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CUDA Toolkit Release Notes

docs.nvidia.com

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Re: CUDA Toolkit Release Notes

#71

Post by gbrown »

pilooch wrote: post #51
andybak wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any title that gives us a clue why the story is worthy of note. At the moment it's frustrating as you have to click through to find out if you want to click through. (title at the time of my comment was "CUDA Toolkit Release Notes")

As an ML + open source developer for over 10y, MacOS support for deep learning is already long gone, Linux is the prime AI/ML OS. However, Apple and NVidia parting away is a good omen for GPU competition I believe. Whatever Apple hw comes up with, if usable outside MacOS software stack, it'd be an interesting alternative.

crosses fingers in OpenCL

Re: CUDA Toolkit Release Notes

#72

Post by esistgut »

Athas wrote: post #44
xvilka wrote: post #32

This is why CUDA and NVIDIA are a cancer. Such an important piece of infrastructure for both graphics and ML should be open source.

The corresponding AMD infrastructure and most related tools are fully open source. The driver is even upstreamed in the Linux kernel!

I am a full stack web developer using a Linux environment as my development environment. I plan to start learning some ML related stuff and I just recently bought a Radeon 5700 XT, the current high end consumer GPU from AMD. Before this I had an RX 580. The driver support on Linux is fine but not optimal, there are multiple issues regarding color ranges, dual monitor support and with Navi based hardware (5700/5700XT) plain hardware freezes/hangs. I did not personally experience the hangs but I installed the 5.4-rc8 kernel and compiled mesa 20 from the git just to avoid them in the first place. There is no Navi support on ROCm and the prefered way to have OpenCL on older hardware like Polaris (RX 580 for example) is to just extract the relevant files from the closed source driver. I still prefer something with open source drivers but AMD is far behind NVIDIA in terms of GPGPU software support, I cant't honestly understand what their strategy is and why they are allowing the majority of developers to tie themself and their careers to NVIDIA.

Re: CUDA Toolkit Release Notes

#73

Post by jsgo »

pvg wrote: post #53
andybak wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any title that gives us a clue why the story is worthy of note. At the moment it's frustrating as you have to click through to find out if you want to click through. (title at the time of my comment was "CUDA Toolkit Release Notes")

As the whiner who whined about this title - the story isn't worthy of note at all, other than someone fishing a supposedly-important detail out of it and putting it in the title. Apple hasn't as much as sold a machine with an Nvidia GPU for many years. This non-editorializing thing is explained in great illustrative detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21617907

Perhaps they haven’t sold Nvidia hardware, but the allowance of Nvidia’s web drivers so that I could connect my eGPU w/ GTX 1080 to the 13in Macbook Pro was one of the primary reasons I bought the MBP.

It is fine if they want to kill off features off upcoming hardware, but killing off the capacity to use something that was used for months is not the best look. If Metal Only was the goal, add a prompt when someone enables said web drivers that they’re going off the reservation snd that they assume the risk.

These release notes seem to be Nvidia giving up the ghost that they’re going to be able to resolve this dispute and High Sierra is the last release where all but a couple of really old Nvidia GPUs work.

Re: CUDA Toolkit Release Notes

#76

Post by ajconway »

ActorNightly wrote: post #30
alphagrep12345 wrote: post #11

Why doesn't apple support NVIDIA though? Considering the whole ML and AI community use only NVIDIA GPUs, it sucks that we can't use apple laptops for the same.

Why would you do anything compute intensive on laptops that suffer from cooling issues?

We got a 28-Core mac Pro now, with lots of expansion ports.

Re: CUDA Toolkit Release Notes

#77

Post by gambiting »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #65
gambiting wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why make such a broad statement at all? There are laptops for nearly every need - yes there are some which will throttle very quickly and are only good for light work, but there are laptops in every size that have decent enough cooling that they can run at max load 24/7 without any issues. As to why someone would do this - can you really not think of a single reason?

I'm not so sure I agree. My old laptop (still in use) is a Dell Precision m4800. It has a quad-core i7, and is so thick and heavy the word "laptop" is kind of a joke. It has massive heatsinks and fairly loud fans. Still it will throttle back after ~90 seconds of "make -j 4" or other heavily parallel jobs. If you have a laptop that will run at 100% load indefinitely, it's only because the manufacturer has chosen a low…

Well, then you need to look a little bit longer around the market.

At work we use Eurocom laptops with desktop-grade i7 and i9s rated at 90W of power - and we use them for conferences and trade shows to run our demonstrations, they do absolutely fine under full load. Sure they weigh about 5KG, but that's absolutely fine for the target use. I hope that answers the question of "why would you possibly want to do that".

I have a Razer Blade Stealth, 13" laptop where the manufacturer has actually gone against the advice from Intel, and gave the CPU a budget of 25W instead of the advised 15W - and the cooling to work with that. Both the CPU and GPU can be at full load indefinitely and will not throttle. It's just a well designed dual-fan cooling solution.

My wife has a Lenovo Y540 - with an i5-9300H, 45W CPU - again, the cooling on it is super beefy and it will run indefinitely at full load. And that's a completely normal 15.6" laptop.

But you know what throttles? Laptops like the MacBook Air, where Apple used a Y-series CPU and gave it zero cooling - that will throttle hard after a while. And that's a 5W chip. It's almost an achievement that they managed to mess this up. But maybe they shouldn't feel too bad - a lot of other companies do mess it up too. Dell XPS. HP Envy. Those are top lines for these brands and they are famous for aggressive throttling under load.

My point is - of course there are laptops on the market that are designed for sustained full load and are completely absolutely fine with it. I'm just baffled by 1) how can this not be obvious 2) how can it be hard to think of one usecase where that's useful?

Re: CUDA Toolkit Release Notes

#78

Post by karolist »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #65
gambiting wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why make such a broad statement at all? There are laptops for nearly every need - yes there are some which will throttle very quickly and are only good for light work, but there are laptops in every size that have decent enough cooling that they can run at max load 24/7 without any issues. As to why someone would do this - can you really not think of a single reason?

I'm not so sure I agree. My old laptop (still in use) is a Dell Precision m4800. It has a quad-core i7, and is so thick and heavy the word "laptop" is kind of a joke. It has massive heatsinks and fairly loud fans. Still it will throttle back after ~90 seconds of "make -j 4" or other heavily parallel jobs. If you have a laptop that will run at 100% load indefinitely, it's only because the manufacturer has chosen a low…

My Lenovo W530 still has a socketed CPU which I've replaced from 2 core/4 thread i5-3210M to 4 core/8 thread i7-3610QM and it will happily chug along without down throttling in parallel compilation, benchmarks or games using eGPU. It's a 45W TDP CPU and there are stronger ones doing fine still. And before you say "that's outdated" - well not really https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/753, it's about as fast per core as 2013 retina MBP and has 4 real cores. I guess my point is "you can make it work".

Now, my work's 2018 15" MBP is suffering massive overheating problems and throttling down just on some light work + YouTube.

Re: CUDA Toolkit Release Notes

#79

Post by gmueckl »

Athas wrote: post #42
zozbot234 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AIUI, Vulkan can be used for compute - so why not do that? It might work reasonably well on both nVidia and non-nVidia hardware. Of course, this requires GPU-enabled software to implement Vulkan support, but that's one-time work.

Last year, I supervised a student project that involved writing a Vulkan backend for a compiler that already possessed CUDA and OpenCL backends. While I recall that everything ended up working, it didn't run all that fast. The vast majority of the problems were related to the language used for encoding the shaders, SPIR-V. Among the difficulties we encountered, I recall the need to use an offline optimiser to do triv…

Vulkan compute shaders are roughly on the level of OpenGL compute shaders, which never were as flexible and general as CUDA and OpenCL kernels.

Even though compute in Vulkan appears as a first class citizen instead of the weird tacked on feature it is in OpenGL, the design is still focused very much on embedding compute steps in a process that is designed to deliver images to a screen. And that uses a lot more opaque object representations like textures and samplers. GLSL has also always been a very restrictive language and that carried over into SPIR-V.

Re: CUDA Toolkit Release Notes

#80

Post by archi42 »

dang wrote: post #19

Submitted title was "Nvidia drops support for CUDA on macOS". We changed that for a while to "CUDA 10.2 is the last release to support macOS", which is language from the article itself. Since then someone emailed and asked why the title was like that in light of the discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21617016 , so I've reverted to the article's title. Edit: If the article were more a burying the lede…

Personal opinion: I really don't care about "CUDA Toolkit Release Notes" or probably most other "$stuff Release Notes" on HN. I only opened the comments because others here seemed to upvote it more than I anticipated and thought "there must be something special about this release" - and indeed, nVidia dropping MacOS support is something that's worth knowing (even as a Linux dev).

Thus I personally would like to either have the title "CUDA Toolkit Release Notes: MacOS-support to be dropped" or link to the click-baity gizmodo (which is missing the CUDA aspect).

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