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> The performance possibilities of GPUs can be democratized by providing more high-level tools that are easy to use by a large community of applied mathematicia
by shmerl 7y ago
> The performance possibilities of GPUs can be democratized by providing more high-level tools that are easy to use by a large community of applied mathematicians and machine learning programmers.
How exactly CUDA is "democratizing" anything, if it's tied to Nvidia? Vulkan backend would make more sense for that purpose.
- rrss 7y agoThat sentence explains perfectly well what it means by democratizing, and how is independent of the platform being tied to nvidia.
- shmerl 7y agoCan you elaborate please? I was under the impression that CUDA is tied to Nvidia, unless you mean there are now working shims for other GPUs.
- Athas 7y agoCUDA is ultimately an API. AMD even has a converter for transforming CUDA cuda to something more portable[0]. While it would be better in a democratic sense for GPUs to be accessed using a fully free API, having an easily usable proprietary API is still more democratic than a difficult-to-use API (especially when, as here, the easy-to-use layer is actually fully free, and can perhaps be retargeted to fully free lower layers later). [0]: https://gpuopen.com/compute-product/hip-convert-cuda-to-portable-c-code/ https://gpuopen.com/compute-product/hip-convert-cuda-to-port...
- shmerl 7y agoIt still looks like porting idea, not like a shim that makes CUDA run on AMD. So I'd say CUDA is still locked to Nvidia. AMD are trying to ease up the transition to portable options - that's surely good, but it's not a full fledged lock-in unlocking. I'd say, Nvidia are being hypocritical here, with this whole "democratizing" claim. They are direct beneficiaries of the lock-in they are advancing with it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pjmlp 7y agoIt allows us to use any programming language with PTX backend. OpenCL on the other hand is C FTW and now kind of supports C++ if one has luck with the drivers. From that point of view is democratizing GPGPU programming to anyone that doesn't want to deal with either C or C++.
- shmerl 7y agoThat's not democratizing GPU computing, that's "democratizing" Nvidia lock-in. Totally different thing, so their claim was hypocritical, since they made it sound like a general thing.
- pjmlp 7y agoIt is easy to sort out, Khronos just needs to accept that a large majority of developers want productive SDKs, not raw specifications based on C, and with luck some C++ as well. I also don't see you complain that so far the only mature SYCL SDK is available from Codeplay, thus making it a single vendor "standard". At least until Intel (One API) and others actually come one with their SYCL extensions, because naturally nothing that Khronos does can be without extensions and its multiple execution paths.