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Wdym American Vendors? Intel uses SPIRV iirc
by high_na_euv 19d ago
Wdym American Vendors?
Intel uses SPIRV iirc
- bigyabai 19d agoI'm talking about holistic efforts like OpenCL, and standards that would be equivalent to Nvidia's "Compute Capability" versioning. The basic underlying tech can be agreed on, but Apple/AMD/Intel all have different GPU priorities that limit their ability to agree on a CUDA-adjacent hardware platform.
- swerner 19d agoWhat do you mean by holistic? SYCL is an open versioned standard that allows for vendor specific extensions. The problem is not that there isn’t a proper standard, the problem is that many hardware vendors - or software developers simply don’t want to adopt it. Intel (via Codeplay) was handing it out on a silver platter - Nvidia on SYCL, full top chain, and people still wouldn’t want it.
- bigyabai 19d agoIsn't OneAPI a good example of the problem, alongside Mojo/ONNX/TensorRT? The industry doesn't need a fifteenth competing standard. They need hardware buy-in. By holistic, I mean hardware architecture cooperation. Nvidia can hold onto their lead forever if GPU designers fight over what a GPGPU hardware baseline looks like. The current ecosystem fragmentation is not competitive, and future fragmentation probably wouldn't work either. I think the fastest way to kill Nvidia would be a hardware consortium.
- swerner 19d agoThe problem with OneAPI is naming. It leads people to believe that is another competing standard where in fact is is simply just an implementation of a standard compliant SYCL compiler. If it just had been named “Intel SYCL compiler”, similar to the existing and accepted Intel OpenCL compiler, it would have been easier. What would you expect the hardware consortium to coordinate on? Unified ISA?
- my123 19d agooneAPI is effectively an Intel-only platform not a standard. Yes they have implementations on top of CUDA but they're maintained by... Intel. They didn't get buy-in for cross-vendor collaboration
- swerner 19d agoThey were maintained by Codeplay - paid for my Intel. Nvidia can make contributions anytime they want, and here is the problem: Nvidia does not want to. Until each vendor starts pitching in with contributing their backend to an open standard, you will have to rely on others doing it for them.
- pjmlp 18d agoCodeplay is Intel since the acquisition in 2022.
- omcnoe 19d agoUltimately AMD missed the most important boat with their woeful support for GPU compute. 10 years ago they needed to go all in and offer something to compete with CUDA - whether that was internal or something standard from Khronos. They just couldn't commit to it as a business, didn't have the vision. Intel missed for a different reason - they didn't invest in the product space at all for decades. In terms of units they had the most market share (millions of Intel Integrated Graphics chips), but it wasn't seen as important. Bare minimum to render Windows and Office UI, nothing more.
- my123 19d ago> Intel uses SPIRV iirc They're migrating away from SPIR-V to their own, Intel PISA: https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-upstreaming-the-pisa-backend-to-llvm/91474 https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-upstreaming-the-pisa-backen...
- swerner 19d agoTo my knowledge, SPIR-V on Intel will stay, and be it only because it’s part of the OpenCL and Vulkan standards.
- my123 19d agoYeah talking about the (vendor-preferred) compute part here Vulkan's SPIR-V dialect is substantially different from the OpenCL one, notably with the former having structured control flow. They're incompatible between each other.
- swerner 19d agoYes, unfortunately. Otherwise we could just implement all of SYCL and OpenCL on top of Vulkan and live happily ever after.