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That's understandable. Control over standards has the immense value. Just like look at Nvidia's CUDA.
by chucke1992 2y ago
That's understandable. Control over standards has the immense value. Just like look at Nvidia's CUDA.
- pjmlp 2y agoCUDA success has much to thank Intel and AMD for never providing anything with OpenCL that could be a proper alternative in developer experience, graphical debugging, libraries and stable drivers. Even OpenCL 2.x C++ standard was largely ignored or badly supported by their toolchains.
- talldayo 2y agocough cough Remind me who owns the OpenCL trademark, again? Intel and AMD weren't the ones that abandoned it. Speaking in no uncertain terms, there was a sole stakeholder that can be held responsible for letting the project die and preventing the proliferation of Open GPGPU standards. A company that has everything to gain from killing Open standards in the cradle and replacing them with proprietary alternatives. Someone with a well-known grudge against Khronos who's willing to throw an oversized wrench into the plans as long as it hurts their opponents.
- google234123 2y agoWould you be willing to share the deal with Apple/Khronos relations?
- troupo 2y agoApple didn't like OpenGL, rightfully, and came up with their own Metal which they released two years before first version of Vulkan was released. Now people pretend that Apple is bad because it never adopted Vulkan and never implemented the "good modern OpenGL" (which never really existed).
- jsheard 2y agoIt runs deeper than that, during the development of WebGPU it came to light that Apple was vetoing the use of any Khronos IP whatsoever, due to a private legal dispute between them. That led to WebGPU having to re-invent the wheel with a brand new shader language because Apples lawyers wouldn't sign off on using GLSL or SPIR-V under any circumstances. The actual details of the dispute never came out, so we don't know if it has been resolved or not.
- binary132 2y agoApple, refusing to use open standards, and instead demanding everyone else do things their way? Say it’s not so!
- jsheard 2y agoThe bizarre thing is that Apple did used to cooperate with Khronos, they were involved with OpenGL and even donated the initial version of the OpenCL spec to them. Something dramatic happened behind the scenes at some point.
- pjmlp 2y agoMost likely related to how Khronos managed OpenCL after getting hold of it.
- talldayo 2y agoPlease, tell us all about how Khronos hurt Apple with free software that Apple had every opportunity to influence. Point to the boo-boo that justifies making things worse for everyone.
- google234123 2y agoI can imagine a scenario: Apple donates openCL, then later suggests some changes for the next version. Khronos delays or pushes back and now openCL is stuck from Apple's perspective and they can't do anything about it.
- pjmlp 2y agoDon't blame Apple for what Khronos, Intel and AMD have done with OpenCL after version 1.0. It isn't Apple's fault that Intel and AMD didn't deliver.
- talldayo 2y agoIt is entirely Apple's fault that they rejected OpenCL to replace it with a proprietary library. If this was an implementation or specification problem, Apple had every opportunity to shape the project in their own image. They cannot possibly argue that this was done for any other reason than greed, considering they themselves laid the framework for such a project. Without Apple's cooperation, Open Source GPGPU libraries can not reasonably target every client. Apple knows they wield this power, and considering their history it's both illogical and willfully ignorant to assume they're not doing this as part of a broader trend of monopolistic abuse. Having shut out Nvidia as part of a petty feud, Apple realized they could force any inferior or nonfree CUDA alternative onto their developers no matter how unfinished, slow or bad it is. They turned away from the righteous and immediately obvious path to complicate things for developers that wanted to ship cross-platform apps instead of Mac-only ones.
- pjmlp 2y agoThe fact is that Intel, AMD and even Google (coming up with Renderscript), didn't gave a shit about making OpenCL something developers cared about.
- talldayo 2y agoThat's not their job. CUDA wasn't "something developers cared about" for 11 fucking years and now look at where we are. If the OEMs focused on doing their job and implementing their standards, then neither of us would be trying to assign blame in the first place. The worst part is, now that Apple has gone all-in on incomplete and proprietary alternatives, nobody has won. Apple successfully applied their monopoly abuse to a market that they have completely captive. And we want to blame... checks clipboard Intel and AMD, for having renewed interest in a successful decade-old concept.
- dragontamer 2y agoOpenCL 2.x was a major failure across the board. OpenGL and Vulkan were good though. Gotta take the wins where they exist.
- pjmlp 2y agoThanks to Intel and AMD.
- dragontamer 2y agoNVidia never even implemented OpenCL 2.0 AMD had a buggy version. Intel had no dGPIs so no one cared how well an iGPU ran OpenCL (be it 1.3 or 2.0) -------- AMD was clearly pushing C++ AMP at the time with Microsoft. And IMO, it worked great!! Alas, no one uses it so that died.
- winwang 2y agoIsn't the point of OpenCL to be... open? Not only did Intel and AMD not provide enough value, but neither did the community. CUDA... is kind of annoying. And yet, it's the best experience (for GPGPU), as far as I can tell. I feel like it says something that CUDA sets a standard for GPGPU (i.e. its visible runtime API) but others still fail to catch up.
- cogman10 2y agoThe problem is the OpenCL development model is just garbage. Compare the hello world of OpenCL [1] vs CUDA [2]. So much boilerplate and low level complexity for doing OpenCL whereas the CUDA example is just a few simple lines using the cuda compiler. And what really sucks is it's pretty hard to get away from that complexity the way OpenCL is structured. You simply have to know WAY too much about the hardware of the machine you are running on, which means having the intel/amd/nvidia routes in your application logic when trying to make an OpenCL app. Meanwhile, CUDA, because it's unapologetically just for nVidia cards, completely does away with that complexity in the happy path. For something to be competitive with CUDA, the standard needs something like a platform agnostic bytecode to target so a common accelerated platform can scoop up the bytecode and run it on a given platform. [1] https://github.com/intel/compute-samples/blob/master/compute_samples/applications/usm_hello_world/src/usm_hello_world.cpp https://github.com/intel/compute-samples/blob/master/compute... [2] https://github.com/premprakashp/cuda-hello-world https://github.com/premprakashp/cuda-hello-world
- winwang 2y agoYeah, not just OpenCL, but even "newer" standards like WebGPU. I considered making a blog post where I just put the two hello worlds side-by-side and say nothing else. I was severely disappointed after seeing people praise WebGPU (I believe for being better than OpenGL). As for the platform-agnostic bytecode, that's where something like MLIR would work too (kind of). But we could also simply just start with transpiling that bytecode into CUDA/PTX. Better UX with wider platform compatibility: CuPy, Triton.