Yeah talking about the (vendor-preferred) compute part here
Vulkan's SPIR-V dialect is substantially different from the OpenCL one, notably with the former having structured control flow. They're incompatible between each other.
I'm talking about holistic efforts like OpenCL, and standards that would be equivalent to Nvidia's "Compute Capability" versioning.
The basic underlying tech can be agreed on, but Apple/AMD/Intel all have different GPU priorities that limit their ability to agree on a CUDA-adjacent hardware platform.
Ultimately AMD missed the most important boat with their woeful support for GPU compute. 10 years ago they needed to go all in and offer something to compete with CUDA - whether that was internal or something standard from Khronos. They just couldn't commit to it as a business, didn't have the vision.
Intel missed for a different reason - they didn't invest in the product space at all for decades. In terms of units they had the most market share (millions of Intel Integrated Graphics chips), but it wasn't seen as important. Bare minimum to render Windows and Office UI, nothing more.
What do you mean by holistic? SYCL is an open versioned standard that allows for vendor specific extensions. The problem is not that there isn’t a proper standard, the problem is that many hardware vendors - or software developers simply don’t want to adopt it.
Intel (via Codeplay) was handing it out on a silver platter - Nvidia on SYCL, full top chain, and people still wouldn’t want it.
Isn't OneAPI a good example of the problem, alongside Mojo/ONNX/TensorRT? The industry doesn't need a fifteenth competing standard. They need hardware buy-in.
By holistic, I mean hardware architecture cooperation. Nvidia can hold onto their lead forever if GPU designers fight over what a GPGPU hardware baseline looks like. The current ecosystem fragmentation is not competitive, and future fragmentation probably wouldn't work either. I think the fastest way to kill Nvidia would be a hardware consortium.
> Intel uses SPIRV iirc
They're migrating away from SPIR-V to their own, Intel PISA: https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-upstreaming-the-pisa-backen...
To my knowledge, SPIR-V on Intel will stay, and be it only because it’s part of the OpenCL and Vulkan standards.
Yeah talking about the (vendor-preferred) compute part here
Vulkan's SPIR-V dialect is substantially different from the OpenCL one, notably with the former having structured control flow. They're incompatible between each other.
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I'm talking about holistic efforts like OpenCL, and standards that would be equivalent to Nvidia's "Compute Capability" versioning.
The basic underlying tech can be agreed on, but Apple/AMD/Intel all have different GPU priorities that limit their ability to agree on a CUDA-adjacent hardware platform.
Ultimately AMD missed the most important boat with their woeful support for GPU compute. 10 years ago they needed to go all in and offer something to compete with CUDA - whether that was internal or something standard from Khronos. They just couldn't commit to it as a business, didn't have the vision.
Intel missed for a different reason - they didn't invest in the product space at all for decades. In terms of units they had the most market share (millions of Intel Integrated Graphics chips), but it wasn't seen as important. Bare minimum to render Windows and Office UI, nothing more.
What do you mean by holistic? SYCL is an open versioned standard that allows for vendor specific extensions. The problem is not that there isn’t a proper standard, the problem is that many hardware vendors - or software developers simply don’t want to adopt it.
Intel (via Codeplay) was handing it out on a silver platter - Nvidia on SYCL, full top chain, and people still wouldn’t want it.
Isn't OneAPI a good example of the problem, alongside Mojo/ONNX/TensorRT? The industry doesn't need a fifteenth competing standard. They need hardware buy-in.
By holistic, I mean hardware architecture cooperation. Nvidia can hold onto their lead forever if GPU designers fight over what a GPGPU hardware baseline looks like. The current ecosystem fragmentation is not competitive, and future fragmentation probably wouldn't work either. I think the fastest way to kill Nvidia would be a hardware consortium.
3 replies →