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> However, Intel should have pushed a couple of cards for free to every single HPC/AI grad department in the US. And perhaps even tossed in a $50K grant to boot

> However, Intel should have pushed a couple of cards for free to every single HPC/AI grad department in the US. And perhaps even tossed in a $50K grant to boot. That's, what, $50K*100=$5 million max and a thousand graphics cards Nvidia used to do this in the late 2000s and early 2010s. It did wonders to drive CUDA uptake versus Vulkan, and Nvidia would sponsor plenty of researchers and students to leverage CUDA and Nvidia GPUs in Parallel Programming classes. > you have to value software for that idea to penetrate I'm not sure it's software per say and more so Developer Experience. If a vendor fails to truly interact with their implementers, they lose critical feedback. Intel used to have a very active Technical Marketing Engineer org (the old word for DevEx), but I'm not sure how active or relevant it is anymore.

rincebrain 2y ago
> not software per [se] and more so Developer Experience This aligns with my experiences trying to use Intel software. The software was often technically very good, but the user experience trying to use it was horrible, and god help you if you got an error. Larrabee all over, really. I suppose linking to [1] and [2] is probably germane for this discussion. I swear there was another blogpost explaining the tradeoffs made in the Larrabee/Xeon Phi development process in exacting detail, and confirming that it ran gaming workloads pretty well before being shelved, but I can't find it again. [1] - https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/18/ispc-origins https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/18/ispc-origins [2] - http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BWhy%20didn%27t%20Larrabee%20fail%3F%5D%5D http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BWhy%20d...
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Thanks for the links! I absolutely should follow Matt Pharr and Tom Forsyth's blog tbh - I've been out of the HPC world for sometime now but it's getting relevant again.
physicsguy 2y ago
Vulkan didn’t even exist when I got a free card from NVidia. For cross platform programming on GPUs people in academia/industry just gave up because performance was worse, the tooling was terrible and library support was non existent. OpenCL, OpenACC, OpenMP GPU offloading have all been disappointing.

rincebrain 2y ago

> not software per [se] and more so Developer Experience This aligns with my experiences trying to use Intel software. The software was often technically very good, but the user experience trying to use it was horrible, and god help you if you got an error. Larrabee all over, really. I suppose linking to [1] and [2] is probably germane for this discussion. I swear there was another blogpost explaining the tradeoffs made in the Larrabee/Xeon Phi development process in exacting detail, and confirming that it ran gaming workloads pretty well before being shelved, but I can't find it again. [1] - https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/18/ispc-origins https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/18/ispc-origins [2] - http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BWhy%20didn%27t%20Larrabee%20fail%3F%5D%5D http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BWhy%20d...

alephnerd 2y ago
Thanks for the links! I absolutely should follow Matt Pharr and Tom Forsyth's blog tbh - I've been out of the HPC world for sometime now but it's getting relevant again.

physicsguy 2y ago

Vulkan didn’t even exist when I got a free card from NVidia. For cross platform programming on GPUs people in academia/industry just gave up because performance was worse, the tooling was terrible and library support was non existent. OpenCL, OpenACC, OpenMP GPU offloading have all been disappointing.