101–110 of 207 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cory Doctorow argues well why it doesn't matter how you got into a monopoly position: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/18/market-discipline/#too-bi...
Still have no idea how this dude is relevant other than he wrote some scifi books one time. What are his technical accomplishments. Oh, nothing? Anyone can talk, especially nowdays because of AI, ironically.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly I don't get how the current situation could develop. Video games have used compute shaders forever, and those work just fine on other cards. I remember doing some quite involved stuff for my thesis using OpenCL a decade ago, and it worked just fine. Nowadays OpenCL is dead for some reason... I just don't get what is there in CUDA that makes it so special. As far as I remember, a GPGPU API consists of a shade…
There probably isn't anything in CUDA that makes it special. They are well optimised math libraries and the math for most of the important stuff is somewhat trivial. AI seems to be >80% matrix multiplication - well optimised BLAS is tricky to implement, but even a bad implementation would see all the major libraries support AMD. The vendor "lock in" is because it takes a few years for decisions to be expressed in mar…
It's crazy, because even 10 years ago it was already obvious that machine learning was big and is only going to become more important. AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol happened in 2016. Computer vision was making big strides.
5 years ago, large language model hadn't really arrived on the scene yet, at least as impressively as today, but I think eg Google was already using machine learning for Google Translate?
Nvidia solved a hard problem and their competitors all failed. I spent years with an AMD card growing progressively more annoyed at their self-inflicted apparent inability to multiply matrices on demand. Nvidia had nothing to do with their failure, unless they had some sort of high-level mole in AMD's driver teams. Hitting the only successful company in a difficult field with legal assaults is not the obvious path to…
And openly undermined technologies and standards that aimed to do the same in an interoperable way.
This is, in my eyes, enough to hit with a litigation, but we'll see.
On the other hand, Microsoft does seem to have used mere mortals to write a driver/gpu independent way to run workloads in azure (Maia/Triton).
Microsoft is truly unstoppable no matter which way this whole AI race goes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
CUDA is pure lock-in, so it only makes sense for antitrust regulators to evaluate if it's causing anti-competitive damage to the market. Hint - it is. Lock-in is never good.
Sure is, but there is nothing stopping AMD or Intel from building a working alternative to CUDA, so how is it anti-competitive? The problem with OpenCL, Sycl, ROC, etc. is that the developer experience is terrible. Cumbersome to set up, difficiult to get working accross platforms, lack of major quality of life features, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just on that last paragraph, because the frame annoys me - that is bullying. It isn't fair to insinuate that a company did something wrong by attempting to obey the law. MS knows all about antitrust. They've hired a bunch of lawyers and told them to do what needs to be done to be compliant with the regulations. That shouldn't then be implied as evidence that they are guilty of antitrust activities! What are the lawye…
This is a confusing argument to me. Are you saying that structuring and smurfing should then be legal? All structuring and smurfing is is an attempt to make sure that financial transactions stay below the statutory reporting threshold. Also, I think you’re conflating my statement which was meant to be prescriptive with a descriptive statement. I’m saying if structuring and smurfing are illegal in a financial context,…
But then you consider that it's used for civil asset forfeiture (i.e. law enforcement stealing money from innocent people without ever proving a real crime) and it suddenly makes sense:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/24/...
Whereas with MSFT it's a different situation. There is nothing illegal or wrongful about depositing a large amount of money, there is just a heinous law that makes it illegal to do it in a common way. Whereas monopolizing a market is intended to be illegal regardless of how you do it, so there shouldn't be a way to structure things to monopolize the market without breaking the law. The way you're intended to comply with the law is by not monopolizing the market.
Nvidia solved a hard problem and their competitors all failed. I spent years with an AMD card growing progressively more annoyed at their self-inflicted apparent inability to multiply matrices on demand. Nvidia had nothing to do with their failure, unless they had some sort of high-level mole in AMD's driver teams. Hitting the only successful company in a difficult field with legal assaults is not the obvious path to…
Isn't it one of the fundamental applications of a GPU, whether for ML compute or more commonly for 3D graphics, to multiple matrices? In what way did AMD GPUs fail to do this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you need to intentionally structure a deal to avoid scrutiny and have it described that way, it implies what you really wanted was much worse. “We packed the goods in nondescript boxes to avoid scrutiny by the border guards…” Scrutiny isn’t something you need to avoid as a big company if you’re not fucking around. The lawyers are there to handle the scrutiny, not to hide stuff from it.
> If you need to intentionally structure a deal to avoid scrutiny and have it described that way, it implies what you really wanted was much worse. It doesn't. That is like saying that if someone structures their affairs to pay less taxes it implies that wanted to do something illegal. They had to choose some structure, they picked the safest and easiest one. In both the hypothetical tax case and the real MS case, I…
Structuring your business to avoid breaking the law is good.
Structuring your business to avoid some otherwise regular audits that would reveal whether you are breaking the law is obviously suspicious. One might think that there is a reason why getting audited might result in negative consequences for your business.
Nvidia solved a hard problem and their competitors all failed. I spent years with an AMD card growing progressively more annoyed at their self-inflicted apparent inability to multiply matrices on demand. Nvidia had nothing to do with their failure, unless they had some sort of high-level mole in AMD's driver teams. Hitting the only successful company in a difficult field with legal assaults is not the obvious path to…
> self-inflicted apparent inability to multiply matrices on demand Isn't it one of the fundamental applications of a GPU, whether for ML compute or more commonly for 3D graphics, to multiple matrices? In what way did AMD GPUs fail to do this?
And when you try to do compute on AMD GPUs they crash your kernel if you look at them wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The alternative to CUDA is called OpenCL. There has been speculations that poor performance of NVIDIA GPUs with OpenCL compared to CUDA is an intentional anticompetitive practice, but I don't feel confident to tell for sure.
OpenCL is an alternative to CUDA just like Legos are an alternative to bricks. The problem with OpenCL isn't even the performance, it's everything. If OpenCL were any good, people could use it to build similarly powerful applications on cheaper AMD GPUs.