While Apple M* chips seems to have an incredible unified memory access, the available learning resources seem to be quite restricted and often convoluted. Has anyone been able to get past this barrier?
I have some familiarity with general purpose software development with CUDA and C++. I want to figure how to work with/ use Apple's developer resources for general purpose programming.
Ask HN: Resources for general purpose GPU development on Apple's M* chips?
1–10 of 86 posts
Re: Ask HN: Resources for general purpose GPU development on Apple's M* chips?
#2There is no general purpose GPU development on Apple M series.
There is Metal development. You want to learn Apple M-series gpu and gpgpu development? Learn Metal!
Re: Ask HN: Resources for general purpose GPU development on Apple's M* chips?
#3If you are open to run Linux you can use standard opencl and vulkan.
Re: Ask HN: Resources for general purpose GPU development on Apple's M* chips?
#4[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Resources for general purpose GPU development on Apple's M* chips?
#5Besides the official docs you can check out llama.cpp as an example that uses metal for accelerated inference on Apple silicon.
Re: Ask HN: Resources for general purpose GPU development on Apple's M* chips?
#6People have already mentioned Metal, but if you want cross platform, https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu has a vulkan-like API and cross compiles to all the various GPU frameworks. I believe it uses https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK to run on Macs. You can also see the metal shader transpilation results for debugging.
Re: Ask HN: Resources for general purpose GPU development on Apple's M* chips?
#7You can help with the reverse engineering of Apple Silicon done by a dozen people worldwide, that is how we find out the GPU and NPU instructions[1-4]. There is over 43 trillion float operations per second to unlock at 8 terabit per second 'unified' memory bandwidth and 270 gigabits per second networking (less on the smaller chips)....
[1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/gpu
[2] https://github.com/dougallj/applegpu
[3] https://github.com/antgroup-skyward/ANETools/tree/main/ANEDi...
[4] https://github.com/hollance/neural-engine
You can use a high level APIs like MLX, Metal or CoreML to compute other things on the GPU and NPU.
Shadama [5] is an example programming language that translates (with Ometa) matrix calculations into WebGPU or WebGL APIs (I forget which). You can do exactly the same with the MLX, Metal or CoreML APIs and only pay around 3% overhead going through the translation stages.
[5] https://github.com/yoshikiohshima/Shadama
I estimate it will cost around $22K at my hourly rate to completely reverse engineer the latest A16 and M4 CPU (ARMV9), GPU and NPU instruction sets. I think I am halfway on the reverse engineering, the debugging part is the hardest problem. You would however not be able to sell software with it on the APP Store as Apple forbids undocumented API's or bare metal instructions.
Re: Ask HN: Resources for general purpose GPU development on Apple's M* chips?
#8People have already mentioned Metal, but if you want cross platform, https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu has a vulkan-like API and cross compiles to all the various GPU frameworks. I believe it uses https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK to run on Macs. You can also see the metal shader transpilation results for debugging.
wgpu has its own Metal backend that most people use by default (not MoltenVK).
There is also a Vulkan backend if you want to run Vulkan through MoltenVK though.
Re: Ask HN: Resources for general purpose GPU development on Apple's M* chips?
#9People have already mentioned Metal, but if you want cross platform, https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu has a vulkan-like API and cross compiles to all the various GPU frameworks. I believe it uses https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK to run on Macs. You can also see the metal shader transpilation results for debugging.
wgpu has its own Metal backend that most people use by default (not MoltenVK). There is also a Vulkan backend if you want to run Vulkan through MoltenVK though.
Oh good to know! It's been a while since I've looked at the osx implementation
Re: Ask HN: Resources for general purpose GPU development on Apple's M* chips?
#10Check out MLX[1]. Its a bit like pytorch/tensorflow with added benefit of Apple Silicon.