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About time. NVIDIA needs some serious competition.
by 1024core 2y ago
About time. NVIDIA needs some serious competition.
- talldayo 2y agopokes OpenCL's corpse with a stick C'mon, do something...
- ein0p 2y agoIronically, Transformers are relatively simple architectures - all you really need is a high performance matmul. So OpenCL could "do something" at this point, if it were alive.
- imtringued 2y agohttps://github.com/ROCm/ROCm/issues/2754 https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm/issues/2754 Wow and I thought that the latest generation of GPUs was better.
- anakaine 2y agoFrom that exchange, clearly not. They do not have their stuff together. This is one area where AMD really should be employing quite a full team to ensure that major projects, including drivers, are able to support AMD cards without any friction. Whilst it's still a PITA to work.with AMD hardware in most AI frameworks Nvidia will continue to dominate.
- anakaine 2y agoIts very unfortunate. One of our vendors has spent a hell of an effort making spatial analysis tools work via OpenCL instead of being just processor bound, and its made those industry standard libraries 1-2 orders of magnitude faster. That is something the spatial industry desperately needs in order to improve iteratively. With the state of OpenCL it's frustrating. So much to be had, but so little improvement and support.
- talldayo 2y agoIn 50 years, I feel like GPGPU compute will be told as a Greek tragedy. Nvidia, pariah of Apple, would create a parallel compute ecosystem that was so powerful that even the combined effort of the industry couldn't topple it. At every corner where they could have thwarted them, Nvidia's competitors refused to up the ante or chided CUDA's efforts as silly and unnecessary. One crypto/AI craze later, everyone and their mother is berating their OEM for ignoring such basic functionality and refusing to collaborate on a competing alternative. Frustrating is a good way to put it, but there's a certain causal satisfaction I feel from watching it all unfold. Of course everyone loses to CUDA when they refuse to sponsor an Open Source alternative. It's fascinating to me that hardware manufacturers would rather let CUDA dominate than establish a basic working relationship.
- FuriouslyAdrift 2y agoAMD is doing several billion in ai processor sales already and the new chip is selling as fast as they can make them. At least with AMD, a customer can actually get them now as opposed to the nearly 1 year lead time from nVidia.
- latchkey 2y agoConfirmed. Buying them up as fast as I can. =)
- fransje26 2y agoNow, if they could also do the performant, unified, software and driver part..
- anakaine 2y agoThis is a big part of why they are generally available. Building on top of AMD gear is currently more difficult than Nvidia. It's unfortunate, but the evolution of/from Cuda when AMD had little in this space gave intel a massive jump-start. As a dev it's way easier to pick up various stacks that work with nvidia gear and not have to worry anywhere near as much about what's underneath.
- doctorpangloss 2y agoThe only meaningful hardware competition, meaning lower prices, will come from Chinese designed, Chinese manufactured parts. This is still a long ways out. Is it inevitable? I think so. Before 2019 there wasn't an opportunity, now there is. For software, Chinese universities, Alibaba, Tencent and Bytedace are already releasing models, training code and in rare cases datasets that are competitive with private offerings. CogVLM/CogAgent is one that I use. It's very promising.
- elzbardico 2y agoHow much time for that? I wouldn't expect nothing in industrial volumes for the next years, maybe 2028? who knows? But, anyway, we will prohibited from buying it, probably. We still can't buy Cuban cigars.
- bufferoverflow 2y agoOr from Tesla project Dojo
- rbanffy 2y agoCompetition doesn't do much when all production everywhere is already taken in preorders. It'll only change when there is surplus production.
- schaefer 2y agoDid you watch the Nvidia 2024 GTC keynote[1]? The CEO of NVIDIA was pretty clear: Nvidia's focus is now on selling Blackwell AI Factories. According to some napkin math, each of these Blackwell AI factories will have an annual power bill of roughly $8,000,000 USD and if you do a little apples to oranges comparison will outperform the computer that's currently #1 on the supercomputing top 500 (Frontier at Oak Ridge) by one to two orders of magnitude. for comparison, over the past fifteen years, we've seen 3 orders of magnitude improvement in the supercomputing top 500. (from roadrunner in 2008 to frontier in 2024). Nvidia is going to do 1 to 2 orders of magnitude improvement instantaneously. Nvidia's core market has shifted dramatically. There is no competition. [1]: https://www.nvidia.com/gtc/keynote/ https://www.nvidia.com/gtc/keynote/
- nullc 2y agoWhen moving into a market where there are no competitors one should be wary that this may be because there are no customers.
- anonylizard 2y agoThat's not very convincing against Nvidia. Since they single handedly created the modern AI market through CUDA.
- schaefer 2y agoThe topic of customer interest is addressed at timestamp 59 minutes and zero seconds of the keynote. By my count, 49 corporate logos were shown as launch partners. At one point in the talk the CEO claims that “Blackwell will be Nvidia’s most successful product ever”. — And again, the product he’s talking about is a data centers packed with 56 racks…
- picojoulebits 2y agoNot to rain on the parade here but nvidia is not going to haul a 1 to 2 order of magnitude in a single jump. Top500 measures fp64, nvidia likes to quote fp8. Blackwell is actually a regression on fp64 performance to provide more die space for AI compute. This isn't to say the silicon isn't good just different goals being hit.