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People keep using proprietary software and keep getting burned by it. When will we learn?

superkuh 3y ago
What's the alternative? AMD only supports their (consumer) GPUs for ~4 years via ROCm in some instances. If you buy the card at any time except release day you only get a couple years of compute support. To answer my own question: opencl, and it's just as bad as it was in 2014. Or, slowly, people are starting to do compute with Vulkan. This might be the best way forwards even if it's an awkward choice.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Investment is not rewarded until the platform is used, which won't be until investments are made... it's a multi billion dollar chicken and egg problem that only could have been averted a decade ago by consumers refusing to be locked in to a proprietary standard.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    A decade ago, CUDA was still offering a more usable platform than the competition. The problem could only have been averted if AMD had properly committed to investing in their platform at least decade ago, just as NVIDIA has been doing for almost 2 decades now.
    - whatshisface 3y ago
      A decade ago, CUDA was better, but I don't think the industry had crossed the threshold of being stuck on it. AMD still had the option of investing to catch up, and there would have been the possibility of an industry consortium. Now, with the whole ML stack having been optimized over ten years of rapid development for a single proprietary standard, and especially with the deliberate obstructionism exemplified by the linked article, it is much less likely that a consortium or competitor could catch up.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        A decade ago we still called it GPGPU and it was a somewhat niche stuff used for specialized applications. There wasn't enough interest in the field to warrant that heavy investment. Fast-forward ten years, and we're in rapid inflation phase (the cosmological kind, not the financial kind) - whatever choices were there at the start got baked in, and are sinks for all the free money that's coming in and demanding fast results. AMD could've solved this 10 years ago if they invested in it, but they didn't have future knowledge about ML on GPUs being the next big thing.
andersa 3y ago
There are no viable alternatives if you require high performance or even just the software to actually work properly.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  Yes - this is a competition problem. If there were viable alternatives, then interoperability wouldn't be something we really talk about. Instead it'd be abstraction layers to run on the chip-specific runtimes. And then it's just CUDA trying to "beat" the alternative.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Trying to best Nvidia’s language on Nvidia’s hardware seems pretty hopeless. I wonder if that’s the wrong abstraction layer? There exists stuff like CUBLAS, which is of course using CUDA under the hood, but it also is something like a BLAS. Maybe as the AI/ML world keeps developing people will be grow more stubborn about sticking to frameworks. We probably just need a couple rounds of people getting burned by vendor lock-in, I guess.
moffkalast 3y ago
Hopefully Vulkan eventually gets a headless compute kernel version.
- solardev 3y ago
  Could WebGPU fill that need?
  - kllrnohj 3y ago
    WebGPU can't fill any need that GL, DirectX, or Vulkan can't. WebGPU isn't a native GPU API, but an abstraction over existing ones. As such its feature set is only ever at best comparable, but in practice will always be worse than the native ones (always worse due to needing to be implementable by multiple platforms - at a minimum both vulkan and metal)
    - solardev 3y ago
      I see. Thanks for the explanation!
- mandarax8 3y ago
  You can already do compute without creating a swap chain or presenting right?
- jsheard 3y ago
  Vulkan has always supported headless mode, everything related to graphics and presentation is optional. It has a way to go before its compute model is as powerful and easy to use as CUDA is though.
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    There are various efforts to compile OpenCL and SYCL to Vulkan, the Mesa folks are working on this as part of the RustiCL project. But full capability will require some extensions beyond what plain Vulkan provides.
  - 3y ago
Karellen 3y ago
If people were going to learn not to use proprietary software/hardware like the stuff that the wankers at Nvidia churn out, they'd have learned it over a decade ago when Torvalds gave them a big "fuck you" - which had been a long time coming even back then. People who keep picking Nvidia don't want to learn not to use proprietary tools.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  That's a bit like saying "the slaves in the roman silver mines didn't want to rebel." Maybe a decade ago it was because they didn't care about abstract ideals like software freedom, but now they are well and truly stuck, and can serve only as a cautionary tale to other industries.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    Nvidia offers an attractive product with strings attached, we very well could call it anti-competitive. But it is not very similar to slavery, nobody is getting beaten or chained up, the “victims” are willing participants. Maybe some comparison to company stores could be warranted…
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
sevagh 3y ago
Who's burned by what? NVIDIA's customers are happily training their models on superior hardware, so much so that they're begging to be able to order and spend more.
renewiltord 3y ago
Who's getting burned? It's the best stack to build on. The only ones getting burned are the third-party guys who want adoption.
- wmf 3y ago
  Nvidia customers are paying $30K for GPUs that should be under $10K; that's how they're getting burned.
hackerlight 3y ago
Collective action problem. So, never, because structurally there are game theory reasons pushing individual customers to behave this way. Therefore you can't blame the customer you have to blame the regulator and system.

What's the alternative? AMD only supports their (consumer) GPUs for ~4 years via ROCm in some instances. If you buy the card at any time except release day you only get a couple years of compute support. To answer my own question: opencl, and it's just as bad as it was in 2014. Or, slowly, people are starting to do compute with Vulkan. This might be the best way forwards even if it's an awkward choice.

whatshisface 3y ago
Investment is not rewarded until the platform is used, which won't be until investments are made... it's a multi billion dollar chicken and egg problem that only could have been averted a decade ago by consumers refusing to be locked in to a proprietary standard.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  A decade ago, CUDA was still offering a more usable platform than the competition. The problem could only have been averted if AMD had properly committed to investing in their platform at least decade ago, just as NVIDIA has been doing for almost 2 decades now.
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    A decade ago, CUDA was better, but I don't think the industry had crossed the threshold of being stuck on it. AMD still had the option of investing to catch up, and there would have been the possibility of an industry consortium. Now, with the whole ML stack having been optimized over ten years of rapid development for a single proprietary standard, and especially with the deliberate obstructionism exemplified by the linked article, it is much less likely that a consortium or competitor could catch up.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      A decade ago we still called it GPGPU and it was a somewhat niche stuff used for specialized applications. There wasn't enough interest in the field to warrant that heavy investment. Fast-forward ten years, and we're in rapid inflation phase (the cosmological kind, not the financial kind) - whatever choices were there at the start got baked in, and are sinks for all the free money that's coming in and demanding fast results. AMD could've solved this 10 years ago if they invested in it, but they didn't have future knowledge about ML on GPUs being the next big thing.

andersa 3y ago

There are no viable alternatives if you require high performance or even just the software to actually work properly.

jvanderbot 3y ago
Yes - this is a competition problem. If there were viable alternatives, then interoperability wouldn't be something we really talk about. Instead it'd be abstraction layers to run on the chip-specific runtimes. And then it's just CUDA trying to "beat" the alternative.
bee_rider 3y ago
Trying to best Nvidia’s language on Nvidia’s hardware seems pretty hopeless. I wonder if that’s the wrong abstraction layer? There exists stuff like CUBLAS, which is of course using CUDA under the hood, but it also is something like a BLAS. Maybe as the AI/ML world keeps developing people will be grow more stubborn about sticking to frameworks. We probably just need a couple rounds of people getting burned by vendor lock-in, I guess.

moffkalast 3y ago

Hopefully Vulkan eventually gets a headless compute kernel version.

solardev 3y ago
Could WebGPU fill that need?
- kllrnohj 3y ago
  WebGPU can't fill any need that GL, DirectX, or Vulkan can't. WebGPU isn't a native GPU API, but an abstraction over existing ones. As such its feature set is only ever at best comparable, but in practice will always be worse than the native ones (always worse due to needing to be implementable by multiple platforms - at a minimum both vulkan and metal)
  - solardev 3y ago
    I see. Thanks for the explanation!
mandarax8 3y ago
You can already do compute without creating a swap chain or presenting right?
jsheard 3y ago
Vulkan has always supported headless mode, everything related to graphics and presentation is optional. It has a way to go before its compute model is as powerful and easy to use as CUDA is though.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  There are various efforts to compile OpenCL and SYCL to Vulkan, the Mesa folks are working on this as part of the RustiCL project. But full capability will require some extensions beyond what plain Vulkan provides.
- 3y ago

Karellen 3y ago

If people were going to learn not to use proprietary software/hardware like the stuff that the wankers at Nvidia churn out, they'd have learned it over a decade ago when Torvalds gave them a big "fuck you" - which had been a long time coming even back then. People who keep picking Nvidia don't want to learn not to use proprietary tools.

whatshisface 3y ago
That's a bit like saying "the slaves in the roman silver mines didn't want to rebel." Maybe a decade ago it was because they didn't care about abstract ideals like software freedom, but now they are well and truly stuck, and can serve only as a cautionary tale to other industries.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Nvidia offers an attractive product with strings attached, we very well could call it anti-competitive. But it is not very similar to slavery, nobody is getting beaten or chained up, the “victims” are willing participants. Maybe some comparison to company stores could be warranted…
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

sevagh 3y ago

Who's burned by what? NVIDIA's customers are happily training their models on superior hardware, so much so that they're begging to be able to order and spend more.

renewiltord 3y ago

Who's getting burned? It's the best stack to build on. The only ones getting burned are the third-party guys who want adoption.

wmf 3y ago
Nvidia customers are paying $30K for GPUs that should be under $10K; that's how they're getting burned.

hackerlight 3y ago

Collective action problem. So, never, because structurally there are game theory reasons pushing individual customers to behave this way. Therefore you can't blame the customer you have to blame the regulator and system.