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Peculiar business model, at a glance. It seems like they're doing work that AMD ought to be doing, and is probably doing behind the scenes. Who is the customer
by ryukoposting 2y ago
Peculiar business model, at a glance. It seems like they're doing work that AMD ought to be doing, and is probably doing behind the scenes. Who is the customer for a third-party GPU driver shim?
- tesch1 2y agoAMD. Just one more dot to connect ;)
- dpkirchner 2y agoCould be trying to make themselves a target for a big acquihire.
- dboreham 2y ago> Could be trying to make themselves a target for a big acquihire. Is this something anyone sets out to do?
- seeknotfind 2y agoYes.
- ryukoposting 2y agoIt definitely is, yes.
- to11mtm 2y agoCynical take: Try to get acquired by Intel for Arc.
- shiroiushi 2y agoMore cynical take: this would be a bad strategy, because Intel hasn't shown much competence in its leadership for a long time, especially in regards to GPUs.
- rockskon 2y agoThey've actually been making positive moves with GPUs lately along with a success story for the B580.
- schmidtleonard 2y agoYeah but MLID says they are losing money on every one and have been winding down the internal development resources. That doesn't bode well for the future. I want to believe he's wrong, but on the parts of his show where I am in a position to verify, he generally checks out. Whatever the opposite of Gell-Mann Amnesia is, he's got it going for him.
- derektank 2y agoWait, are they losing money on every one in the sense that they haven't broken even on research and development yet? Or in the sense that they cost more to manufacture than they're sold at? Because one is much worse than the other.
- rockskon 2y agoThey're trying to unseat Radeon as the budget card. That means making a more enticing offer than AMD for a temporary period of time.
- ryao 2y agoThe former is likely true, but the latter is not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 That being said, the IP blocks are shared by their iGPUs, so the discrete GPUs do not need to recoup the costs of most of the R&D, as it would have been done anyway for the iGPUs.
- sodality2 2y agoMLID on Intel is starting to become the same as UserBenchmark on AMD (except for the generally reputable sources)... he's beginning to sound like he simply wants Intel to fail, to my insider-info-lacking ears. For competition's sake I really hope that MLID has it wrong (at least the opining about the imminent failure of Intel's GPU division), and that the B series will encourage Intel to push farther to spark more competition in the GPU space.
- dangero 2y agoMore cynical take: Trying to get acquired by nvidia
- dizhn 2y agoPerson below says they (the whole team) already joined Nvidia.
- dogma1138 2y agoIntel is in a vastly better shape than AMD, they have the software pretty much nailed down.
- indolering 2y agoTell that to the board.
- bboygravity 2y agoSomeone never used intel killer wifi software.
- lhl 2y agoI've recently been poking around with Intel oneAPI and IPEX-LLM. While there are things that I find refreshing (like their ability to actually respond to bug reports in a timely manner, or at all) on a whole, support/maturity actually doesn't match the current state of ROCm. PyTorch requires it's own support kit separate from the oneAPI Toolkit (and runs slightly different versions of everything), the vLLM xpu support doesn't work - both source and the docker failed to build/run for me. The IPEX-LLM whisper support is completely borked, etc, etc.
- moffkalast 2y agoI've recently been trying to get IPEX working as well, apparently picking Ubuntu 24.04 was a mistake, because while things compile, everything fails at runtime. I've tried native, docker, different oneAPI versions, threw away a solid week of afternoons for nothing. SYCL with llama.cpp is great though, at least at FP16 since it supports nothing else but even Arc iGPUs easily give 2-4x performance compared to CPU inference. Intel should've just contributed to SYCL instead of trying to make their own thing and then forgot to keep maintaining it halfway through.
- lhl 2y agoMy testing has been w/ a Lunar Lake Core 258V chip (Xe2 - Arc 140V) on Arch Linux. It sounds like you've tried a lot of things already, but case it helps, my notes for installing llama.cpp and PyTorch: https://llm-tracker.info/howto/Intel-GPUs https://llm-tracker.info/howto/Intel-GPUs I have some benchmarks as well, and the IPEX-LLM backend performed a fair bit better than the SYCL llama.cpp backend for me (almost +50% pp512 and almost 2X tg128) so worth getting it working if you plan on using llama.cpp much on an Intel system. SYCL still performs significantly better than Vulkan and CPU backends, though. As an end-user, I agree that it'd be way better if they could just contribute upstream somehow (whether to the SYCL backend, or if not possible, to a dependency-minized IPEX backend). the IPEX backend is one of the more maintained parts of IPEX-LLM, btw. I found a lot of stuff in that repo that depend on versions of oneKit that aren't even downloadable on Intel's site. I couldn't help but smirk when I heard someone say "Intel has their software nailed down."
- dylan604 2y agoIt would be interesting to find out AMD is funding these other companies to ensure the shim happens while they focus on not doing it.
- bushbaba 2y agoAMD is kind of doing that funding by pricing its GPUs low and/or giving them away at cost to these startups
- shmerl 2y agoIs this effort benefiting everyone? I.e. where is it going / is it open source?
- britannio 2y agoSome of the work from Tinycorp is: https://github.com/tinygrad/7900xtx https://github.com/tinygrad/7900xtx