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LibreCUDA – Launch CUDA code on Nvidia GPUs without the proprietary runtime

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Re: LibreCUDA – Launch CUDA code on Nvidia GPUs without the proprietary runtime

#121

Post by tomooot »

smokel wrote: post #108
funcDropShadow wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is forcing you to buy a computer. Nobody is forcing you to live under a roof. Nobody is forcing you to eat.

Sorry for the harsh comment. I just found it highly unlikely that Nvidia would change its ways due to this, and I don't really see how we're being "squeezed". Nvidia are delivering amazing products (as are AMD), and it is not going to be any cheaper this way. Building this kind of hardware is not something a hacker can do over the weekend.

The squeeze is mostly within the segmentation of VRAM between products, it's basically a commodity and this week the spot price for 8GB of GDDR6 has varied from $1.30 to $3.50 [1].

Yet to get a card with 8GB more than one with comparable logical performance, you'd be looking at hundreds (or thousands in the case of "machine learning" cards) of dollars.

[1] https://www.dramexchange.com/

Re: LibreCUDA – Launch CUDA code on Nvidia GPUs without the proprietary runtime

#122

Post by galkk »

funcDropShadow wrote: post #102
galkk wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But in the long run open source wins because once an open source alternative exists it is just the better option. This is just wishful thinking. Anything close to real professional use, not related to IT, and closed source is king: office work, CAD, video editing, music production, and those domains immediately came to mind. Nowhere there open source can seriously challenge commercial, closed sourced competitors. Y…

Counter example: blender. It may not be winning in video editing, but it has serious market share in 3d rendering. Different players are investing money in it and extend it with their own stuff.

Agree, blender is a contender.

Re: LibreCUDA – Launch CUDA code on Nvidia GPUs without the proprietary runtime

#123

Post by nsajko »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #9
shmerl wrote: post #8

Since ZLUDA was taken down (by request from AMD of all parties), it would be better to have some ZLUDA replacement as a general purpose way of breaking CUDA lock-in. I.e. something not tied to Nvidia hardware.

That's a problem on a different level of the CUDA stack. Having a compiler that takes a special C++ or python dialect and compiles it to GPU suitable llvm-ir and then to a GPU binary is one thing (and there's progress on that side: triton, numba, soonish mojo), being able to launch that binary without going through the nvidia driver is another problem.

> [...] there's progress [...]

Don't forget about Julia!

Re: LibreCUDA – Launch CUDA code on Nvidia GPUs without the proprietary runtime

#124

Post by JonChesterfield »

georgehotz wrote: post #94

Cool to see one of these in C, particularly if it can be binary compatible. Why not s/libreCuInit/cuInit? If you are interested in open source runtimes, tinygrad has them in Python for both AMD and NVIDIA, speaking directly to the kernel through ioctls and poking the command queues. https://github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad/blob/master/tinygrad/ru... https://github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad/blob/master/tinygrad/ru...

That's interesting. This looks like you've bypassed the rocm userspace stack entirely. I've been looking for justification to burn libhsa.so out of the dependency graph for running llvm compiled kernels on amdgpu for ages now. I didn't expect roct to be similarly easy to drop but that's a clear sketch of how to build a statically linked freestanding x64 / gcn blob. Excellent.

(I want a reference implementation of run-simple-stuff which doesn't fall over because of bugs in libhsa so that I know whatever bug I'm looking at is in my compiler / the hardware / the firmware)

Re: LibreCUDA – Launch CUDA code on Nvidia GPUs without the proprietary runtime

#128

Post by [deleted] »

Wytwwww wrote: post #119
smokel wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for the harsh comment. I just found it highly unlikely that Nvidia would change its ways due to this, and I don't really see how we're being "squeezed". Nvidia are delivering amazing products (as are AMD), and it is not going to be any cheaper this way. Building this kind of hardware is not something a hacker can do over the weekend.

Nvidia is charging what they are entirely because there is no or very little competition. There isn't much else to it, if AMD/Intel caught up Nvidia would suddenly start selling their GPUs for way less...

[deleted]

Re: LibreCUDA – Launch CUDA code on Nvidia GPUs without the proprietary runtime

#129

Post by [deleted] »

Wytwwww wrote: post #119
smokel wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for the harsh comment. I just found it highly unlikely that Nvidia would change its ways due to this, and I don't really see how we're being "squeezed". Nvidia are delivering amazing products (as are AMD), and it is not going to be any cheaper this way. Building this kind of hardware is not something a hacker can do over the weekend.

Nvidia is charging what they are entirely because there is no or very little competition. There isn't much else to it, if AMD/Intel caught up Nvidia would suddenly start selling their GPUs for way less...

[deleted]

Re: LibreCUDA – Launch CUDA code on Nvidia GPUs without the proprietary runtime

#130

Post by talldayo »

lmpdev wrote: post #110
daft_pink wrote: post #39

I think the point of open cuda is to run it on non NVIDIA gpus. Once you have to buy NVIDIA gpus what’s the point. If we had true you competition I think it would be far easier to buy devices with more vram and thus we might be able to run llama 405b someday locally. Once you already bought the NVIDIA cards what’s the point

The point might not necessarily be for consumers Linus wasn’t writing Linux for consumers (arguably the Linux kernel team still isn’t), he needed a Unix-like kernel on a platform which didn’t support it Nvidia is placed with CUDA in a similar way to how Bell was with Unix in the late 1980s. I’m not sure if a legal “CUDA Wars” is possible in the way the Unix Wars was, but something needs to give Nvidia has a monopoly…

> I expect Nvidia to pre-emptively open up CUDA just enough to keep them (and most of us) happy

Besides how they've "opened" their drivers by moving all the proprietary code on-GPU, I don't expect this to happen at all. Nvidia has no incentive to give away their IP, and the antitrust cases that people are trying to build against them border on nonsense. Nvidia monopolizes CUDA like Amazon monopolizes AWS, their "abuse" is the specialization they offer to paying customers... which harms the market how?

What really makes me lament the future is the fact that we had a chance to kill CUDA. Khronos wanted OpenCL to be a serious competitor, and if it wasn't specifically for the fact that Apple and AMD stopped funding it we might have a cross-platform GPU compute layer that outperforms CUDA. Today's Nvidia dominance is a result of the rest of the industry neglecting their own GPGPU demand.

Nvidia only "wins" because their adversaries would rather fight each other than work together to beat a common competitor. It's an expensive lesson for the industry about adopting open standards when people ask you to, or you suffer the consequences of having nothing competitive.

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