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AI will take down Nvidia’s moat. When it becomes trivial to translate CUDA/PTX to HIP, SYCL or Metal, CUDA is no longer the moat, it becomes the intermediate re
by swerner 13d ago
AI will take down Nvidia’s moat. When it becomes trivial to translate CUDA/PTX to HIP, SYCL or Metal, CUDA is no longer the moat, it becomes the intermediate representation.
- bayindirh 13d ago> When it becomes trivial to translate CUDA/PTX to HIP,... ZLUDA is already doing that, no?
- swerner 13d agoI don't think we're at a point yet where anyone would trust ZLUDA enough to ship commercial products that rely on it. I would be delighted though, if anyone can prove me wrong.
- bayindirh 13d agoNo, but we can go there. This is an open source project. Anyone can put some more effort behind it and push it further. It's improving, AFAICS. Src: https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA
- swerner 13d agoUnfortunately, many of very good ideas end with “it’s open source, anyone can contribute” because very few actually do.
- mrheosuper 13d agoWhat about spinning up a thousand agent and let them run wild ? Like many projects are doin
- bayindirh 13d agoFor CRUD, that can work. For something like that, it's almost impossible. It's niche, performance and code-quality sensitive, needs deep and wide knowledge, and hardware dependent.
- bayindirh 13d agoBecause while many want to work on the same project generally, the people who can or want to do that has so little time. I personally had to put all my toy projects into hiatus to be able to keep up with life. Maybe if things get a little lighter, we can thaw them or start working on a couple of interesting ones which I stumble on.
- mathisfun123 13d agoi swear people who are outsiders here have only clickbait takes; if you've never had to ship GPU code professionally you should just not comment on these things. the source language has never been the moat. Nvidia sells to hyperscalers. Hyperscalers have armies of kernel authors who have no issue translating shaders by hand (or now with claude). Nvidia's moat is (and will remain for the foreseeable future) the entire stack. you cannot fathom the pain and misery of working on literally any other stack. if you've never debugged a GPU synchronization error or kernel panic due to some GPU firmware bug or fought absolute shit profilers hunting for perf you really have no idea what you're talking about. EDIT: i can't believe this really requires saying but graphics and compute are not the same domain at all. if you work in graphics for GPU but not compute then you are still way out of your depth commenting. to wit: graphics people do not (and cannot) write CUDA kernels/shaders.
- swerner 13d agoIf that is your standard, I do have an idea what I’m talking about.
- mathisfun123 13d agoYa? do tell us about your experience that leads you to believe mere translation is the bottleneck in the market...
- swerner 13d agoI’m too old to participate in internet pissing contests.
- mathisfun123 13d agothis isn't a "pissing contest"? you made a speculative claim in a public forum and i'm challenging your authority to make such a claim. a "pissing contest" would be if i had said i've shipped hundreds of thousands of lines of shader code into prod and thus you clearly have no idea what you're talking about because you haven't (which is also true).
- Keyframe 13d agoyeah yeah, "when" an often keyword with AI it seems. As Mr. E. Nigma put it - what always comes but never arrives? Meanwhile the moat deepens and it's build on inertia and laziness and Nvidia knows this really REALLY well.
- swerner 13d agoOh, absolutely. Nvidia is the modern day “nobody gets fired for buying IBM”. The reason we’re still using Unix is not because it’s the best, but because it had to much inertia to let any alternative become its successor. Similarly, C and HTML are maybe the most terrible yet extremely useful languages we have.
- larodi 13d agotrivial to translate (or transpile) - okay. trivial to understand the result - not so much. trivial to then evolve it - hm... perhaps a different story. still, it seems very likely now, that such "quick rewrites" are viable, not sure if an open approach to them is viable. a newly born open project that was LLM-derived, and not by a credible author, which spans hundreds of files no human eye has ever looked at, can only work for a closed organization, but will never be trusted by the general audience... just like that.
- threatripper 13d agoI don't see a hard reason. If it works it works. No hard need for a good, universal, and long lasting solution. At some point you just stack slop on top of slop and it works for your use case - and if it doesn't you'll slop it out yourself.
- saagarjha 13d agoHow do you know if it works? Not that "works" is different from "runs".
- larodi 12d agotbh... it seems to work contrary to all expectation that slop shouldn't work. but, then, just when I think about the incredible corporate slop i've seen here and there, that not only works, but pays. well I guess we have to agree - slop works. and that's fine.
- threatripper 12d agoNot sure if it's fine but when it pays it doesn't have to be.