3 ms·

What do you think about SYCL as a viable cross-platform GPU API?

by jb1991 2y ago

roenxi 2y ago
I'd have been happy to use OpenBLAS if it worked on a GPU. Any API is good enough for me. I have yet to see anything in the machine learning world that required real complexity, the pain seems to be in figuring out black box data, models and decyphering what people actually did to get their research results. The problem I had with my AMD card was that SYCL, like every other API, will involve making calls to AMD's kernel drivers and firmware that would crash the program or the computer (the crash was inevitable, but how it happened depended on circumstances). The AMD drivers themselves are actually pretty good overall, if you want a desktop graphics card for linux I recommend AMD. Open source drivers have a noticeably higher average quality than the binary stuff Nvidia puts out. Rock solid most of the time. But for anything involving OpenCL, ROCm or friends I had a very rough experience. It didn't matter what, because the calls eventually end up going through the kernel and whatever the root problem is lives somewhere around there.
paulmd 2y ago
The biggest problem with SyCL is that AMD doesn’t want to back a horse that they don’t control (same reason they opposed streamline) so they won’t support it. When the #2 player in a 2-player market won’t play ball, you don’t have a standard. Beyond that, AMD’s implementation is broken. Same as Vulkan Compute - SPIR-V could be cool but it’s broken on AMD hardware, and AMD institutionally opposes hitching their horse to a wagon they didn't invent themselves. This is why people keep saying that NVIDIA isn't acting anticompetitively. They're not, it's the Steam/Valve situation where their opponents are just intent on constantly shooting themselves in the head while NVIDIA carries merrily on along getting their work done.

3 ms·

What do you think about SYCL as a viable cross-platform GPU API?

by jb1991 2y ago

What do you think about SYCL as a viable cross-platform GPU API?

roenxi 2y ago
I'd have been happy to use OpenBLAS if it worked on a GPU. Any API is good enough for me. I have yet to see anything in the machine learning world that required real complexity, the pain seems to be in figuring out black box data, models and decyphering what people actually did to get their research results. The problem I had with my AMD card was that SYCL, like every other API, will involve making calls to AMD's kernel drivers and firmware that would crash the program or the computer (the crash was inevitable, but how it happened depended on circumstances). The AMD drivers themselves are actually pretty good overall, if you want a desktop graphics card for linux I recommend AMD. Open source drivers have a noticeably higher average quality than the binary stuff Nvidia puts out. Rock solid most of the time. But for anything involving OpenCL, ROCm or friends I had a very rough experience. It didn't matter what, because the calls eventually end up going through the kernel and whatever the root problem is lives somewhere around there.
paulmd 2y ago
The biggest problem with SyCL is that AMD doesn’t want to back a horse that they don’t control (same reason they opposed streamline) so they won’t support it. When the #2 player in a 2-player market won’t play ball, you don’t have a standard. Beyond that, AMD’s implementation is broken. Same as Vulkan Compute - SPIR-V could be cool but it’s broken on AMD hardware, and AMD institutionally opposes hitching their horse to a wagon they didn't invent themselves. This is why people keep saying that NVIDIA isn't acting anticompetitively. They're not, it's the Steam/Valve situation where their opponents are just intent on constantly shooting themselves in the head while NVIDIA carries merrily on along getting their work done.