Comment by swerner
12 hours ago
AI will take down Nvidia’s moat. When it becomes trivial to translate CUDA/PTX to HIP, SYCL or Metal, CUDA is no longer the moat, it becomes the intermediate representation.
12 hours ago
AI will take down Nvidia’s moat. When it becomes trivial to translate CUDA/PTX to HIP, SYCL or Metal, CUDA is no longer the moat, it becomes the intermediate representation.
trivial to translate (or transpile) - okay. trivial to understand the result - not so much. trivial to then evolve it - hm... perhaps a different story. still, it seems very likely now, that such "quick rewrites" are viable, not sure if an open approach to them is viable. a newly born open project that was LLM-derived, and not by a credible author, which spans hundreds of files no human eye has ever looked at, can only work for a closed organization, but will never be trusted by the general audience... just like that.
I don't see a hard reason. If it works it works. No hard need for a good, universal, and long lasting solution. At some point you just stack slop on top of slop and it works for your use case - and if it doesn't you'll slop it out yourself.
How do you know if it works? Not that "works" is different from "runs".
> When it becomes trivial to translate CUDA/PTX to HIP,...
ZLUDA is already doing that, no?
I don't think we're at a point yet where anyone would trust ZLUDA enough to ship commercial products that rely on it. I would be delighted though, if anyone can prove me wrong.
No, but we can go there. This is an open source project. Anyone can put some more effort behind it and push it further. It's improving, AFAICS.
Src: https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA
1 reply →
yeah yeah, "when" an often keyword with AI it seems. As Mr. E. Nigma put it - what always comes but never arrives? Meanwhile the moat deepens and it's build on inertia and laziness and Nvidia knows this really REALLY well.
Oh, absolutely. Nvidia is the modern day “nobody gets fired for buying IBM”. The reason we’re still using Unix is not because it’s the best, but because it had to much inertia to let any alternative become its successor. Similarly, C and HTML are maybe the most terrible yet extremely useful languages we have.
i swear people who are outsiders here have only clickbait takes; if you've never had to ship GPU code professionally you should just not comment on these things.
the source language has never been the moat. Nvidia sells to hyperscalers. Hyperscalers have armies of kernel authors who have no issue translating shaders by hand (or now with claude). Nvidia's moat is (and will remain for the foreseeable future) the entire stack. you cannot fathom the pain and misery of working on literally any other stack. if you've never debugged a GPU synchronization error or kernel panic due to some GPU firmware bug or fought absolute shit profilers hunting for perf you really have no idea what you're talking about.
EDIT: i can't believe this really requires saying but graphics and compute are not the same domain at all. if you work in graphics for GPU but not compute then you are still way out of your depth commenting. to wit: graphics people do not (and cannot) write CUDA kernels/shaders.
If that is your standard, I do have an idea what I’m talking about.
Ya? do tell us about your experience that leads you to believe mere translation is the bottleneck in the market...
10 replies →
Most modern graphics is compute. Pixar, Dreamworks, Sony, etc do not use Vulkan to render their movies. It’s CPUs or CUDA.
“graphics people do not (and cannot) write CUDA kernels/shaders” is just not true at all. All it would take to verify that would be things like reading the introduction of the OptiX documentation, a small sample of SIGGRAPH GPU papers or the Blender/Cycles source code.