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The whole market funded Nvidia because AMD failed to provide a viable alternative for 10+ years

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
doikor 3y ago
AMD was almost bankrupt 10 years ago. Basically AMD had to bet the whole company on their next CPU or GPU and their choice was the CPUs and put all their efforts into that and it payed off (Zen architecture). It has only been the last 4 or 5 years that AMD has had any real money to put into their GPU/AI accelerator sector and that seems to be developing quite well now (though they seem to be mostly interested in super computer/massive data center deployments for now)
fulafel 3y ago
GPU languages shouldn't be proprietary. At one point this was a shared understanding and lots of companies were behind initiatives like OpenCL. Meanwhile progress in higher level non C++ GPU languages has stayed in niches without big industry backing, and we're stuck with CUDA which is bad in both language design sense and market-wise.
- paulmd 3y ago
  the problem with opencl was that AMD's runtime was so buggy and incomplete that developers usually had to build a whole separate pathway just for AMD. And if you're doing that, you're not portable anyway, so why bother forcing NVIDIA through a more-mismatched generalized API just for the sake of purported "portability"? it's turtles (broken AMD technical leadership) all the way down. this is simply not a field AMD cared about, whether you think they were right or wrong (based on their financials or otherwise). and now that it has turned into a cash fountain, everyone wishes it had gone differently. "should have bought bitcoin" but instead of pollution funbux it's investing into your own product.
  - fulafel 3y ago
    This is a AMD centric view but the problem is much wider, it includes other OS platforms (eg Android & Apple platforms) and other hardware vendors (eg intel, mobile chipsets) as well. After all game APIs were also victim to the same kind of "code to the driver" circumstance. I agree that correctness and robustness of the vendor impolementations went poorly, but it's fixable if there was commitment between vendors, the infighting leading to Apples departure must not have helped that side either. In the end I think including the high level compilers and APIs in the proprietary driver stack responsibility is unsustainable. Microsoft seems to have a better model, or there could be even a standard JIT code consumed by drivers that emitted by open source stacks shared across platforms. The latter way would also better support development of nicer GPU languages.
    - paulmd 3y ago
      > In the end I think including the high level compilers and APIs in the proprietary driver stack responsibility is unsustainable. Microsoft seems to have a better model, or there could be even a standard JIT code consumed by drivers that emitted by open source stacks shared across platforms. The latter way would also better support development of nicer GPU languages. OK, let's talk MS. What NVIDIA has done with PTX is basically the same thing as MSIL/CIL. There is a meta-ISA/meta-language that has been commonly agreed, and if you invoke no tokens that the receiving driver doesn't understand, the legacy compiler understands and emits executable (perhaps not optimal) code. The legacy hardware stays on a specific driver and a specific CUDA support level. The CUDA support level is everything, that is your entire "feature profile". It's not GFX1030/GFX1031, it's RDNA3.0/3.1/whatever. NVIDIA has been able to maintain their feature support (not implementation details) in a monotonically increasing sequence. Additionally, they also maintain a guarantee that spec 3.1 guarantees that you can also compile and execute 3.0 code. "Upwards family correctness" I guess. Again, doesn't have to be optimal but the contract is there's no tokens that you don't understand. A Tegra 7.0 compiler can compile desktop 7.0 CUDA (byte/)code etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA#Version_features_and_specifications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA#Version_features_and_spec... Legacy driver support doesn't change, so, you can always read PTX, you can always read anything that's compiled for your CUDA Capability Level even if it's from a future toolkit that wasn't released at the time. PTX is always the ultimate "emit code from 2020 and run on the 2007 gpu that only understands CUDA 1.3" relief valve though. If you don't write code that does stuff that's illegal in 1.3... it'll compile and emit PTX, and the Tesla driver will parse and run it. Anyway, let's talk MS. MS could come up with MSIL/CIL. NVIDIA can come up with PTX. Why can't AMD do this? What is unique about GCN/RDNA as a language that you can't come up with an intermediate language representation?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

AMD was almost bankrupt 10 years ago. Basically AMD had to bet the whole company on their next CPU or GPU and their choice was the CPUs and put all their efforts into that and it payed off (Zen architecture). It has only been the last 4 or 5 years that AMD has had any real money to put into their GPU/AI accelerator sector and that seems to be developing quite well now (though they seem to be mostly interested in super computer/massive data center deployments for now)

fulafel 3y ago

GPU languages shouldn't be proprietary. At one point this was a shared understanding and lots of companies were behind initiatives like OpenCL. Meanwhile progress in higher level non C++ GPU languages has stayed in niches without big industry backing, and we're stuck with CUDA which is bad in both language design sense and market-wise.

paulmd 3y ago
the problem with opencl was that AMD's runtime was so buggy and incomplete that developers usually had to build a whole separate pathway just for AMD. And if you're doing that, you're not portable anyway, so why bother forcing NVIDIA through a more-mismatched generalized API just for the sake of purported "portability"? it's turtles (broken AMD technical leadership) all the way down. this is simply not a field AMD cared about, whether you think they were right or wrong (based on their financials or otherwise). and now that it has turned into a cash fountain, everyone wishes it had gone differently. "should have bought bitcoin" but instead of pollution funbux it's investing into your own product.
- fulafel 3y ago
  This is a AMD centric view but the problem is much wider, it includes other OS platforms (eg Android & Apple platforms) and other hardware vendors (eg intel, mobile chipsets) as well. After all game APIs were also victim to the same kind of "code to the driver" circumstance. I agree that correctness and robustness of the vendor impolementations went poorly, but it's fixable if there was commitment between vendors, the infighting leading to Apples departure must not have helped that side either. In the end I think including the high level compilers and APIs in the proprietary driver stack responsibility is unsustainable. Microsoft seems to have a better model, or there could be even a standard JIT code consumed by drivers that emitted by open source stacks shared across platforms. The latter way would also better support development of nicer GPU languages.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    > In the end I think including the high level compilers and APIs in the proprietary driver stack responsibility is unsustainable. Microsoft seems to have a better model, or there could be even a standard JIT code consumed by drivers that emitted by open source stacks shared across platforms. The latter way would also better support development of nicer GPU languages. OK, let's talk MS. What NVIDIA has done with PTX is basically the same thing as MSIL/CIL. There is a meta-ISA/meta-language that has been commonly agreed, and if you invoke no tokens that the receiving driver doesn't understand, the legacy compiler understands and emits executable (perhaps not optimal) code. The legacy hardware stays on a specific driver and a specific CUDA support level. The CUDA support level is everything, that is your entire "feature profile". It's not GFX1030/GFX1031, it's RDNA3.0/3.1/whatever. NVIDIA has been able to maintain their feature support (not implementation details) in a monotonically increasing sequence. Additionally, they also maintain a guarantee that spec 3.1 guarantees that you can also compile and execute 3.0 code. "Upwards family correctness" I guess. Again, doesn't have to be optimal but the contract is there's no tokens that you don't understand. A Tegra 7.0 compiler can compile desktop 7.0 CUDA (byte/)code etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA#Version_features_and_specifications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA#Version_features_and_spec... Legacy driver support doesn't change, so, you can always read PTX, you can always read anything that's compiled for your CUDA Capability Level even if it's from a future toolkit that wasn't released at the time. PTX is always the ultimate "emit code from 2020 and run on the 2007 gpu that only understands CUDA 1.3" relief valve though. If you don't write code that does stuff that's illegal in 1.3... it'll compile and emit PTX, and the Tesla driver will parse and run it. Anyway, let's talk MS. MS could come up with MSIL/CIL. NVIDIA can come up with PTX. Why can't AMD do this? What is unique about GCN/RDNA as a language that you can't come up with an intermediate language representation?