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It’s too bad they don’t make this easier on developers, Apple. Is there a reason I don’t see?

by dgfitz 2y ago

morphle 2y ago
There certainly is a reason and indeed you don't see it because Apple downplays these things in their PR. It might be the same reason that is behind NVDIA's CUDA moat. CUDA lock-in prevented competitors like AMD and Intel to convince programmers and their customers to switch away from CUDA. So there was no software ported to their competitive GPU's. So you get anti-trust lawsuits [1]. I think you should put yourself in Apples management mindset and then reason. I suspect they think they will not sell more iPhones or Macs if they let third party developers access the low level APIs and write faster software. They might reason that if no one knows the instruction sets hackers will write less code to break security. Security by obscurity. They certainly think that blocking competitors from reverse engineering the low power Apple Silicon and blocking them from using TSMC manufacturing capacity will keep them the most profitable company for another decade. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40593576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40593576
- dylan604 2y ago
  At this point, Apple is absolutely not afraid of an anti-trust lawsuit. To them, it is part of the cost of doing business
  - morphle 2y ago
    I concur, they are virtually untouchable in this respect. No one else will throw a trillion or more into developing lower power faster silicon.
- _zoltan_ 2y ago
  CUDA didn't prevent anything at least not in the way you believe. Intel and AMD had no competitive offer, period. They still don't. NVIDIA is simply offering an ecosystem that is battle tested and is ready out of the box. Look at the recent semianalysis test to see how not ready AMD is, who would be the only company to have a real shot at this. Their HW on paper is better or equal, yet their software ecosystem is nowhere ready.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > Look at the recent semianalysis test to see how not ready AMD is, who would be the only company to have a real shot at this. Their HW on paper is better or equal, yet their software ecosystem is nowhere ready. Reading that was kind of odd. It seems like their conclusion was that on paper AMD should be significantly less expensive and significantly faster, whereas in practice they're significantly less expensive and slightly slower because of unoptimized software, which actually seems like it'd still be a pretty good deal. Especially if the problem is the software, because then the hardware could get better with a software update after you buy it. They also spend a lot of time complaining about how much trouble it is to install the experimental releases with some improvements that aren't in the stable branch yet, but then the performance difference was only big in a few cases and in general the experimental version was only a couple of percent faster, which either way should end up in the stable release in the near future. And they do a lot of benchmarks on interconnect bandwidth which, fair enough, Nvidia currently has some hardware advantage. But that also mainly matters to the small handful of companies doing training for huge frontier models and not to the far larger number of people doing inference or training smaller models. It feels like they were more frustrated because they were using the hardware as the problems were being solved rather than after, even though the software is making progress and many of the issues have already been resolved or are about to be.
    - zaroth 2y ago
      They literally spent months trying to work out the bugs. It’s an absolute admonishment of AMD’s software stack. Just look at their market value and it says everything you need to know about how much “better” AMD is than NVIDIA.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        > They literally spent months trying to work out the bugs. That's kind of the point. They spent months working out bugs that are now worked out. Which sucks when you're the one to do it, so they're kind of bitter about it, but is pretty great for everyone who comes after them and the fixes have already made it into the drivers. > Just look at their market value and it says everything you need to know about how much “better” AMD is than NVIDIA. "The company makes more money" has a nasty tendency to be inversely correlated with value for money to the customer. Comparing the "market cap" of Oracle vs. pick your favorite open source database is not a great way to decide which one to use.
twoodfin 2y ago
Apple wants total freedom to rework lower levels of the stack down to the hardware, without worrying about application compatibility, hence their answer will continue to be Metal.
- morphle 2y ago
  I agree that it allows Apple to redefine Apple Silicon instruction sets without having do explain it to 3rd party software developers, but it is certainly not the main reason they hide the technical documentation of the chips.
  - MBCook 2y ago
    Why not? Metal is the answer. Everything else is just implementation detail as GP said. Apple doesn’t provide developer support to other OSes. The only OS they do anything for* is macOS. So to them there’s no point. All they’d get is people relying on implementation details they shouldn’t, other companies stealing what they consider their trade secrets, or more surface area for patent trolls to scan. * Someone on the Asahi team, I think Hector Martin, has commented before the Apple is doing things that clearly seem designed to allow others to make and securely boot other OSes on their Apple Silicon hardware. They clearly could be clamping it down far more but are choosing not to. However that’s exactly as far as the support appears to go.
    - talldayo 2y ago
      > Metal is the answer. Everything else is just implementation detail as GP said. You can say this as long as you want, Nvidia makes money hand-over-fist supporting CUDA alongside OpenCL and DirectX. It's all just business to them - they don't have to play the same game as Apple because they're just not quite so petty with the ecosystem politics. Look at MacOS, for example. Plenty of legacy software never was supported in Metal, it's "implementation detail" never manifested. It wasn't even really used in AI either until Apple upstreamed their own MPS hacks into Pytorch and people got BERT et. al. working, and even that was a pint-sized party trick that you could do on a Raspberry Pi. Apple themselves aren't even using their own servers for serious inference either, because you can't. It's gotta be offloaded to a lower-latency platform. It's not just that Metal as a platform has failed it's users, although it's certainly contributed to developers giving up on Mac hardware for serious compute. Apple's GPU design is stuck in iPhone mode and they refuse to change their approach with Apple Silicon desktop hardware. It was Apple's big bet on NPUs that hamstrung them, not an implementation detail, and if you don't believe me then wait and see. Xserve didn't tear down the 1U market, Asahi didn't upend Linux HPC, and Metal isn't going to upend AI compute any more than DirectX will. This is the same "Apple will get 'em next year" quote we always hear when they fuck up, and they never actually seem to swallow their pride and take notes.

It’s too bad they don’t make this easier on developers, Apple. Is there a reason I don’t see?

by dgfitz 2y ago

It’s too bad they don’t make this easier on developers, Apple. Is there a reason I don’t see?

There certainly is a reason and indeed you don't see it because Apple downplays these things in their PR. It might be the same reason that is behind NVDIA's CUDA moat. CUDA lock-in prevented competitors like AMD and Intel to convince programmers and their customers to switch away from CUDA. So there was no software ported to their competitive GPU's. So you get anti-trust lawsuits [1]. I think you should put yourself in Apples management mindset and then reason. I suspect they think they will not sell more iPhones or Macs if they let third party developers access the low level APIs and write faster software. They might reason that if no one knows the instruction sets hackers will write less code to break security. Security by obscurity. They certainly think that blocking competitors from reverse engineering the low power Apple Silicon and blocking them from using TSMC manufacturing capacity will keep them the most profitable company for another decade. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40593576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40593576

dylan604 2y ago
At this point, Apple is absolutely not afraid of an anti-trust lawsuit. To them, it is part of the cost of doing business
- morphle 2y ago
  I concur, they are virtually untouchable in this respect. No one else will throw a trillion or more into developing lower power faster silicon.
_zoltan_ 2y ago
CUDA didn't prevent anything at least not in the way you believe. Intel and AMD had no competitive offer, period. They still don't. NVIDIA is simply offering an ecosystem that is battle tested and is ready out of the box. Look at the recent semianalysis test to see how not ready AMD is, who would be the only company to have a real shot at this. Their HW on paper is better or equal, yet their software ecosystem is nowhere ready.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > Look at the recent semianalysis test to see how not ready AMD is, who would be the only company to have a real shot at this. Their HW on paper is better or equal, yet their software ecosystem is nowhere ready. Reading that was kind of odd. It seems like their conclusion was that on paper AMD should be significantly less expensive and significantly faster, whereas in practice they're significantly less expensive and slightly slower because of unoptimized software, which actually seems like it'd still be a pretty good deal. Especially if the problem is the software, because then the hardware could get better with a software update after you buy it. They also spend a lot of time complaining about how much trouble it is to install the experimental releases with some improvements that aren't in the stable branch yet, but then the performance difference was only big in a few cases and in general the experimental version was only a couple of percent faster, which either way should end up in the stable release in the near future. And they do a lot of benchmarks on interconnect bandwidth which, fair enough, Nvidia currently has some hardware advantage. But that also mainly matters to the small handful of companies doing training for huge frontier models and not to the far larger number of people doing inference or training smaller models. It feels like they were more frustrated because they were using the hardware as the problems were being solved rather than after, even though the software is making progress and many of the issues have already been resolved or are about to be.
  - zaroth 2y ago
    They literally spent months trying to work out the bugs. It’s an absolute admonishment of AMD’s software stack. Just look at their market value and it says everything you need to know about how much “better” AMD is than NVIDIA.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      > They literally spent months trying to work out the bugs. That's kind of the point. They spent months working out bugs that are now worked out. Which sucks when you're the one to do it, so they're kind of bitter about it, but is pretty great for everyone who comes after them and the fixes have already made it into the drivers. > Just look at their market value and it says everything you need to know about how much “better” AMD is than NVIDIA. "The company makes more money" has a nasty tendency to be inversely correlated with value for money to the customer. Comparing the "market cap" of Oracle vs. pick your favorite open source database is not a great way to decide which one to use.

twoodfin 2y ago

Apple wants total freedom to rework lower levels of the stack down to the hardware, without worrying about application compatibility, hence their answer will continue to be Metal.

morphle 2y ago
I agree that it allows Apple to redefine Apple Silicon instruction sets without having do explain it to 3rd party software developers, but it is certainly not the main reason they hide the technical documentation of the chips.
- MBCook 2y ago
  Why not? Metal is the answer. Everything else is just implementation detail as GP said. Apple doesn’t provide developer support to other OSes. The only OS they do anything for* is macOS. So to them there’s no point. All they’d get is people relying on implementation details they shouldn’t, other companies stealing what they consider their trade secrets, or more surface area for patent trolls to scan. * Someone on the Asahi team, I think Hector Martin, has commented before the Apple is doing things that clearly seem designed to allow others to make and securely boot other OSes on their Apple Silicon hardware. They clearly could be clamping it down far more but are choosing not to. However that’s exactly as far as the support appears to go.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    > Metal is the answer. Everything else is just implementation detail as GP said. You can say this as long as you want, Nvidia makes money hand-over-fist supporting CUDA alongside OpenCL and DirectX. It's all just business to them - they don't have to play the same game as Apple because they're just not quite so petty with the ecosystem politics. Look at MacOS, for example. Plenty of legacy software never was supported in Metal, it's "implementation detail" never manifested. It wasn't even really used in AI either until Apple upstreamed their own MPS hacks into Pytorch and people got BERT et. al. working, and even that was a pint-sized party trick that you could do on a Raspberry Pi. Apple themselves aren't even using their own servers for serious inference either, because you can't. It's gotta be offloaded to a lower-latency platform. It's not just that Metal as a platform has failed it's users, although it's certainly contributed to developers giving up on Mac hardware for serious compute. Apple's GPU design is stuck in iPhone mode and they refuse to change their approach with Apple Silicon desktop hardware. It was Apple's big bet on NPUs that hamstrung them, not an implementation detail, and if you don't believe me then wait and see. Xserve didn't tear down the 1U market, Asahi didn't upend Linux HPC, and Metal isn't going to upend AI compute any more than DirectX will. This is the same "Apple will get 'em next year" quote we always hear when they fuck up, and they never actually seem to swallow their pride and take notes.