Comment by throwdbaaway
7 hours ago
I tried getting LLMs to add proper Vulkan support to ik_llama.cpp, which have very good support for CUDA and CPU. The models do an admirable job; they don't care much about poor DX.
Few problems I noticed:
* coopmat2 from nvidia is the classic embrace, extend, extinguish. No point to ask the models to translate from CUDA to coopmat2. Instead, the models can understand the existing CUDA and CPU kernels, and adapt them accordingly to non-nvidia devices.
* However, the standard API is also lacking. The models struggled to make prompt processing compute-bound on strix halo when the graph is complex. Upfront standard API might just be an evolution dead end.
coopmat2 can be implemented by anybody non-nvidia. It's not EEE when the regular coopmat extension is not good enough to get good performance
On the other hand, despite my complain about the standard API, the models were able to come up with cooptmat1 kernels that run dsv4 flash faster than whatever the guys at antirez/ds4 can come up with using rocm, on a strix halo, with the added benefit that I can also pair the strix halo with an egpu to drastically speed things up.
From what I can tell, coopmat2 can get to about 75~90% of cuda performance on a single device, and there is no good way to do direct communication across devices. It is fair to say that nobody would replace cuda with coopmat2? That looks like a EEE project that can assigned to a couple of nvidia engineers, to fragment the ecosystem.