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Anyone working on getting us out of the Nvidia monopoly on commerical AI should be praised. We need lots of competition in this space. I'm hoping Google spins

Anyone working on getting us out of the Nvidia monopoly on commerical AI should be praised. We need lots of competition in this space. I'm hoping Google spins off its TPU division and sells chips to everyone that wants them. I'm hoping AMD gets their act together and that they open up their drivers and stack. I'm hoping a lot of other hardware companies and compute stacks start making inroads on this. Nvidia is not just bilking the whole world on margin, but they're also a limiting reagent in the grand scheme of progress.

sorenjan 3y ago
You'll note that AMD (and Nvidia, but that's expected) is unfortunately missing from the members list for UXL, which seems to be based on Intel's oneAPI which in turn is based in part on Khrono's SYCL: > Our mission: > • Build a multi-architecture multi-vendor software ecosystem for all accelerators. > • Unify the heterogeneous compute ecosystem around open standards. > • Build on and expand open-source projects for accelerated computing. https://uxlfoundation.org/ https://uxlfoundation.org/ If AMD got their act together they would go all in on open standards together with other actors in the segment, but maybe they really want to see if their rocm can repeat Cuda's success and lock in? I just want accelerators to become commodities and interchangeable like CPUs, let me write my code once and deploy on whatever hardware the user have, preferably without having to compile multiple versions.
adolph 3y ago
> hoping Google spins off its TPU division There’s a lot of stuff Google could have spun off but they seem content to ignore things until they turn out the lights.
ein0p 3y ago
[flagged]
- wmf 3y ago
  Making GPUs work properly requires years of effort so she needs a time machine to go back and start earlier.
  - ein0p 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - qotgalaxy 3y ago
      [dead]
    - threeseed 3y ago
      > have him fix it to his liking Like when he strolled into Twitter, acted like he knew better than everyone, delivered nothing and then left. There is far more to achieving things in large companies than simply having great technical skills.
      - ein0p 3y ago
        IDK, dude’s provably pretty capable as long as you don’t attempt to drown him in a bureaucratic swamp. Betcha he’d fix it pretty good.
        jiggawatts 3y ago
        > don’t attempt to drown him in a bureaucratic swamp You weren't listening to the GP comment. He's expected to succeed while being drowned in the swamp. That's what most people mean and expect when they bring in an outsider. "Fix our problems, but without changing anything to do with management."
        fragmede 3y ago
        There's a difference between fixing technical problems and cultural problems. Hotz has proven to be a wizard at technical ones, while his skill with fixing cultural issues remains to be seen.
        devonkim 3y ago
        Any long-lasting solution requiring continuous investments is going to require more impact on the people side than the technical side. Hiring maybe one or two technical wizard asshats at a company may work for a bit but can’t scale in that eventually asshats will either drive away enough potential contributors or clash with another asshat. Any company actually needing said asshats to conduct business has a form of organizational tech debt in that they’ll need to spend a lot of resources managing around said persons in the end while said person’s ego continues to grow convinced they’re primarily responsible for successes.
latchkey 3y ago
> Anyone working on getting us out of the Nvidia monopoly on commerical AI should be praised. We need lots of competition in this space. Disclosure: I'm working on exactly that, so thank you so much for this! I'm doing it on the high end of the spectrum, with MI300x, and a lot less drama.
atq2119 3y ago
> I'm hoping AMD gets their act together and that they open up their drivers and stack. Their entire stack on Linux is open-source. That part isn't a problem.
- sashank_1509 3y ago
  Nope, they basically open sourced their api which is kind of a worthless proposition. You would think this is malicious, trying to pretend as open source, but the whole thing is done so ineptly, it is just incompetence. Likely management has no idea what open source means and thinks releasing api code means open source and is good enough for customers to use your GPU. More concretely, what they open sourced calls closed source functions that run on the GPU which is where all the bugs are, and causes all the crashes.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > More concretely, what they open sourced calls closed source functions that run on the GPU which is where all the bugs are, and causes all the crashes. In particular, what they did was open source the drivers but not the firmware, and then when the firmware has bugs nobody outside the company can fix it because it's not open source.
    - llm_trw 3y ago
      Worth noting that is a step up from NVidia who moved their driver to the GPU and open sourced a configuration file.
      - paulmd 3y ago
        That is an interesting way to frame the situation when AMD’s solution doesn’t even run hdmi 2.1 under Linux. and intel has a solution for this too, in fact…
        atq2119 3y ago

sorenjan 3y ago

You'll note that AMD (and Nvidia, but that's expected) is unfortunately missing from the members list for UXL, which seems to be based on Intel's oneAPI which in turn is based in part on Khrono's SYCL: > Our mission: > • Build a multi-architecture multi-vendor software ecosystem for all accelerators. > • Unify the heterogeneous compute ecosystem around open standards. > • Build on and expand open-source projects for accelerated computing. https://uxlfoundation.org/ https://uxlfoundation.org/ If AMD got their act together they would go all in on open standards together with other actors in the segment, but maybe they really want to see if their rocm can repeat Cuda's success and lock in? I just want accelerators to become commodities and interchangeable like CPUs, let me write my code once and deploy on whatever hardware the user have, preferably without having to compile multiple versions.

adolph 3y ago

> hoping Google spins off its TPU division There’s a lot of stuff Google could have spun off but they seem content to ignore things until they turn out the lights.

ein0p 3y ago

[flagged]

wmf 3y ago
Making GPUs work properly requires years of effort so she needs a time machine to go back and start earlier.
- ein0p 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - qotgalaxy 3y ago
    [dead]
  - threeseed 3y ago
    > have him fix it to his liking Like when he strolled into Twitter, acted like he knew better than everyone, delivered nothing and then left. There is far more to achieving things in large companies than simply having great technical skills.
    - ein0p 3y ago
      IDK, dude’s provably pretty capable as long as you don’t attempt to drown him in a bureaucratic swamp. Betcha he’d fix it pretty good.
      - jiggawatts 3y ago
        > don’t attempt to drown him in a bureaucratic swamp You weren't listening to the GP comment. He's expected to succeed while being drowned in the swamp. That's what most people mean and expect when they bring in an outsider. "Fix our problems, but without changing anything to do with management."
        fragmede 3y ago
        There's a difference between fixing technical problems and cultural problems. Hotz has proven to be a wizard at technical ones, while his skill with fixing cultural issues remains to be seen.
        devonkim 3y ago
        Any long-lasting solution requiring continuous investments is going to require more impact on the people side than the technical side. Hiring maybe one or two technical wizard asshats at a company may work for a bit but can’t scale in that eventually asshats will either drive away enough potential contributors or clash with another asshat. Any company actually needing said asshats to conduct business has a form of organizational tech debt in that they’ll need to spend a lot of resources managing around said persons in the end while said person’s ego continues to grow convinced they’re primarily responsible for successes.

latchkey 3y ago

> Anyone working on getting us out of the Nvidia monopoly on commerical AI should be praised. We need lots of competition in this space. Disclosure: I'm working on exactly that, so thank you so much for this! I'm doing it on the high end of the spectrum, with MI300x, and a lot less drama.

atq2119 3y ago

> I'm hoping AMD gets their act together and that they open up their drivers and stack. Their entire stack on Linux is open-source. That part isn't a problem.

sashank_1509 3y ago
Nope, they basically open sourced their api which is kind of a worthless proposition. You would think this is malicious, trying to pretend as open source, but the whole thing is done so ineptly, it is just incompetence. Likely management has no idea what open source means and thinks releasing api code means open source and is good enough for customers to use your GPU. More concretely, what they open sourced calls closed source functions that run on the GPU which is where all the bugs are, and causes all the crashes.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > More concretely, what they open sourced calls closed source functions that run on the GPU which is where all the bugs are, and causes all the crashes. In particular, what they did was open source the drivers but not the firmware, and then when the firmware has bugs nobody outside the company can fix it because it's not open source.
  - llm_trw 3y ago
    Worth noting that is a step up from NVidia who moved their driver to the GPU and open sourced a configuration file.
    - paulmd 3y ago
      That is an interesting way to frame the situation when AMD’s solution doesn’t even run hdmi 2.1 under Linux. and intel has a solution for this too, in fact…
      - atq2119 3y ago