4 ms·
My disappointment with WebGPU has been limited data type support. I wanted to write some compute stuff with it, but the limitation of not supporting a lot of in
by nevi-me 3y ago
My disappointment with WebGPU has been limited data type support. I wanted to write some compute stuff with it, but the limitation of not supporting a lot of integer sizes made it undesirable.
Does anyone know if the spec is likely to be revised to add more support over time?
- dezmou 3y agohttps://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/3620 https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/3620
- pjmlp 3y agoEventually, but expect a progression rate measured in years.
- TazeTSchnitzel 3y agoWhat kinds of integer sizes? Depending on the target GPU, 64-bit integers are likely to not be available at all, or be quite slow. If you need 8-bit or 16-bit integers, on the other hand, those can be trivially emulated with 32-bit operations.
- flohofwoe 3y agoThe current WebGPU spec is basically the common feature subset across desktop and mobile GPUs, and what of those hardware features are actually exposed by D3D12, Metal and Vulkan. If something is missing then it's most likely the fault of some random mobile GPU. Such missing features might be added later via optional extensions, but the focus was to get the thing out of the door first.
- atgctg 3y agoAs an example, INT8 support in WebGPU would enable running quantized models, allowing larger LLMs to run locally in the browser. See Limitations section here: https://fleetwood.dev/posts/running-llms-in-the-browser https://fleetwood.dev/posts/running-llms-in-the-browser