wrote: post #200
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of which are also open, like OpenStack or K8s, or have third party implementations, like Ceph implementing the Amazon S3 API.

Also all reimplementations of proprietary technology. The S3 API is a really good example of the “OSS only becomes dominant when development slows down” principle. As a friend of mine who has had to support a lot of local blob storage says, “On the gates of hell are emblazoned — S3 compatible.”

> Also all reimplementations of proprietary technology.

That's generally where open standards come from. You document an existing technology and then get independent implementations.

Unix was proprietary technology. POSIX is an open standard.

Even when the standard comes at the same time as the first implementation, it's usually because the first implementer wrote the standard -- there has to be one implementation before there are two.

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

#354

Post by [deleted] »

donor20 wrote: post #324
jillesvangurp wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gelsinger is a typical hardware engineer out of his depth competing against what is effctively a software play. This is a recurring theme in the industry where you have successful hardware companies with strong hardware focused leadership fail over time because they don't get software. I used to work at Nokia Research. The problem was on full display during the period Apple made it's entry into mobile. We had plenty…

apple did initially want to build on what they saw as the best fab - Intel. unlock the power Intel would bring for their phone. But they had some design objectives focused on user experience (power/cost) and Intel didn't see the value. Intel then scrambled to try and build what apple had asked for but without the software. Nokia kept doing crazy hardware to show off on hardware side. But these old companies can't sto…

[deleted]

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

#355

Post by AnthonyMouse »

pjmlp wrote: post #275
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nah, POSIX on servers is only relevant enough for language runtimes and compilers, which then use their own package managers and cloud APIs for everything else. Alongside a cloud shell, which yeah, we now have a VT100 running on a browser window. There is a reason why there are USENIX papers on the loss of POSIX relevance.

> Nah, POSIX on servers is only relevant enough for language runtimes and compilers, which then use their own package managers and cloud APIs for everything else.

Those things are a different level of abstraction. The cloud API is making POSIX system calls under the hood, which would allow the implementation of the cloud API to be ported to different POSIX-compatible systems (if anybody cared to).

> There is a reason why there are USENIX papers on the loss of POSIX relevance.

The main reason POSIX is less relevant is that everybody is using Linux and the point of POSIX was to create compatibility between all the different versions of proprietary Unix that have since fallen out of use.

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

#356

Post by lelanthran »

eternityforest wrote: post #345
lelanthran wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why bother? It's not the generation that matters so much, it's the gathering of entropy, which comes from peripherals and not possible to generate on-die. If you don't need cryptographically secure randomness, you still want the entropy for generating the seeds per thread/die/chip.

It absolutely is possible to generate entropy on-die, assuming you actually want entropy and not just a unique value that gets XORed with the seed, so you can still have repeatable seeds. Pretty much every chip has an RNG which can be as simple as just a single free running oscillator you sample

> Pretty much every chip has an RNG which can be as simple as just a single free running oscillator you sample

Every chip may have some sort of noise to sample, but they are nowhere near good sources of entropy.

Entropy is not a binary thing (you either have it or don't), it's a spectrum and entropy gathered on-die is poor entropy.

Look, I concede that my knowledge on this subject is a bit dated, but the last time I checked there were no good sources of entropy on-die for any chip in wide use. All cryptographically secure RNGs depend on a peripheral to grab noise from the environment to mix into the entropy pool.

A free-running oscillator is a very poor source of entropy.

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

#357

Post by NekkoDroid »

ac29 wrote: post #190
aseipp wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't work if you're going against GPUs. All the nice goodies we are accustomed to on large desktop x86 machines with gigantic caches and huge branch predictor area and OOO execution engines -- the features that yield the performance profile we expect -- simply do not translate or scale up to thousands of cores per die. To scale that up, you need to redesign the microarchitecture in a fundamental way to allow mo…

While the first >1000 core x86 processor is probably a little ways out, Intel is releasing a 288-core x86 processor in the first half of 2024 (Sierra Forest). I assume AMD will have something similarly high core in 2024-25 as well.

288 Cores or Threads? Cuz to my knowledge AMD already has a 128 Core, 256 Thread Processor with the Epyc 9754

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

#358

Post by eternityforest »

lelanthran wrote: post #356
eternityforest wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely is possible to generate entropy on-die, assuming you actually want entropy and not just a unique value that gets XORed with the seed, so you can still have repeatable seeds. Pretty much every chip has an RNG which can be as simple as just a single free running oscillator you sample

> Pretty much every chip has an RNG which can be as simple as just a single free running oscillator you sample Every chip may have some sort of noise to sample, but they are nowhere near good sources of entropy. Entropy is not a binary thing (you either have it or don't), it's a spectrum and entropy gathered on-die is poor entropy. Look, I concede that my knowledge on this subject is a bit dated, but the last time I…

For non-cryptographic applications, a PRNG like xorshift reseeded by a few bits from an oscillator might be enough.

As I understand it, the reason they don't use on-chip RNGs by themselves isn't due to lack of entropy, it's because people don't trust them not to put a backdoor on the chips or to have some kind of bug.

Intel has https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDRAND but almost all chips seem to now have some kind of RNG.

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

#359

Post by SilverBirch »

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.

>owned the top500 with xeon phi.

This is interesting - because what I heard (within Intel at the time, circa 2015) was Xeon Phi was a disaster. The programming model was bad and they couldn't sell them.

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

#360

Post by PeterisP »

latchkey wrote: post #339
PeterisP wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I see it, the whole point of ROCm support is being able to service the many users who have pre-existing AMD cards and nothing else available. If someone is going to rent a GPU, I don't need to bother with adding extra features for them, because they can just rent a CUDA-capable GPU instead. I'm considering adding ROCm support for some ML-enabled tool - no matter if it's a commercial product or an open source…

> The way I see it, the whole point of ROCm support is being able to service the many users who have pre-existing AMD cards and nothing else available. ROCm is a stack of a whole lot of stuff. I don't see a stack of software being "the whole point". > the thing I need from AMD is to ensure that the ROCm support I make will work without hassle for these end-users with random old AMD gaming cards (because these are the…

I'm talking about what would be the point for someone to add ROCm support to various pieces of software which currently require CUDA, as IMHO this is the core context not only of this thread but of the whole discussion of this article - about ROCm becoming a widely used replacement or alternative for CUDA.

> "ROCm is primarily targeted at discrete professional GPUs"

That's kind of true, and that is a big part of the problem - while AMD has this stance, ROCm won't threaten to replace or even meet CUDA, which has a much broader target; if you and/or AMD want to go in this direction, that's completely fine, that is a valuable niche - but limiting the application to that niche clearly is not "doubling down on ROCm" as a competitor for CUDA, and that disproves the TFA claim by Intel that "the entire industry is motivated to eliminate CUDA", because ROCm isn't even trying to compete with CUDA at the core niches which grant CUDA its staying power unless it goes way beyond merely targeting discrete professional GPUs.

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