Some talk of OpenCL vs. Cuda in this thread, but I'm wondering what, if anything, does SYCL have to offer in this area? Do Nvidia GPUs support SYCL?
U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI
111–120 of 207 posts
Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't that logic also apply to, say, Apple?
It applies to game consoles as well, nintendo/sony/microsoft selling a hardware, and require to pay THEM when I want to run something on it, is outrageous.
I don't really understand this argument. There are tons of alternatives. If I want to build and design a product a certain way, and you don't like it, simply don't buy it? This is a genuine question because I realize I am probably in the minority on HN, so please don't downvote just because of that.
I just think that regulations in general should be applied only when necessary, and then be applied with great force.
The user experience for game consoles largely falls back on the manufacturer. If Xbox had loads of unvetted buggy games and malware swimming in the ecosystem, people might be less inclined to buy an Xbox. So Microsoft sets about establishing some control over the ecosystem. Apple's App Store was really the first time that your average Joe could download an application from the internet and not have to worry about viruses. It was a big deal that added a lot of value to the user experience.
Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI
#113Nvidia 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…
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…
> Nowadays OpenCL is dead for some reason...
Where does SYCL fit into this picture, is it a viable replacement for cross-platform GPU access?
Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI
#114Nvidia 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…
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…
Writing and porting kernels between different GPU paradigms is relatively trivial, that's not the issue (although I find the code much clunkier in everything other than CUDA). The problem is that the compiler toolchains and GPU accelerated libraries for FFT, BLAS, DNN, etc. which come bundled with CUDA are pretty terrible or non-existent for everything else, and the competitors are so far away from having a good answer to this. Intel have perhaps come closest with OneAPI but that can't target anything other than NVidia cards anyway, so it's a moot point.
Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US Constitution has largely been interpreted in a “spirit of the law” manner since the founding. Originalism has taken significant durable gains in terms of SCOTUS appointments since the 1980s; prior to that originalists had a good chance of changing their POV once appointed. I suspect similar viewpoints are reflected in the judge appointments as well. Letter of the law benefits the powerful because they can alwa…
> Letter of the law benefits the powerful because they can always stay ahead of legislative attempts to fix the letter of the law (or lobby to change the letter). Spirit of the law is much harder to corrupt. This is precisely the opposite. "Spirit of the law" makes the rules squishy and indeterminate, providing opportunities for fancy lawyers to bend the result to their own interests. "Letter of the law" often leads…
No law can ever be written to capture every possible application of the underlying spirit. Thus your ability to escape the spirit is directly correlated with how many lawyers you can hire to find loopholes in the text (or just flat out lie).
It’s also important to remember that societies naturally undergo shifts over time. It’s impossible to continuously update a codified set of laws when the underlying moirés of the time have shifted; you’ll just be constantly arguing over the updates to add. Any law written perfectly today becomes imperfect simply through the passage of time. That’s why the Bible and any prescriptive religious text feels so outdated on many recommendations - it’s a snapshot in time of the values of a culture but those values change. There was even a fantastic sci-fi short story on this exact point of cultural shift [1] that’s worth a read.
Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI
#116Nvidia 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…
The thing with monopoly laws is it doesn’t matter how you got into pole position. The point is that you’re illegally utilizing tangential benefits of the pole position to maintain that position as well as enter new markets. > including how the company’s software locks customers into using its chips, as well as how Nvidia distributes those chips to customers. The lock-in is probably a losing argument on technical meri…
> The thing with monopoly laws is it doesn’t matter how you got into pole position. The point is that you’re illegally utilizing tangential benefits of the pole position to maintain that position as well as enter new markets.
The following is for US law.
Your first sentence is not really needed because US monopoly law really doesn't care if you are actually in pole position. It's more about monopolization than it is about monopoly.
To a first approximation think of it as being about fair competition. You could have a complete 100% monopoly in some particular market but if you got that monopoly by simply outcompeting everyone else by making a better product and you were not trying to use that to expand into other markets by doing things like tying you would probably not have an antitrust problem.
Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI
#117Earlier 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…
What do you think about SYCL as a viable cross-platform GPU API?
Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US Constitution has largely been interpreted in a “spirit of the law” manner since the founding. Originalism has taken significant durable gains in terms of SCOTUS appointments since the 1980s; prior to that originalists had a good chance of changing their POV once appointed. I suspect similar viewpoints are reflected in the judge appointments as well. Letter of the law benefits the powerful because they can alwa…
> Letter of the law benefits the powerful because they can always stay ahead of legislative attempts to fix the letter of the law (or lobby to change the letter). Spirit of the law is much harder to corrupt. This is precisely the opposite. "Spirit of the law" makes the rules squishy and indeterminate, providing opportunities for fancy lawyers to bend the result to their own interests. "Letter of the law" often leads…
Seems like either system is exploitable by the rich.
Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Letter of the law benefits the powerful because they can always stay ahead of legislative attempts to fix the letter of the law (or lobby to change the letter). Spirit of the law is much harder to corrupt. This is precisely the opposite. "Spirit of the law" makes the rules squishy and indeterminate, providing opportunities for fancy lawyers to bend the result to their own interests. "Letter of the law" often leads…
No law can ever be written to capture every possible application of the underlying spirit. Thus your ability to escape the spirit is directly correlated with how many lawyers you can hire to find loopholes in the text (or just flat out lie). It’s also important to remember that societies naturally undergo shifts over time. It’s impossible to continuously update a codified set of laws when the underlying moirés of the…
> No law can ever be written to capture every possible application of the underlying spirit. Thus your ability to escape the spirit is directly correlated with how many lawyers you can hire to find loopholes in the text (or just flat out lie).
The assumption here is that the rules would be complicated and provide lots of opportunities for gamesmanship. Now suppose the rule is "no company shall have more than 30% market share in any market, any that does shall be broken into no fewer than twelve independent pieces."
No loopholes, if you exceed 30% market share you get broken up. And if they find a loophole then you amend the law and take it out.
> It’s impossible to continuously update a codified set of laws when the underlying moirés of the time have shifted; you’ll just be constantly arguing over the updates to add.
That's just politics. Somehow you need a process to decide what the law should be. The output of that process is the new law. If the output sucks then get a new process. But whether people can agree on what the law should be is a separate issue than whether we should even know what the law as enacted is supposed to mean.
> That’s why the Bible and any prescriptive religious text feels so outdated on many recommendations - it’s a snapshot in time of the values of a culture but those values change.
That's fine, nobody is saying that you can't change the law if a case comes out in a bad way. But it should be the legislature rather than the courts to do it, and the new understanding shouldn't be applied to past behavior ex post facto.
Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI
#120People attribute great leadership to Satya, but to me it seems to be about be willing to fight with regulators, and funnily enough the regulators haven't been working so much recently. Just have a look at the size that Google, Microsoft, Meta others have got, not because they have a outstanding product (like Cuda), but because they can use their dominant market position to buy smaller businesses and monetize their pr…
After WW2, the US was the manufacturing superpower of the world, and it made the US very wealthy. China has since taken that spot, and the US didn't have any major play in the global economy. Starting with Obama, the US started investing heavily into tech via regulatory dismemberment and fiscal policy (ZIRP). The tech monopoloy is intended so that the US has control of a market in the global economy.